Before we get started, I've got a quick invitation for you. If you happen to be in Rapid City, South Dakota, this Sunday, November 9th, I'm going to be guest preaching at Bible Fellowship Church at 9.45 in the morning. We're going to be talking about stuff from Galatians 3, Abraham, the Man of Faith, some Old Testament stuff. It's going to be fun. Come by, we'll go to church together.

We'll say hello. It'd be awesome. All right, let's get on with the episode.

All right. Today is the day that we are going to get a Yeah. If I leave, then yeah.

All righty, today is the day that we are going to get into the two most famousest books from the intertestimental period of all.

These are the books that I think you are most likely to have heard of from this era, whether you are a Jew or a Protestant, evangelical Christian who doesn't regard these as part of the Bible at all, but would regard these as valuable, useful,

and interesting, or whether you're from a Christian tradition that would say, well, it's different

than the old and the New Testament, but I'm okay with it being put in the same book,

bound up inside the same leather as the rest of the Bible, or whether you're from a tradition that

would say, nah, this should be totally integrated into the Bible. No matter where you fit in all

of that, I think these are the two books from the period between where the Old Testament leaves

off 440 BC and just before the time of Jesus that you are most likely to have heard of. These are the books of first and second Maccabees. These books

are named for the hero family. They describe the family that saw a problem and solved a

problem. The problem they saw was that a madman and his descendants from

Seleucid Greek Syria had overstepped their bounds. They were trying to force Greekism onto the

Jewish people and snuff out the law of God and the worship of God and the temple and force

everybody to become Greek. They blasphemed God. And so the namesake of

these two books, the Maccabees family, it's kind of a nickname that they take on, they push back and

win. They throw off their overlords. They purify the temple. And eventually they win so completely

that they reestablish a new free kingdom in Jerusalem

and Judea. And then they're only able to keep that kingdom for about 100 years. That isn't recorded

in first and second Maccabees. But then until 1948, that's the last time. There's a free

Jewish kingdom or government there in historic Israel.

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