Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And this is gonna be a fun one. This is gonna be a weird one because we never have guests on this program. It's always just you and me hanging out, and we grind through the next part of the Bible that we're working on together. But we have come to a fork in the road where we go beyond the things that I am able to know. I mean, I can go and Google stuff or whatever, but that's not as good as talking to somebody who has actually been there and has seen the things that I'm curious about and knows the stuff firsthand that I'm curious about. And so I've I brought in a ringer, I brought in a buddy, my friend John Monson is here. He's a professor of all of this stuff. He's got a bunch of great credentials. I'm not going to go over all of them, just trust me. He's great. And I'm about to bounce a question to John that I I'm guessing you have wondered as well as we've been going through Nehemiah. And the question is is there anything left of this? I mean, as we're reading the book, it feels like this is this gigantic achievement. I mean, for crying out loud, we got two choirs walking in concentric circles along the wall. There's all this stuff going up to the temple, and we're singing psalms, and people are renewing a covenant. It's just an amazing amount of stuff that seems to be inspired by what I suppose we could reduce to just stacking up a few rocks, right? These are very important rocks. This was very important stacking. And there's a whole legacy and a whole chapter here that you and I have just looked at. But then time happens, right? A lot of time in this case. 2400, 2500 years? That's forever. And so the question that I want to bounce to you, my friend John, who knows Israel and Jerusalem like the back of his hand. You grew up there, you're a native fluent Hebrew speaker. The question I want to ask you is is there anything left of what Nehemiah built?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's great to be with you, Matt. And that's such a great question. We always need to sort of inquire the text, like what happened in real terms here as we study the grand narrative of scripture. The problem with the Nehemiah walls, in my view, is that we need to frame it in a much, much larger picture. This is a glorious moment. But when we compare this glorious moment with the past glorious moments of the monarchies of Israel, it's pretty much nothing. So it sounds like a great thing, but one of the reasons it's brought to be such a great thing is because the people coming back, some of them have memories of what their world was like before the Babylonian destruction. And so Chronicles and Ezra and Nehemiah, part of their mission is to sort of reconnect Israel and Judah and the exiles with what was a glorious past and to do it in such a way that it shows that God is faithful. So you might view this whole episode as a tangible way to build something and show on the foundations of the past that God is faithful and that he will bring us back to where he wants us to be. And maybe that will involve some future glory. Another way to frame it is that the whole ebb and flow of the city of Jerusalem is based upon certain topographical, let's just say, limitations. So the essential problem is that you have this little finger of land that's not right on a trade route, but is near a trade route. It has the only source of water in the immediate area. And so it becomes a place that all the way back to Melchizedek and even before him, people were gravitating towards because they could defend it, this little tiny sort of promontory of land, and they had some water. So that animates the whole history. And what's really happening here is that David expands a little bit, but then Solomon incorporates another hill just north of that, the Temple Mount, and that becomes Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00Very rich, but very small in Solomon's era. When you say this goes all the way back to Melchizedek, you're referencing 1600, 1800 years before the events described in the book of Nehemiah. Exactly.
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SPEAKER_01So what I'm trying to do is frame it and just layer it and say there's an easily fortifiable, small place in the Judean highlands that for 2,000 years and more people have been defending because they have a little spring of water. David expands it a little bit. Solomon builds a temple to the north of it, which is the second hill, which is known as the Temple Mount today. That is basically Jerusalem. Refugees later in Israel's history, when the northern kingdom of Israel is destroyed, they come from the north. And Jerusalem expands massively under the days of Hezekiah. So think of the days of Isaiah. Now that's the template that they have for the rest of their history. Let's recreate a tangible reality of God's sovereignty and of God's blessing to us. So Ezra and Nehemiah are the first phase of that, which is pretty much restricted to the original Jebusite, Melchizedek, city of David of David, and that this little annex to the north, which is the temple mount where the temple had resided, had stood.
SPEAKER_00In your opinion, is uh that restriction, that limitation just related to resources. It's a lot of city, and that's all the more glory that could be restored with what they had to work with at that point.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And now you have the Jewish people coming back with lots of stronger enemies in their midst, having been given a tiny sliver of land that's part of a larger imperial reality of Persia. So what this is is very clearly a real-world trip down memory lane of what we had in the past. And isn't it great that we're able to restore it? And if you go to the next step of subsequent history of the Jewish people, the Maccabean era, after the time of Alexander, 300 BC, and then you know, 163 BC, uh, a couple hundred years before Christ, they are able to rebuild the entire city into the image of what it was in its peak, not of David and Solomon, but its peak of Hezekiah and the days of Jeremiah, right before the Babylonians destroyed it.
SPEAKER_00So when Pompey or Pompey shows up in 63 BC, he's coming to an almost fully rebuilt Jerusalem. Is that what you're saying?
SPEAKER_01Yes, literally in Jerusalem, the walls of the Maccabees in the period of the Greeks when they had a kingdom, those walls follow literally on top. The stones, you can see it. The stones are literally built on top of the walls of Hezekiah from the days of Isaiah, and the walls literally on top of that are the walls of the Babylonian period, the walls of the days of Josiah and Jeremiah right before the fall. You mean 586, Nebuchadnezzar? 586 BC. Okay. Yes, right before the destruction. So Nehemiah's walls are just the beginning, really, sort of the embryonic Davidic city. But remember, they're channeling David. The line of David is in Zerubel. So they're channeling David. So to get to the point of what's left of Nehemiah's walls, we have several problems. We have the Hasmonean walls that came later, and then the Roman walls that really just obliterated and even mined the stones of quite a few of the walls from Nehemiah's time. Another problem is that Nehemiah and his team themselves were mining, using the remnants of what had been the glorious city of David and expanded city and Temple Mount back in the days of Jeremiah and even back to the days of Isaiah.
SPEAKER_00So they were quarrying all of that out from scratch and hauling it miles and miles. They're taking ruined walls and rubble and reformatting that, no doubt doing some carving and cutting to make it work. So then, if I'm hearing you right, when someone in your field or your colleague's field who actually goes and digs his stuff up and looks, you could identify something as being worked over during the era of the pre-Nebuchadnezzar kingdom. But really, those rocks could have been repurposed by Nehemiah, and they could have been repurposed by the Herod family 450 years after Nehemiah. They're all the same rocks with the same geologic qualities cut from the same strata of whatever quarry they came out of, but they weren't a part of one set of walls. They were a part of multiple sets of walls, thus making it really confusing to know what you're looking at. Am I reading that right?
SPEAKER_01Exactly right. These walls and even the walls of the old city of Jerusalem today are quite literally built from the rubble and the larger stones from centuries and centuries, actually, several thousand years. And so when we read of Nehemiah's wall, we might see larger, what's called ashlar masonry from the time of Solomon, and we may see much smaller stones that are more characteristic of the Persian period during which Nehemiah's building. The Persians have their own sort of unique building style, and Israel is adopting some of that already in this era. So we have almost nothing of the walls of Nehemiah because of the fact that there's so much reuse of what was before, and so much reuse after Nehemiah of what he himself was doing. So I believe very confidently that these towers that are described, the Tower of the Hundred, the Tower of Hananel, remember, Israelite culture and Hebraic culture is very, very visual oriented, oriented towards physical realities of ideology or of belief. So it doesn't just matter what you think, it matters what you do. And so building a wall and having a space that is now secured Jewish Israelite city is more than practical security. It's now a symbolic achievement that God, of course, has brought about through the combination of his sovereign will and their hard work. Now, let's frame back to the book of Chronicles. Over and over in the Hebrew, it says, good king built the city, fortified the city, and had powerful gates and bars on the gates. And bad kings had those very same things destroyed.
SPEAKER_00And Nehemiah is intentionally trying to, I believe, identify himself with the good kings by repeatedly using the phrase, I hung the gates and bolts and bars in place, whenever he's talking about the work he's supervising on the walls. I mean, that's at least how I read it. Precisely.
SPEAKER_01So these towers, this night journey around the walls, this need for protection, it's real. Now, the problem that we have is all this mishmash is very, very hard to dissect and to analyze into its constituent parts. You have some big things like the big, big stones of the Solomonic era. You have stones later from the Maccabean-Hasmonean period during the period of the Greeks, let's say 200 to 100 BC, where those stones were crafted in particular ways that are clearly, clearly to that period, because nobody was doing this kind of sort of uh framing of a stone in earlier periods. So those are very clear. And later in the time of Jesus and Herod, those stones are reworked even in more detail and in more fine ways, so that those are very identifiable. But right in between that, the stones, let's say, between pre-Babylonian destruction Jerusalem and then the Hasmonean Maccabean Jerusalem, those stones, I mean, that is a mishmash of everything. They just used everything they had. A couple of the very, very tiny fragments, maybe that we have this wall. We go back to the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who was digging in the earlier part of the 1900s, and she found some fragments of walls in different places. How do you understand the dating of a wall? Well, it can be the form of the architecture, it can be the working of the stones, it can also be the pottery that is maybe embedded from it in it, but that embedded pottery could be from earlier periods too. So what you have to do is find walls and floors and architecture that seems to be a unit, one associated with the other. And there are some little fragments of that in what today is called the city of David still, the excavations that are taking place there. And that fragment is interestingly built right adjacent to in recent years what has come to be seen as the palace of David and uh one of the palaces of Solomon. So you get this large architecture from Solomon's era with this sort of mishmash architecture next to it that shows us a little stretch, perhaps, of Nehemiah's wall. Now, interestingly, that's built right on top of the Milo, M-I-L-L-O, that is referred to over and over in the Bible. Again, a good king built up the Milo, which is the sort of support foundation of the city of David on its east side. And this Nehemiah wall, if it is indeed Nehemiah's stretch, goes right along where it logically would go.
SPEAKER_00Do you have a sense of what part of the wall? I mean, in Nehemiah chapter three, obviously, you get the big build montage where he sort of starts at one end and just goes around the wall like a clock. So-and-so built this, so-and-so built this, this family built this. Do we have a sense of what part of that ancient wall this would have fit into, like what gate it was near, or anything like that?
SPEAKER_01We pretty much think we know where Solomon's palace is right now, and maybe even where the court of the guard was. So it would be wedged between the water gate and the what's later known as this horse gate. It would be wedged between those in the north and then what's known as the fountain gate and later on in the south, dungate. Now, today the old city has a dung gate, but it's quite a bit north of the dung gate and the dragon springs that are mentioned in the Nehemiah passages. Those are in the sort of, if you have a finger of land, let's say you point downwards, the bottom of your index finger is where the pool of siloem, the dragon spring, and the dung gate, those things are down there.
SPEAKER_00We've likened it to uh like a mutated version of the Italian peninsula with the boot. And the way we've envisioned it in our conversations, we put the dungate right at the toe of the boot. Exactly. It's easy to remember. What would you kick the poop with? You know, exactly right. Exactly there. But if I'm hearing you right, and this little chunk that has been known for a while and maybe corresponds with some of Nehemiah's construction, if that's near the water gate, then that's kind of cool because there's a pretty big scene that happens there with the reading of the law, this spontaneous festival that happens. We're building up a platform, the Levites are explaining it in language that the normal people can understand. I mean, this is a big deal in the fall of 444, and it's kind of fun for me, at least, as a little bit of a fanboy of this story, to imagine that a teeny tiny little chunk of the wall that some of the people there for that momentous day might have just casually been glancing at or even leaning against while this was going on. Like maybe there's a tiny, maybe a few of those rocks are still sitting where they were in the first place. I mean, it's fun, if nothing else, for an outsider like me.
SPEAKER_01I think it's not only fun, it's highly significant because Jerusalem's architecture is embedded in the constraints of topography, the reuse of earlier stones, and the manufacturing or the replacing of those stones into structures that resonate with the past, with the theology and ideology of the past. So it's no accident that quite literally, as you said, somebody working on the MIS wall finds some rubble and you know puts it on top of what they've been building and looks further down and says, Oh my word, here is a burn layer, here's destruction. And uh wow, this is destruction that harkens back to the Babylonian era. So they weren't doing archaeology per se, but they actually had a, you might say, very much pre-modern awareness of what has happened before. So if you go from the, you know, the horse gate in the corner there, where what's the so-called opal, and you go down to a tower, this water gate, and then you're getting down to the area where the Davidic and Solomonic monarchies were, and then you work down a little further, and they literally can see this melo, that is that stepstone structure is a testimony to prior realities of the world of political, religious Israel and Judah that were there before. So when they have these convocations, they are literally the genetic Israelites returning to their land, and they are literally rebuilding the physical stones that were there in the days of their past glories and their past sorrow. So you have to be thinking David and Lamentations at the same time as they are rebuilding here. That little stretch on the eastern side, that is, um, I think quite secure in saying that we have a little stretch of Nehemiah's wall, especially since it's kind of wedged between later Maccabean-Hasmonean structures. We maybe have a little bit of residue of the Temple Mount itself because it's so vast and had such huge stones that on both the east side, where you see some protruding boulders, that would have been the limits of Nehemiah's wall on that side, north of this area we've been describing. And then also even on the west side, there are some stones that may even harken back to Solomon's era that would have potentially been the eastern face of the Temple Mount. That wall, that facade might have been incorporated into the eastern side of Nehemiah's wall. But that west side, as we loop around, is literally following what was later known as the Tyrepean Valley. It's a sort of north-south valley, and that factors into being further down along that boot of Italy, so to speak, on the left side of it. So the Ephraim gate, the old gate. I mean, why do they mention an old gate? It probably has something to do with the western entrance to the Temple Mount, going back to much earlier days. The valley gate, perfectly appropriate because it is a now very much filled in, but a valley in uh antiquity. And then going down to the famous pool of Siloem, that my goodness, it takes us all the way from Hezekiah defending the city in the days of Isaiah to Jesus himself in the New Testament and the Gospel of John, you know, referring to the pool of Silo where the blind man goes. So I guess what one has to think about is like a single stone or a stretch of wall can be a time capsule that goes back to Abraham's day and forward all the way, certainly to Jesus' day, but even beyond to last week, if you if you want to think about it that way. I'll add one more thing that again, the pottery of this period, there's tremendous continuity in pottery, which is our chronological diagnostic. And we have really relatively few of those plates, some, you know, sort of not so nice cooking pots and uh and bowls.
SPEAKER_00It seems to me, though, that that would only square with and substantiate what we read about in the last third of Nehemiah, which is that repopulating this area was tough. People didn't want to move there. It wasn't the fashionable place to be. So you already have a diminished population compared to the Heyday, pre-Nebuchadre. But then on top of that, even after people moved back, we know from the book of Ezra that they had a little bit of a problem with kind of being selfish and wanting to prioritize their own estates, probably their own villas out on the countryside, a little more than the city itself. They had to be nagged by prophets to get back after it. And then 60, 80, 100 years later, by the time we get into the 440s and Nehemiah, it's still, after all that time, is not where people seem to want to be. So I'm just saying, to me, it seems like it would make sense that we would not have a ton of pottery and plates and living waste, that it would be reduced during that time because underpopulation is something we knew was a problem during that era.
SPEAKER_01You're absolutely right. And if you think about it, one of the things we have to do, I say this often, whether it's Joshua, Solomon, or Nehemiah, we need to bring the biblical story and our quests for physical remains of it, we need to bring it down to biblical size. So, you know, Joshua's conquest was not a blitzkrieg. It wasn't maybe the beginning, but it did not signify the end of an era of Canaanite local culture because what do we have in Judges? They're still trying to fight those people. And now with Nehemiah, this is a glorious moment for Israel to actually have part of their land back and to rebuild the Habira, you say in Hebrew, the capital, the fortified capital city. But at the same time, it's a far cry from anything that was there before. And as we continue to dig, and as you know, progress continues in Jerusalem of building new parking lots like they're doing. In this one part of Jerusalem right now, they found this massive quarry. Well, not really, it's a quarry, but it's really a moat between the palaces of the Davidic Solomonic era and the temple itself. They're finding fragments of Nehemiah. They're finding fragments of the later Maccabean period. And so I think even though a lot of it is all chaos because of generations, centuries of rebuilding and destroying and rebuilding again, I think they're going to find more fragments of it as they search more and more. So I don't think there's any reason, like some of the biblical scholars of the last century, to doubt many of the statements made by Nehemiah, Ezra, and Chronicles. I think there's reason to be motivated to explore further what they are. So, in sum, a kind of topographical reality of we need to fortify this hill because our enemies are near. We got to do this. And we can't do it like we did it in the past, as big and beautiful, but we'll get there. And then, second, ideologically, they reintroduce imagery from the period of the monarchy and even the Davidic era. They reintroduce language and they reintroduce even the script that was familiar in those early glory days. So ideologically, they're connecting and they're genetically connected. And what the walls of Nehemiah are doing are closing the circle, so to speak. They're completing the cycle and saying, we're going to show architecturally what this reality is that we have a restored polity of some sort in this land of promise. And we will trust God to help us build it, to defend against our enemies, to be shrewd about how we negotiate things with the Persian Empire and our neighbors. And uh, let's get the good old religion back too, and not just our security and our comfort.
SPEAKER_00John, thank you a ton. It is so remarkable how fluent and conversant you are in this. Somebody like me talks about this. Uh, I've been there as a tourist. I'm a guest and I'm there only briefly. You grew up there. This is your world. You talk about it the way I talk about my hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado when I was a kid. And it's just so very helpful to get your perspective on all of this. Any final word before we shut things down for today here?
SPEAKER_01Yes. We have in this story of Nehemiah a powerful and beautiful demonstration of the sovereignty of God and God's commitment to see it through. And it's not just an idea and it's not just a nice story. It's made stone by this real architecture and by the hard work of these people who know that they have a glorious past and they know that they have a glorious future, and they're willing to take the first steps to move stones that their forebearers moved and to build something out of nothing. So they are rebooting the faith of their forebearers and trusting God for the outcome. And they have an incredible leader who does it not through making himself the main event, but does it through going back to the texts of old and implementing the promises of old into a new architectural reality that becomes ultimately another glorious city yet again. And let's just fast forward for a minute to see the promises and sovereignty of God. What's so powerful is that Jesus Christ Himself, when he comes and redeems, he is walking literally on the stones of the walls of Nehemiah and the stones that are remaining of the palace of David and Solomon, and he's going up to the Temple Mount. And these things are not lost on him as he is physically in contact with his own history and the history of his people. And he's channeling Jeremiah, who had to watch the whole thing go up in flames, and he's walking the very same paths, lamenting, like Jeremiah lamented, that the city just will not listen. And yet, I think those same stones give a tremendous testimony of encouragement and faith as well, not just in the days of Jesus, but in our own days as well. These are physical manifestations of the faithfulness of God. And I think we should cling to them both through the story and through the realities of archaeology.
SPEAKER_00That's a wonderful place to leave it and a wonderful thought to leave it on. Next week, we have five more episodes in this season on Nehemiah, and then we're done. And in those five episodes, we'll kind of get the epilogue. We're going to cover what happened after Nehemiah. And so a lot of the stuff that you just heard Dr. Monson talk about, if there's any of that, we're going, I don't remember exactly where that fits, timeline-wise, Alexander the Great's in there somewhere, the Asmonians, Maccabeans, Rome, how does that all work together? Don't worry. We're going to string it all together. We're going to build out the connective tissue between the end of the narrative of the Old Testament in Nehemiah and the stuff we're going to be looking at, which is right after the time of Jesus in the early church in the book of Galatians in our next season. John, you're just a wealth of information. And I know that you've done your best to try to distill this kind of stuff that you've spent your life working on down into charts and visual resources for people. I've seen your website, but if people want more of what you do in a really concise, understandable way, where do they go?
SPEAKER_01Oh, thanks much, Matt. It's uh biblicalbackgrounds.com. No underscore, no caps, just biblicalbackgrounds.com, just like it sounds.
SPEAKER_00There is a ton there that is a wonderful compliment to the kind of stuff we do on this podcast, kind of conversations you and I have. And there's a fun little bonus here. John has been kind enough to offer to me a chart that he made. It's a multifaceted timeline of the entire Persian era of the Bible chart that he developed. And it's not even published yet. So I, you know, I'm gonna watermark the whole thing up so that it stays his property. But for anybody who sports the program at any level on any platform, we're gonna send you one of John's Persian era of the Bible history charts. It's beautiful. It's gonna take something you've spent a lot of time working on through the course of this season of the podcast, and it's gonna make it really tangible right in front of your face. And I would ask on behalf of John, so he doesn't have to ask you, I am. Please don't share it. It isn't published yet. But this watermarked version is something that we're gonna bounce to you. And thank you, man, for being willing to do that. It's super generous.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. We're on the same mission to make the Bible better understood and so we can internalize its message. Thanks, Matt. You're great.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate it, dude. Biblicalbackgrounds.com. And again, anybody supports program at any level, you can go right now and uh either on Patreon or in your email inbox, you're gonna get a copy of John's Super Rad, but also very watermarked because it isn't published quite yet. Persian era of the Bible chart. I super appreciate you, John. I super appreciate all you being up for a longer conversation. It seemed like the right thing to do since we had the guy here to just pick his brain and uh let him fill in some of the gaps of our knowledge and what we've been poking around at. So uh thanks for hanging out with me for a little extra time today. And next week, once again, we're gonna get going on the epilogue to all of this. And I think it's gonna be a blast. So five more episodes, and then we're done. We're on to Galatians. All right, I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.