Hello and welcome to Bible Stories. We are your hosts, Matt Mullin. Hello. Hey, Matt.

And my name is Todd Hamins and we are two ministers slash buds who love, love, love telling the stories of the Bible and we cannot wait to share them with you.

And Matt, you know, sometimes we explain from the get-go what these stories are like and kind of setting up the topic for the day.

But the reality is this one, well, the writing is on the wall. That's literally the topic of this story. So Matt, go ahead and take it away.

Today's story taught dovetails with where we've been so far. Okay. Did you say duck tails?

Woo. So we've been following King Neb and at this point in our story where we pick up today, King Neb has died.

He has ruled for about 43 years and after he dies, after King Nebuchadnezzar is dead, Babylon's only round for like another 23 years.

And then it falls to Cyrus King of Persia. So old King Neb, he's around almost to the end of Babylon.

Okay. And then he's gone and Cyrus takes his place.

Cyrus will take his place. Cyrus of Persia. And our story today is in those 23 years, in between King Neb's death and the fall of Babylon.

And in those 23 years, there was a lot of intrigue, a lot of tricky rickies running around.

There was a lot of bloodshed around the throne. A lot of people killing each other to get in charge.

King Neb's son, a guy whose name is and I kid you not Todd. This is his name. His name is evil Maridok, evil hyphen Maridok.

That's a movie star. That's a strong name.

That's a strong name and a mother who clearly didn't love her son.

No. If you put evil on the front, either you're setting the bar really low or you're making a prediction.

So old evil, he succeeded his dad and he was killed. Evil Maridok was killed by his brother-in-law.

The brother-in-law took the throne. Some people might be thinking themselves, I have tough in-laws.

Todd and I don't. We have lovely in-laws. But if you're thinking to yourself, we have tough ones. At least they're not killing you to get your job.

True. The brother-in-law ruled for four years and then the brother-in-law's son took over after that.

The son ruled for only two months before he was assassinated by Navin Dias, who ruled for 17 years.

Now, Navin Dias, he was out of pocket for ten of his 17-year reign.

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