Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I'm not ashamed to tell you that I like musicals. I am also not ashamed to tell you that I sing along with them, and I am further not ashamed to tell you that even though it's a little overdone and everybody knows it, one of my favorite musicals is Wicked. I think people like Wicked because the characters are interesting, they're flawed, but it's easy to feel compassion for them and you see them change and grow over the course of the story. I also think that Wicked, which got traction in the early 2000s, came out at the right time for the story motif that is, oh, what if the good guy was bad and the bad guy was good? You know, it's a topsy-turvy fairy tale, right? Where instead of the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz being clearly irredeemably evil, she's actually just misunderstood. And the truly evil character is the wizard behind the curtain. Of course, in the Wizard of Oz, we pull back the curtain on that institution of wizard, and what do we find back there? Someone who's pathetic and insecure and bumbling, hiding behind a lot of bluster. But in Wicked, the topsy-turvy version, we pull back the curtain on the wizard and discover it's not that he's bumbling or insecure, he's pure evil. The guy we think of as being the one who carefully attends to the needs of everyone is actually the worst, and he's exploiting the whole thing. I think part of the reason that resonated with people so much in the early 2000s is the bright lights of the internet got turned on some of our cherished institutions, and we realized uh there's some rot in here. It's icky. This doesn't feel good, and it didn't feel good, but also it felt good to sing along with a musical that seemed like it kind of got what we were feeling about stuff like that. And I like that a story like Wicked, a topsy-turvy fairy tale, kind of pushes us to be like, hey, I want purity, I want some degree of decency and integrity from the people who occupy these important positions. Well, we run into a similar topsy-turvy fairy tale kind of situation in the intertestamental period when we're looking at the history of the Jews. You have these two noble positions. One is high priest, that one's been intact for a very long time. The high priest is a noble office whose job it is to kind of shepherd the people and manage the temple and religious life of the people. But corruption had taken over this role dramatically. Now, the other role is going to be king. This is also supposed to be a shepherding noble role that will also quickly be corrupted by these lesser people who get into this position, these dark wizards who hold themselves out as being good in the metaphorical Emerald City, but they're actually deeply, deeply corrupt. Well, here's somebody who wasn't even trying to come off as pious. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the king of the Seleucid Empire in the early 100s BC. In the midst of that, you've got opportunistic local rulers and priests trying to curry favor with the Seleucids, in this case, Antiochus IV. The role of high priest in Israel is very valuable. There's a huge treasury there, there's huge influence and power there. Basically, it's a money factory. And there's a guy named Jason, who we talked about yesterday, who goes and buys the term for this again is Simony or Simone, named for Simon Magus, who tried to buy religious office and power from Peter in the book of Acts. He goes and buys the office of the high priest. Well, ick, that kind of feels like the corrupt wizard from Wicked. This is supposed to be a noble position, and you just gave a bunch of money to some foreigner who kind of hates you and the people that you govern, the Jews, to buy this office and cheapen it and bastardize it. Gross, Jason, what the heck are you doing? Jason pushes his luck a little further and is like, hey, I also want to restructure Jerusalem in the style of a Greek city-state, a Greek polis. And Antiochus IV is like, yeah, I want things to be more Greek. Do it. And so this Jason guy, this high priest, weasels his way into basically being in charge of Jerusalem. And it looks like he's starting to make very Greekifying changes as the high priest of God of the Jews. I mean, it's so backwards. He's supposed to be doing the opposite thing. Well, live by the sword, die by the sword. Another guy comes along named Menelaus, and he's like, wait, we can just buy the high priesthood of Jerusalem, and then you kind of make him de facto king of Jerusalem. Well, I would want that, and I have a ton of money. So Menelaus goes to Antiochus IV, who also likes money, and is like, hey, I heard you like money, and Antiochus IV is like, I absolutely adore it. I love it. What did you have in mind? And Menelaus is like, what if I gave you a lot of it and then you made me the high priest and just kick Jason out? And Antiochus is like, wait, so I would get new money for something I don't care about? Yes, your terms are acceptable. I accept that. And the rumor was that Menelaus actually hijacked cash from the temple treasury somehow to buy the role of high priest, Ick. So people are starting to get real mad in Jerusalem around 170-ish BC. Again, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids start to fight. This is the sixth Syrian war between these two. Antiochus is down in Egypt fighting down there. And on his way home, this Menelaus guy, who just bought the high priesthood, was like, hey, you should swing by and get some more money to further solidify my position here. And the ancient rumor is that Menelaus just handed out 1800 talents of gold to help fund Antiochus's attempt to defeat the Ptolemies and establish his position everywhere. What are you doing, dude? You're supposed to be the custodian of that, not give it all away to somebody else. Also, I'm totally pulling out my phone here because I want to run the numbers on 1,800 talents of gold. Okay, so uh gold. Okay, a talent of gold is it's 60 pounds. Sometimes in ancient the ancient world, a talent of gold is up to 120 pounds, but the the average seems to be about 60. That's what's called a Babylonian talent. So 60 pounds, and there are 16 ounces in a pound. So 60 times 16. All right, so 960 ounces of gold per talent. And then there's 1800 talents, so times 1800. Okay, so that's 1.7. Am I doing this right? 1.7 million ounces of gold as of today, that's worth about $4,050 a pop. So that is uh a lot. That's like $7 billion in today's money. So just once again, this fake high priest Menelaus, that's a Greek name. He's not even Jewish, or if he is, he's hiding his Jewishness. He just handed out seven billion dollars worth of gold to an oppressor and occupier of the Jewish people from the Jewish temple. And what do you know? People were pretty mad about it. So Jason's been sitting around looking for an opportunity to get back in the game. And somewhere in here, the timeline's fuzzy to me, he hears a rumor that Antiochus has died, and so he tries to overthrow Menelaus and appoint himself as being the guy in charge of Jerusalem again. But Antiochus is not dead at all, and he's like, What the heck? There's a rebellion against me in Jerusalem over this money or something. We gotta crush it. Antiochus IV, maybe it's opportunistic, maybe it's out of a genuine confusion. He sends troops down there to shut it down, Greekify everything. I mean, uh property gets seized, money gets gobbled up, Greek monuments start getting built in the temple complex. I mean, this is idolatry in the highest degree. It's absolutely appalling. He makes laws that make Jews violate the Sabbath. He makes laws that outlaw circumcision, the mark of the covenant. He makes Jews eat pork. The story goes that he even profaned the temple by going in there and even like sacrificing a pig on the altar or something like that. So here we are. The metaphorical wizards in this scenario, the high priests and the noble king, are not noble at all. They're awful. They're horrible. And all of this horribleness is happening at the expense of the Jewish people. And then when one of the horrible people tries to opportunistically push back on another one of the horrible people, all the horrible people fight and everything gets worse. Who's the victim? Just the normal, pious Jewish person who misses the days when they had kings and wishes they could live their lives and not have this kind of crap going on. Well, eventually, in 167 BC, one dude and his family get pushed too far. And tomorrow we're gonna pick up right where we left off and talk about this man whose name was Mattathias and his kids, and how they said enough was enough and took up the sword and threw off Antiochus Epiphanes IV and his corrupt, wicked descendants, and how they threw off these fake high priests and cleansed and restored the temple, and in doing so, created a brand new holiday that you've heard of. And we'll talk about that more tomorrow, and it's gonna be fun. Judge me all you want! I like those musicals, and I'm gonna keep liking them. More intertestamental fun tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.