Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And every time I watch a movie or a TV show that is big and sweeping and historical epic or a fantasy historical epic, we get to the end of it, and I always want the thing where they show me what happened next. I mean, at least give me the white words on the screen where you say, then this happened and then this happened, and show me the pictures and memoriam of everybody, but tell me how they died. And we started doing that yesterday. We started doing the epilogue to the moment in history we've been looking at. And we got all the way up through 110, 115 years after the time of Nehemiah and Ezra that we just spent a bunch of time looking at. And we encountered a guy named Alexander the Great, a Macedonian. He's Greek-ish, and he has defeated a distant descendant of King Xerxes and King Artaxerxes, a guy named Darius III. And with that, Alexander the Great puts the signet ring of the king of Persia on his finger and becomes effectively the final king of the Persian Empire. And I think what he did there was already enough to earn Alexander the title The Great, but it wasn't enough for Alexander. That's all he knew was conquest. I mean, it's like a shark. They sit still and they can't breathe. They're gonna have the movement to get the oxygen running over the gills. And so Alexander, well, he's got a lot more conquest ahead of him. Well, Alexander pushes his luck as far as he can. He conquers as far as India, but ultimately he comes back to Babylon as his troops grow weary of war and he dies there as a young man. I believe he was 33 years old. He does not have an heir, he does not name an heir. And so as a result, four of his generals, sometimes collectively referred to as the Diadochi, divide up Alexander's newly formed empire and also newly Greekified empire, because he intermarried everybody with Greeks and he spread Greek language. And two of those generals and their families are going to play a big role moving forward in the story, the Seleucids and the Ptolemids. The Ptolemy family sets up shop in North Egypt in that newly founded Alexandria area, and they are very friendly toward the Jewish people in the early going. And the Ptolemids initially have custody of Jerusalem as well, but then eventually the Seleucids gain custody of Jerusalem, and they are not as nice to the Jews. In fact, they're openly antagonistic to the Jews. The Seleucid emperors still share Alexander's vision for Greekifying the whole world. And even though Alexander did not try to inflict that on the Jews when he rolled into Jerusalem, he kind of read the room maybe a little better than his generals and their descendants later. The Seleucids felt like the Jews are not Greekifying well enough. We need to make that happen. And so they profaned the Jewish temple, particularly one leader named Antiochus Epiphanes. He profaned the temple that Zerubbabel had built. And he had a lot of luck converting the minds of a lot of young Jewish people to thinking in Greek cultural ways and having Greek cultural values. But what's one of the big lessons coming out of Nehemiah? If you do that, if you adopt all of those foreign ways and you are an ancient Jew, bad things are coming. Well, it looks like there was a whole bunch of people in Jerusalem who were still buying Nehemiah's message. And they were thinking, we cannot go and adopt these Greek ways. It doesn't matter how much influence they exert on us. We have to be a people set apart. We got to honor the Sabbath. We got to do all the stuff that our ancestors covenanted that they would do and that we, their descendants, would do in 444 B.C. One particular family that stands out is the Maccabees family. And interestingly, it is an old high priest who in the 160s, actually, BC, he leads the charge in saying, no, we have to honor the reforms of the age of Nehemiah and Ezra that we looked at so carefully in the book of Nehemiah. We got to honor that, and we need to resist these new overlords. And his name was Matthias, and his descendants would ultimately lead kind of at times a guerrilla war pushing back on the Seleucid Empire, in particular Antiochus Epiphanes, and they win and they get a kingdom of their own. And for almost exactly 100 years, the descendants of Matthias and the Maccabees family rule this Jewish independent kingdom that historians call the Hasmonean dynasty. But unfortunately, the Hasmonean kings are awful. They're corrupt. They make all of the same mistakes that the kings of the Northern Kingdom made in the books of 1 and 2nd Kings. They don't honor God. They don't get it right. It's more of the same stuff that you get throughout the entire Old Testament. And ultimately, the political intrigue and the mess in Jerusalem made by this inept, incompetent, immoral leadership results in them having to turn to this new empire that has sprung up way out west. There was a rivalry between two potential successors to a global empire, the Carthaginians in North Africa and the Romans in central Italy. The Romans in the 200s BC, quietly way out west, defeated the Carthaginians, and gradually gained power and influence in the central Mediterranean and then moving into the Eastern Mediterranean. And by 63 BC, the age of the late Roman Republic, they had become quite ambitious. They were conquering everything. Julius Caesar was up north conquering Gaul and Germanic tribes. He was all the way into Britain battling against the Celts. And Pompeii, one of his buddies and political allies, had been conquering in the South. And now he's the guy who shows up at the request of the Hasmonian dynasty to have Rome come and straighten out all of their political problems. And before we talk about what went down when Pompeii showed up, when Rome showed up to quote unquote help the later Hasmonean dynasty get things figured out before we'll talk about that tomorrow. Before we do, this seems like as good a place as any to stop and acknowledge a really underappreciated but very important shift that happens in the world between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Persian era of the Old Testament, everything we've been looking at in Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, we're always looking east, right? We're looking out to modern day Iraq, modern day Iran. That's where Babylon and Susa and Persepolis and Persargete and the ancient capital of the Medes, Ekbatana, all of that stuff is back east. That's where the culture happens. That's where a lot of the money happened. There's a decent amount of money in Asia Minor, Turkey as well. Egypt did okay also. But the cultural center of gravity, the place where everything was happening and where it was hopping, it was back east. During the latter Old Testament, Greece is on the map. I mean, it's possible that the Philistines, you know, they had Goliath the giant. It's possible that they were Greekish in some way as well. So Greek culture, seafaring, Greek influence has been on the map in the Old Testament, but it's never really been the focal point. It's never been the place of the center of cultural gravity, right? But now, with what has happened way out west, with the Romans fending off their fiercest rival, Hannibal and the Carthaginians, now all of a sudden they reign supreme over the entire western half of the Mediterranean world. It's like they got a clean slate to start building with. They're not building on top of other well-known ancient empires. And everything feels new and alive and exciting with Rome. And it's like the poles, the cultural poles of the planet shift between the Old Testament and the New Testament with the ascendancy of Rome. Now everybody starts looking west. It was this dinky little frontier town, and all of a sudden, it's the real thing to look out for. All of a sudden, it is the place that you appeal for help. So the fact that the people in Jerusalem, the intellectual, spiritual, even literal descendants of Elyasheb and Zerubbabel and Ezra and Nehemiah, the fact that when they got into trouble in the 60s BC, that they did not look east to the remnants of old Persia, the remnants of old Babylon, but instead looked so far west as to be beyond the scope of pretty much anything in the entire Old Testament, except maybe Tarshish, where Jonah tried to say, Oh, maybe Tarshus was out that way in like Spain or something, but pretty much totally off the map of the known biblical world to the West. The fact that they're looking out there really should be noted because that is enough to say, okay, the world of Jesus that we're about to get into, my friends, when we get back into the New Testament, we're looking at Galatians and stuff, it is very different in terms of how people close their eyes and picture the important places and the hot spots from what it was when we left off with Nehemiah. Anyways, we will talk about how things went when Pompeii got the letter to come and help out the Hasmonean dynasty with their problems. Manana. If you can't tell, I'm really enjoying the epilogue and I'm really having fun trying to stitch together the connective tissue here between what we just got done doing and what is coming up next. Thanks for doing it with me. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.