I am so excited. I love the book of Zeeville. I just love it. I think there's so many fantastic things in it. And I'll also say that, well, there are plenty of fantastic things in it, and I loved it for a long time. I've been teaching Ezekiel for maybe 10 years in my Old Testament classes before someone told me, you know, you ought to look at this little theme, one of my colleagues. And I started to look at it. And the more I looked at it, the more I find it, the more I find it,

and the more I see there's a really, really powerful message being taught in Ezekiel that we may

miss. And so that's what I want to hit on there. There are all sorts of other things in Ezekiel.

We're not going to touch on. I probably will do a podcast episode on just the notion of the real context and what's

really going on Ezekiel 37. I guess I should say that this is a lecture for Spark, the Society

for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Cultures that you can find at sparkproject.org. But I think we'll also share this on my podcast, but this is a, we do regular

lectures for Spark. And so this is one of the ones that we do. And I will just share it with

others this time and invite you to learn more about us. So I'll do at least one, maybe more episodes on a couple of the things

that are worthwhile on Ezekiel. But what we're going to focus on tonight is another

worthwhile thing. And that's this theme that I think you'll see throughout Ezekiel. So let's

start. I think we need to understand what's going on in ezekiel right now and and for those

of you who are part of this uh as the lecture we still have a week of jeremiah and ezekiel and

jeremiah is the same historical political background they they're both uh their colleagues they're

uh prophesying at the same time so maybe colleagues isn isn't the right word. I don't know if they

ever met each other. But anyway, they, so this will help you understand Jeremiah. This will

help you understand Ezekiel, but it's good to understand just a little bit of a political

background so that you can understand the prophecies we're going to talk about better.

So we're going to start with Jehovah Has the second. He's king of Judah.

He's the second son of Josiah. So Josiah was the great, kind of last great, wonderful, amazing, righteous king who led them through religious reforms, refurbished the temple, renewed the covenant and so on.

Fantastic king who as Egypt, who has had gained control over Israel during this time period,

nominally on behalf of the Syria, but, yeah, but really it was kind of on behalf of the Syria initially,

but after a while it was just them. And in some way, Yosamuses resisted that. And so the Pharaoh killed Josiah in battle, it would seem,

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