Every movie ever is throwing music over the top of it, right? Because it just makes movies work better to have orchestral stuff. But a lot of times you get the pop songs that go over the top. Sometimes they're just thrown on there and they're kind of thoughtless. But every now and then, right, you see one of these where you make the connection, you go, oh, look what's happening in the scene. And look what they're doing with the music. I don't know what movie this is. Maybe Suicide Squad or something with Harley Quinn. But I can picture I'm just a girl, by no doubt, over a sequence with a couple of female heroes or villains or something like guns and explosions and things around them. I don't know. Maybe I'm just making up a scene. What's a better example? I just saw a Fall Guy and is it the Yeah, it's a Taylor Swift song. It's a super long Taylor Swift song. It's the remember it. All too well. All too well. It's the all too well song. The one that's like 15 minutes long, where I think she's complaining about breaking up with Jake Gyllenhaal. Do we know that? I don't know if that's confirmed. Maybe that's just a rumor I heard. I don't know a lot about these things. What I know is that movie, I should have started with this example. This is better. I like where this it's shaping up. This is going in the right direction. There's a scene in that movie where Ryan Goslin's real sad about losing his girl, and so he's sitting in a car by himself. And that all too well song by Taylor Swift is playing, and he's in there crying and singing along. And you go, Oh, okay, I get it. Like the perfect. The soundtrack makes that work because it's ridiculous and absurd for a tough guy like that who might fall from a tall building or roll a brand new car to be sad and to have such a tender heart about that and to be singing the song. It worked. Good enough, Matt. Likewise, in Nehemiah, you got some songs that are playing over the top of this thing that we just got done looking at, Nehemiah chapter 12, with the rededication of the wall. And we might not know exactly what songs they were, but I have a pretty good idea. I know what song was going over the top. And I don't think that this song, which I bet was performed and publicly sung, sung by the community at the dedication of the walls ceremony in 444 BC in Jerusalem, led by Ezra and Nehemiah. I bet that this song that we're going to look at today was performed there. And if so, I think it was a very, very appropriate song, a great match for the moment. And if it wasn't performed there, well, you can imagine what it would have been like if it was, because it's, I think you're going to see it's really, really appropriate. Best intro ever. Nehemiah 12, of course, is the rededication of the wall. There's a bunch of names in there, but the gist of it, as we've looked at over the last few days, is this. Everybody gets together in a manner that's kind of reminiscent of the old meeting of all of Israel between Mount Ebal and Gerizim in a natural amphitheater back during the time of Joshua, 800 or 1,000 years before the dedication of the wall ceremony. We're looking at in Nehemiah, and there are two big choirs and they circle all around. It's a little reminiscent of the conquest of Jericho. Everybody's singing, it's really well done. Everything has symbolic value. And at the end of this dedication, we discover that everything is super crisp and in place. All the players are there to do the right things and stuff super humming at this point. Well, I ask you, what would be the soundtrack? What would be the song that would most appropriately go over this moment? Maybe the kind of song where if we were to imagine this as a scene from a movie here in Nehemiah chapter 12, maybe the way the edit would work is that the most appropriate song for the moment would be performed by the choirs in like real time. So the audio is communicating that. Maybe something like that. I can picture it. Well, I think the psalm in question that best fits the bill for this event to be the soundtrack of all of it is Psalm 147. And I am just going to read it to you. And you do not have to agree with me because I don't think there's proof that this is the one they used, but I think I mean, come on, why wouldn't you use this one? Psalm 147, verse 1. Praise the Lord. How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise him. The Lord builds up Jerusalem. He gathers the exiles of Israel. See, like right? It's right there. Come on, this had to have been it. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord and mighty in power. His understanding has no limit. The Lord sustains the humble but casts the wicked to the ground. I think this ceremony would have been amazing just because of the resonant music and how it would feel physically to hear it. But then you make these the words that you're singing in light of what's going on. Oh my goodness, this is gold. Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving, make music to our God on the harp, he covers the sky with clouds, he supplies the earth with rain, and he makes grass grow on the hills. He provides food for the cattle and for the young ravens when they call. His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of a man. The Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love. Listen to that. I mean, this is the move that they all just made, right? To renew the covenant, to want to hear the reading of the law in a sweltering hot late summer or early fall day all gathered around. This generation had made a pivot, a reorientation, and this song captures the essence of that. It goes on extol the Lord, O Jerusalem, praise your God, O Zion, for he strengthens the bars of your gates and blesses your people within you. Come on. How many times has Nehemiah said the stuff about that I hung the bars and the gates in place? This is a key theme in the book of Nehemiah. I bet this one was there. He grants peace to your borders and satisfies you with the finest of wheat. He sends his command to the earth, his word runs swiftly. He spreads the snow like wool and scatters the frost like ashes. He hurls down his hail like pebbles, who can withstand his icy blast? He sends his word and melts them. He stirs up his breezes and the waters flow. He has revealed his word to Jacob, his laws and decrees to Israel. He has done this for no other nation. They do not know his laws. But praise the Lord. I say again, maybe they didn't all sing that song at the Dedication of the Walls in 444 BC in Nehemiah chapter twelve. But I got a sneakin' suspicion that they did. And if somebody were to make a movie about this the way I was describing, and that is the psalm they latched on to and put over the top of their depiction of all of these events, well, I think they'd be doing just fine. And obviously, who knows if the next thing I'm gonna say is true or not, but think about the songs you know that you deeply connect with a movie. Here, I'm gonna do a few of them. Top gun, right? Don't you forget about me. Breakfast Club, right? I don't know, I never got to see that. It wasn't allowed when I was a kid, and I still haven't gone back and seen that. But I'm told that that is a song that is associated with the Breakfast Club. Whenever I hear that one song that Evan Essence did that I never even really liked that much, I always think of Daredevil with Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, because it goes with the song. That's what it is. My point is some songs are linked in generational cultural memory to a movie or a moment or an advertisement or Broadway, a musical performance kind of thing. I just wonder if maybe Psalm 147 was completely hitched in the mind of people for generations and generations to this sequence of events in Nehemiah, and everybody's like, Oh yeah, that's the wall dedication song. And then that just didn't make it into my Bible. Or maybe this is known, and I just don't know because that does happen sometimes where I think I'm speculating about something terribly interesting, and then five minutes after I speculated about it, somebody smarter than me is like, dude, you just reinvented a thing we already totally knew. So maybe that's the case here too. But I don't know. I just think it's cool and the song's a great fit. And some of these scenes in the Bible I think are real fun to envision the way we envision the modern storytelling and movies and things like that. So if nothing else, I've had a lovely time. And tomorrow we'll actually be on Tanihemiah chapter 13. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.