Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and I have yet another weird, deeply personal question that I want to ask you on the front end of our conversation today. Do you have a moment in your history where your memory shifts from stuff that is really memories that other people gave you about when you were a super little kid to memories that you actually hold and you know for sure I was there, I remember how it felt. For me, this is definitely a thing. And I think the moment was at Crown Center in Kansas City. I think Crown Center is in Missouri, right? Most of the good Kansas City stuff is on the Missouri side, I think. I don't know. I'm not super up to speed on my Kansas City geography, but we I know we were at Crown Center. It's this kind of shopping mall there in downtown, and there was some public art there. It's like mid-century public art, you know, kind of goofy looking, weird curves and stuff, sort of abstract. And there was uh an indoor fountain or pool there. And I can still smell the chlorine from the pool, and I can still remember people maybe throwing coins in there. And I remember little toddler me looked at this public art or whatever it was and thinking, oh, there's kind of a curvy little cubby hole in there. I could climb in there. That would be a fun place to explore. And I did. And my parents snapped a picture and they told me the story about it. But all the pictures from before that, I remember vicariously through their stories. That picture I remember sights, sounds, smells, the moment, how it felt, my parents' emotions. And that's the earliest thing I think I've got that is kind of an in-color memory that I really believe is my own. Do you have that? It's okay if you don't. It's okay if this sounds weird. But even if it sounds weird, surely you can understand what I'm describing, and then you'll be able to understand this. Likewise, we have moments in history in different parts of the world, and the date changes depending on where we're talking about, where we go from mist and myth and pretty hard to determine what was going on there. We just kind of have legends, we're just guessing, to an era of more certainty where things come into color, if you will, where we know a whole bunch more names and where we run into some good historical sources, and where we start to see this or that people group that we're interested in starting to interact with other people groups we know more about. And they sort of, in that moment, they go from a sort of mythic history to an in-color history with actual documented memories. Well, it is in this next era that we're going to be talking about today in the history of Colossae and the Phrygian people and the individual to whom the book of Philemon was written, Philemon. It is under this next flag, this next era, this moment, that we go from sort of metaphorical kid memories to sort of metaphorical actual memories that we actually hold. And this is under the age of the Lydians. So flag number one over Colossae is the distant past. It's hard to nail down, maybe going all the way back to the flood or the exodus or whatever. Phase number two, flag number two, is the Phrygian proper era with the capital far from Colasse, but still technically in Phrygia in Gordium. And then after that, the third flag is this brief tumultuous era defined by the Sumerian invaders. That only runs for about 50 years. And then this fourth flag, once again, is the age of the great Lydian people. Now, the Lydians are kind of like the Phrygians. Ethnically, they're from the almost exact same part of the world. Their mythic history seems to go back to about the same point as the Phrygians. Their languages seem to be somewhat related. Again, not Greek per se, even though they are very close to a lot of historic Greek stuff. And Lydia, like the Phrygians, are known for being pretty smart and ridiculously wealthy. The Lydians, like the Phrygians, also get their own musical scale, which is pretty fun. There's a Lydian feel that you train to know what you're listening for. You can be like, oh, there that's this ancient people group. That must be like how they built their little flutes. Those are the intervals they had, those are the scales they used. Or maybe it's just a nickname. I don't know if Phrygian and Lydian, when you're talking about music, actually correspond to how they sounded, but I kind of get the impression that maybe they do. That seems like the kind of thing that it would pass down. That'd be a fun thing to explore more deeply another time. But the Lydians are opportunistic. That's a great way to think of them as you try to come up with some sort of characteristic you attach to each of these eras, each of these flags over Colossae. The Lydians have their capital in Sardis. Sardis is it's a mega city. I mean, it's it's an incredibly wealthy cosmopolitan city that is the jewel of West Asia Minor. People fight over it a lot. Important kings rule from there, and it is very close to Colossae on a map, like a stone's throw, right? So it's kind of wild that Colasse, which is generally historically Phrygian, is actually much closer to the historic megacity and capital and cultural capital of the Lydians than it is to Gordium, the historic capital of the Phrygians. So it's possible that Colasse always felt a little bit more Lydian throughout history and a little less Phrygian since these two people groups grew up at the same time. But also, Colasse was a jewel uh by its own right. It was a big city, they had a thriving wool trade, they seemed to be good at arts and building. And so, you know, if Phrygia and Gordium had control of Colossae, I don't think they would have casually just let that drift into the hands of the Lydians. So maybe Colasse is a little more fluid throughout the centuries in the ancient world in terms of whose banner it is under, but my guess is because of its value that it corresponds pretty closely to the timeline that we're talking about here. Lydia sees what happens with the Sumerians. These horse people from the Asian steppes come in between 676 and 620, and they destroy the ancient Phrygian capital of Gordium. There's a burn layer, everything's there exactly where it ought to be. Archaeologists have confirmed all of this kind of thing. But the Sumerians don't seem to know how to govern. So the Lydians engage in a lengthy multi-decade war of opportunism to try to get rid of the Sumerians and capture their historic neighbors. I don't know if Lydia and Phrygia were ever really rivals, but I mean, I don't know if you're a gigantic people group and you're very culturally similar neighbors get wrecked. I mean, that stinks for them or whatever. But what are you gonna do? Let somebody else come in and take them over? Let the invaders from far, far away, who are nothing like you culturally, just have that neighboring country? Or are you gonna go in there yourself and try to stabilize the thing and take ownership of it? Well, to the Lydians, that made perfect sense, but the Sumerians proved to be a pretty tough out. So Lydia had to start firing off letters to the Assyrian Empire headquartered in the biblical city of Nineveh. Nineveh is the town that Jonah, of course, went and preached to. And at the end of the book of Jonah, Nineveh gets spared, so it's still there to receive the correspondence from the kings of Lydia asking for help in how to beat the Sumerians. We have those tablets, by the way, where the request for help in beating the Sumerians is sent from Lydia to Nineveh. But not too long after that correspondence got set, Nineveh finally did get wrecked and went up in flames, as documented in the Old Testament book of Nahum. Well, with the help of the Neo-Assyrians, or maybe not with their help, Lydia wins out. It's very hard. It costs them like four kings and Sardis getting sacked twice. It costs them a little bit of international groveling, but it works out. Good for you, Lydia. Now you own Phrygia, and that includes ownership of the town we're concerned with, which is Colossae. Things go pretty well for around a hundred years for Lydia after they run out the Sumerians in 620 BC. So I think at this point we can say the fourth flag over Colossae is Lydia, and this flag flies over Colossae from 620 to 540 BC. If you're a normal person, like I mean, those are just some dates. If you happen to be a complete loser and you sit around and spend all your time thinking about the ancient world and how all these dates add up and you don't have a social life, then you were like, wait, 620 to 540 BC. That's like the most dynamic time in the entire ancient world before Alexander the Great. What a crazy time for this fourth flag to fly over Colossae. Well, you're right, my nerdy history friend. This was a crazy time. The great king of this era, ruling from Sardis and wearing the crown of the Lydians, is a guy named Croesus. Maybe you've heard the expression rich as Croesus. Well, he earned it. Croesus might have been, compared to the rest of the world at the time, the richest person ever to live. And depending on what day it is and gold and silver values at any given point and adjusted for inflation, heck, maybe he's still the richest guy to have ever lived. Certainly in the ancient world. And that makes Lydia and Sardis and the throne of Croesus a very attractive thing for any other mega empire that might come along during this time. Now, the Lydians don't seem to make an appearance in the Old Testament. Maybe when you see the name Lud or Ludus on a you know passing list of place names in Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel, maybe that's Lydia. We don't know for sure. Some people think it is. But definitely, people groups like the Medes, the Persians, and the Babylonians come up in the Bible. They're a really big deal. Well, during this fourth flag era of the Lydian occupation of Colossae, Assyria finally gets beat. They get whipped, they lose, they're defeated. That's part of what I was referencing earlier with the fall of Nineveh as described and celebrated in the book of Nahum. And after Assyria, you kind of have this weird power triangle with the ancient mountain folk, who are the Medes up in northern Iraq, northern Iran, in their ancient city of Ekbatana. You've got this up-and-comer scrappy little people group, a cousin people group of the Medes way out east called the Persians, but for the time being, the mega empire that emerges after the fall of Assyria in the late 600s BC is Babylon, and particularly Babylon under their great king Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar's in a real conquering mood now that Assyria is gone, and he sets his sights on things like Egypt and particularly Jerusalem. Famously in 586 BC, the great calamity of the Old Testament, the worst thing other than I guess the fall of humanity and the garden that happens in the Old Testament happens. Nebuchadnezzar comes to town, he captures the Jewish people, he takes them away into captivity, but that's not enough for him. He also loots and destroys the temple, leaving Jerusalem completely in ruin. About the same time that Nebuchadnezzar's attentions are all focused on destroying Jerusalem, up north, the Medes and the Lydians, using Colossian troops on the Lydian side, they're having a big, gigantic fight. And one of the craziest battles in history happens like almost exactly concurrent with Nebuchadnezzar's deportation of the Jews. Up north, there's a battle called the Battle of the Eclipse. An ancient Greek scholar named Thales correctly predicted when this eclipse would occur. I don't know why they decided to have a battle, right? When there was supposed to be an eclipse. But as the story goes, the Medes and the Lydians met on the field of battle, and then there was an eclipse, and they were like, Yeah, we should probably call this off. I don't think that we shouldn't fight during an eclipse or at all. That's gotta be like a sign or something of something. What if we all get married instead? So the royal family of Lydia intermarries with the royal family of the Medes, and all of this royal intermarriage is mediated by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians are trying to make some peace here. And so if my family lineage is right here, the sister probably of Croesus of Lydia marries Syaxeres, king of the Medes' son Astyages, and Syaxeres of the Medes, his daughter, the sister of Astyages, marries Nebuchadnezzar II, and then Nebuchadnezzar builds the hanging gardens for her. I know that was a lot. The point is, it's a weird intermarriage triangle, and that intermarriage triangle coming out of that battle of the eclipse in 585 BC is going to cast a very long shadow on how the rest of history unfolds. I promise you that Philemon and the people of Colossae in the first century AD knew like the back of their hand this marriage swap deal that happened between the Lydians, the Medes, and Nebuchadnezzar of the Babylonians, it was absolutely part of their lore, part of their history that just everybody would have known. Well, during this era, Colasse would have become very Lydian very quickly because they were already so close to the economic, linguistic, and cultural gravitational pull of Lydia. But the Lydian flag flying over Colasse is a very short-lived thing because those marriages I just told you about, that's a band-aid solution to a bigger problem. And ultimately, that is not gonna hold the peace together. And it's gonna prove costly for the people of Lydia and bring to an end their era of flying their flag over Colossae. We'll talk about how things unravel and what happens after that next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.