Well, we're down to the end of the book of Nehemiah here, and we have basically one more thing that I want to accomplish before we move on to Galatians. I think this is probably just going to take a few more episodes to cover, but if you're anything like me, I'm always curious after I go through a story that is very meaningful and I'm very interested in to find out what happened to everybody. How did it play out? How did it work out for the characters who we see? How did it work out for history after that? I also want to work through the question of how does this tie in to the sequel? That is, how does it set up what we encounter in the New Testament? After the book of Nehemiah, Nehemiah and Ezra died. You probably saw that one coming. We don't know how. I'm not even sure if there's any tradition as to how Nehemiah and Ezra died. I think they were both probably already pretty old by the end of this book. So my guess would be that they died as esteemed gentlemen of old age. There are rumors, however, about Ezra's ultimate burial place. Some people have him in modern-day Basra, Iraq. Some people have him in Syria, maybe around Aleppo. I don't remember for sure. I read that a while back. And Josephus, when he talks about Nehemiah, he has him buried in Jerusalem. I have no idea which of those theories have more merit than the other, but those are the ones that I have heard. As for Nehemiah, I'm not aware of any burial tradition with him, but he does come up in the intertestamental book of 2nd Maccabees, which I'm going to talk about more here in a little bit in terms of the plot and everything and how that fits together. I think there's even a suggestion that he came back and built sort of a theology library of the sacred scriptures or something like that. And he really is by name held up as sort of an exemplar of what it is to handle the law right in the age of the Maccabees, which is an age of an independent Jewish kingdom that ran from the 160s BC to the 60s BC. Artaxerxes, the king during Nehemiah, for whom Nehemiah was the cupbearer, ruled from 465 to 424 BC. So that's pretty impressive. And as is often the case, there are some difficulties with the succession after that. And that was the deal here. Artaxerxes' kids didn't like each other so much. His successor was one of his sons who went by the handle Xerxes the Second. But Xerxes only reigned for maybe a month and a half. And then his brother, Sogdianus, assassinated him. Xerxes the Second never really even managed to hold all of Persia at any given time. There was infighting, maybe you could even call it kind of a civil war during the brief reign of Xerxes II. Sogdianus only lasted for about half a year after that, into 423 BC, before the next really effective established ruler of Persia took over, and that was Darius II, who reigned from 423 to 404. So what that means is basically when you picture the grand scheme of this era and you picture it by the ages of these different kings, the best way to think about it is Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC and ruled for a long time. Then his two sons were in power for a bit, Cambyses and very briefly Bardia. Bardia was assassinated, depending on how you read the story, by the great king Darius I, whose son was the king of the Book of Esther, the great Xerxes I. He's the guy who fought against Leonidas and the Spartans. And then Xerxes' son was Artaxerxes, who also reigned for a long time. And then after Artaxerxes, there was some fighting and a couple of guys came and went real quick. You don't need to really remember Xerxes II or Sogdianus. And then Darius II takes us basically up to 400 BC, shy just by a couple of years. After Darius II's 20-year reign, there is again a dynastic struggle, and Artaxerxes II defeats his brother, Cyrus the Younger, to become the next Achaemenid king of Persia, and he rules forever, from like 404 BC to something around 360, 359 BC. So a huge reign, just like Artaxerxes I. And a lot of people think of him as being the last really great, competent ruler of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. After that, you get Artaxerxes III, who murdered most of his family to secure power and is not well regarded. And then finally, Darius III comes to power in 336 BC and dies in 330 BC after having been defeated and pursued by Alexander the Great. Okay, that's how Persia works out. They've basically got another hundred years after the Book of Nehemiah that goes pretty well, but there's a pretty significant fall-off in the last few rulers as the empire seems to spiral into decadence and vulnerability under a few weak leaders. But you know how going all the way back to Darius and Xerxes, there had always been this weird relationship between the Greeks and the Persians. And sometimes they get along real well. Their languages cross-pollinated quite a bit. I mean, Xerxes is not an old Persian name. Xerxes is the Greekification of his name. And if you just looked at it all really clinically on a sheet of paper, you would probably guess early on in the rise of Persian power that they were going to steamroll the Greeks and that everything in southeastern Europe would become part of the Persian Empire. But it doesn't happen because Leonidas stalls the forces at the hot gates, the Battle of Thermopylae, that Spartan king. And then by the time Xerxes makes it to Athens, they've had time to prepare their strategy. And ultimately, under the leadership of Themistocles, the Athenians defeat Xerxes at the naval battle of Salamis, and then ultimately route his forces at Plataea a little bit later, which kind of sets the boundary for 150 years between Persia and the Greeks, or the Greek-like people. And that status quo is in place all the way through the book of Nehemiah. The Greeks aren't really on the radar, they're over being Greeks, and Persia knows what its boundaries are, and that's that. But we fast forward to the end of the Persian Empire in the 330s BC, and the Greeks have risen up, or the Greek-like people. Alexander the Great, who we've talked about a lot, whose coin to pay his soldiers, I literally have here in my that coin, can you hear it? Right there in my right hand. Alexander the Great goes on a giant march of conquest to defeat Persia and conquer the whole world. He wins the Battle of Issus, which is just north of Jerusalem, and then he makes his way down to Jerusalem, where that same theme of opportunism and accepting the benefits of God's providential navigation of history, that mentality is still there a hundred years after Nehemiah's time. And so when the intellectual descendants of both Nehemiah on the good side and the intellectual descendants of Elie Ashheb and some of the more corrupt priests, when they see Alexander coming, for prophetic reasons or just logical reasons, they're like, we just need to open the gates to the walls that Nehemiah built to this conqueror and welcome him in. We're not going to win. Persia's not going to win. We're now subjects of this young kid, Alexander, who was like, what, like 20, early 20s when he showed up in Jerusalem? From there, Alexander goes south into Egypt and establishes the city of Alexandria, named for himself. Egypt had always had this on-again, off again subject relationship with Persia. Now they are solidly within the grip of the Greeks or the Macedonians, that being Alexander the Great. A whole lot of Jewish people who had been further down into what they call Upper Egypt, but it's like southern Egypt or Cush. A whole bunch of Jewish people from down there who had been doing Jewish things and maybe even made their own replica of the temple and maybe even had been carrying out their own sacrifices for a long time down there, as well as a bunch of Jewish people from Jerusalem, they seem to converge when Alexander took over Egypt. And very quickly a thriving Jewish community happens in that city of Alexandria. And that's going to be a big deal and come up again here in a little bit. But let's get back to the end of the Achaemenid kings of Persia. Alexander marches further west. Darius III, the not that impressive, rides out to meet Alexander, but Alexander outmanages him on the battlefield logistically, socially. He almost seems to understand Darius III's subjects better than Darius III understands them. And after a series of battles, Darius III is on the run wearing normal person clothes, and he dies in a not that exciting way in the back of a cart. Alexander removes his signet ring and puts it on his own finger, indicating that really the final emperor of the Persian Empire was not Darius III. The final emperor of the Achaemenid Persian Empire was Alexander the Great. There, I'm calling that a victory. I'm going to quit while we're ahead. That takes us up to the end of the Achaemenid Empire, the end of the Persian era of the history of the world. And then also today we got through the end of the Persian era of the history of the Bible. I think that's pretty good. Tomorrow we will consider the fate of Alexander the Great and how everything he did shook up the world and how that affected all of the people who are the descendants of Abraham and the people trying to keep the whole Nehemiah Ezra reforms going in Jerusalem. All right, more super fun history story, manana. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.