Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and it's epilogue week. We're going through what happened after Nehemiah and how the events of the books of Nehemiah and Ezra and Esther as well shaped the story of the Mediterranean world and the descendants of Abraham over the next few hundred years, and how all of that dovetails so beautifully into the world of Jesus, the world of the New Testament, and the situation that we're going to run into in our next season here on this podcast, which starts in a couple episodes, on the book of Galatians. So where we left off was the Eastern powers, Persia, Babylon before them, they've all tapered off kind of into oblivion. There's still money and people out there, but Rome is the new dominant force in the world by the time you get into the first century BC, that is the hundred years before Jesus is born. And the Jewish people, they've had a kingdom for a while, from the 160s BC into the 60s BC. They have had their own fairly dysfunctional, fairly secular-looking, didn't go great, not wildly successful kingdom. And eventually, if you'll recall from our last conversation, stuff got so bad that they looked west for the first time ever. They didn't look east to Persia or Babylon or north to the Assyrians or south to Egypt. They turned their eyes west and make a contract. They make a deal in the hopes to receive political protection and a bailout from yet another superpower. The attentive reader will note that this has been an oft-repeated refrain throughout the Old Testament, and the results are really similar. Pretty much every time Israel makes a deal like that, they come out on the losing end, and that's how it plays out here. Pompeii, or I think a lot of people who are good at Latin say Pompey, but then you're saying Pompey. Just listen to it. Pompey, Pompey. Uh to me that sounds like way gigglier and worse than Pompeii. I I don't know. I say it the way I say it. Pompeii shows up as a friend in the 60s BC at the invite of the Hasmonian kings, the Jewish dynasty there, and immediately he exerts his massive swagger and authority and effectively makes the former Hasmonian dynasty into a vassal, a submissive state of the Romans. And I think this is a worthwhile side note. That is the last time that the Jewish people have an independent state in any meaningful way. There are a couple rebellions where for a moment they hold land here or there, but for the most part, that's the last time the Jewish people have an independent state until, what was it, 1948, when the modern nation of Israel was created. Pretty wild to have a 2,000-year break between the last time you had political autonomy and the next time. Most people groups get absorbed into history when that happens. So I think it's just a very interesting historical note to see the way that has played out. Okay. And that territory that the Hasmonians had, and that's kind of in the orbit of Jerusalem, eventually is going to get broken up into a few different Roman provinces. It'll have different names over the years. But Galilee is the big one in the north. That's where Jesus and his buddies hail from, and where most of the action in the New Testament happens. And Judea is the very powerful, wealthy province, with Jerusalem as its seat of power in the south. And obviously the story of Jesus going to his execution, it all resolves there in Jerusalem. That's where the bad guys, the enemies of Jesus, live. And those bad guys in the Gospels, in the story of Jesus, the first four books of the New Testament, the bad guys who get Jesus killed, they are one of a handful of sects who emerge against the backdrop of this new Roman peaceful conquest. But real quick before we talk about those sects that emerged amongst the Jews, first, I think we just got to acknowledge what a tragic end this is to the Hasmonean dynasty. I mean, they literally invited in their conquerors and gave them the keys. Once again, this is kind of an echo of a lot of the really unfortunate results of trying to buddy up with powerful nations in the Old Testament. The other thing we got to talk about, though, is a little bit more about the unfolding of the Roman Empire and how it emerged and how that affected Jerusalem and that area, and how the pressures created there resulted in the emergence of these various sects, these various responses to what was going on in the world. So, as sort of a cruel irony, in the same way that Antiochus Epiphanes a hundred years earlier had profaned the temple, so the guy they brought in 100 years later to fix things, Pompeii, the Roman, he walked right into the Holy of Holies as well. And that creates something of a faith crisis for everybody because they're like, well, I thought you died if you went into the Holy of Holies. That's what happened in the Old Testament. Does God even live in our temple anymore? What's going on? And so people's compasses are spinning after the whole Rome Pompeii thing in 63 BC. Well, it's over the next 10 or 20 years that Roman politics intermingles with a prominent, wealthy, pseudo-Jewish Idumean family called the Herods, who live near Jerusalem and are trying to curry favor so that they can eventually become the governors of this Roman province that Pompeii established. But it's also during this time that Julius Caesar becomes very powerful, very prominent, and ultimately a bunch of people within the Roman Senate, politicians, decide they personally need to kill him. And they do so in March of 44 BC, and this sends the entire Roman Republic spiraling into a civil war. The civil war touches and affects the descendants of Abraham in Jerusalem. And this civil war affects how people think about things politically. Factions start to emerge in the Roman province of Judea surrounding Jerusalem, where some people say, We gotta try to be like Ezra and Zerubbabel and Nehemiah of old and cuddle up next to the Romans and appease them and see if we can win their favor as well to advance our things like what happened in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. There are other Jewish people who say, no, we need to follow the example of the Hasmonians, the Maccabees, and we need to throw off the Romans with violence. We need to engage in guerrilla warfare once again, keeping daggers under our cloaks and sabotaging them at every turn. Then there are still other people at this time who are like, we need to return to the spiritual purity and dedication that our ancestors engaged in when they were getting it right, and that can no longer happen in Jerusalem. Jerusalem, these people thought, has become a hive of scum and villainy. We need to go out to the desert places near the Dead Sea and make our own community where we focus on the Word of God and a type of Jewish monasticism where we practice self-discipline and by carefully obeying the commands of God, the tenets of the covenant with God, maybe he will bless us as a people group or at least as this small enclave out in the wilds. Then there was an entirely other people group who didn't really care about any of that stuff. They might have been descendants of Abraham, but more or less they were functionally, culturally Greek and politically Roman and eager to just play the game along with the Romans for their own enrichment. But there is one more sect that is the most famous of all of them that everybody's heard of. They are the bad guys that I keep referencing. Why am I being all coy about it? It's the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the ones who we haven't talked about in detail yet. And tomorrow we're going to talk about this very powerful group of political or religious leaders, what they thought, where they came from, and why, even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, they stood in such stark opposition to Jesus. All right, home stretch. We almost got it stitched together between Nehemiah and Galatians. We'll see if we can round out a little bit more of that tomorrow, talking about the Pharisees. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.