Hello, Chums. It's me, Matt Whitman from the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, the podcast you are listening to. And I said, just for the record, I said chums, not chumps. Chumps is mean. I do not think that of you. Chums is nice, especially if it's the 1940s. I don't think anybody calls anybody chum anymore. Speaking of the 1940s, I totally just backdoored into that. Oh my goodness, this is gonna be a great day. I can't believe that worked. Wait, wait, wait. This is my real first question after the whole chum thing. Amazing. Here we go. Speaking of the 1940s, hey, when you picture World War II, which side do you imagine, do you envision the Russians being on? Well, some of you right now, you're like, well, they were team good guy. They were part of the allies that defeated the Nazis. Good job, Russia. And others of you are like, they were with the Nazis, they were on Team Bad Guy there at the beginning. Well, really, you're both right, because Russia was on both teams at one point or another during World War II. And so the right question to hit me back when I ask you, which side were the Russians on in World War II is well, when during World War II? Right? Because history isn't simple. Things change and you feel like you got one part of the map nailed down, but then you scrub forward or backwards 10 or 20 years on the timeline, and the alignment's completely different. You realize, well, somebody else was in charge. They were doing something different, they were pushing the rock in a different direction. And if you can easily, with your recollection of relatively recent history, picture a Russia that was on two different sides of the same war within living memory of now, then you'll have no trouble picturing this era of this next flag that flew over Colossae in ancient and classical times. And you'll have no trouble picturing how Colossae and the neighboring mega city of Sardis, the historic capital of the proud Lydian people, you'll have no trouble picturing how these proud cities and the people surrounding them fought on one side, that being against the great empire of Persia, in one moment. But then very shortly, if you just scrub forward on the timeline a tiny bit, all of a sudden they're fighting on the other side along with Persia as a subject region, or what the Persians called it, a subject satrapy, a gubernatorial subregion within Persia. They end up fighting alongside the Persians just a little bit after that. Okay, so here's what happened. We got these flags that have flown over Colasse. We've got the super ancient flag that dates back to time immemorial, maybe corresponds to the biblical time of the flood. Maybe we've got some details in there about a legendary king, Nanakus, who maybe corresponds to Noah or Enoch. We've got another legendary king from that time called Manus, from whom we get the term Manic for somebody who's really getting after it and is all over the place. But we know that the people of Colossae and their neighboring communities, they were there at that point. Then the second flag, the second era that makes Colossae Colasse, is the time of Phrygia, the golden era of Phrygia, with kings like Gordias and Midas, where everything he touched turned to gold. But the one thing that he couldn't touch and turned to gold were the invading people group who represent the third flag over Colossae, which is the Cimmerian, C-I-M-M-E-R-A. The Sumerian flag flew over Colossae from 676 to 620 BC, roughly corresponding with the closing years of the southern kingdom of Judah, roughly corresponding with the prophecies of Jeremiah. But the Cimerians were a group of horse raiders. They couldn't hold the area, and along came another significant, not quite Greekish power from that area, that being the Lydians, who represent the fourth flag that flew over Colossae, and they were in charge from 620 BC to 540 during this very tumultuous time in history we talked about yesterday. During that time, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon conquers Jerusalem and takes away the Jews into captivity back in Babylon. The Medes and the Persians duke it out for supremacy after being longtime allies and cousin people groups. And the Assyrians meet their final fate and vanish to history as an empire. And during this roughly 100-year period of the fourth flag over Colossae, there's one great king who sort of dominates it all. It's the king Croesus. And he comes close to the end of this. As I told you yesterday, he's ridiculously rich and he is intermarried like crazy with the Medes and the Babylonians in a weird marriage, let's make peace triangle, after they all called off fighting in the middle of a battle where a solar eclipse occurred, and everybody was like, we probably just shouldn't fight during a solar eclipse or maybe ever again. I don't know. Let's just all marry each other and see if it fixes things. Well, it fixes things for a minute. But if you were here for the seasons that we did on Esther, Nehemiah, and Ezra, you know that stuff got real spicy in the mid-500s BC between Astyages, king of the Medes, and Astyages' own grandson, a young man from way out east in modern day Iran, named Cyrus, who would go on to be known as Cyrus the Great. Historical records differ as to whether Astyages was a good guy or a horrible monster who held one of those trick banquets where you murder people and serve them their own kid. I mean, the rumors about Astyages are very, very, very dark from ancient history. But all rumors aside, what we know is this there was a struggle for power over the cooperative empire of the Medes and the Persians, and Cyrus the Great emerged victorious and pretty easily toppled what was left of the Babylonian Empire. This is recorded in the book of Daniel. When you get the writing on the wall scene, oh, your kingdom's been divided, says the writing on the wall. Tonight your kingdom will be divided between the Medes and the Persians. Oh, then the Medes and the Persians show up in Babylon, they conquer Babylon. And from all the chaos, Cyrus the Great emerges victorious. Well, Lydia, clear out west, with rich King Croesus still on the throne in the 550s and 540s, at first is untouched, which means our favorite town on this podcast of Colossae also remained untouched and continued to flourish during this age of things getting settled out in the mid-500s between Babylon, the Medes, and the Persians. But after Cyrus the Great got everything settled down and took stock of his empire, he's like, okay, here's a couple things I need to do. One, Jews, go back to Jerusalem and rebuild your temple. I don't know what Babylon was thinking. We're going to treat you way nicer. Get after that. Okay, well, then the story of the Bible chases after that, and we follow Zerubbabel and Ezra and Nehemiah over to Jerusalem, and things get rebuilt there. It takes a long time. That's where the Bible story goes. What is happening off-screen of the Bible is that nice guy, Cyrus, who was like, go rebuild the temple. He is not feeling so nice toward Colasse, and particularly the neighboring megacity of great wealth and riches, the capital of the Lydians, that is Sardis. So Cyrus begins prosecuting a campaign to bring the kingdom of Lydia, or maybe you could call it an empire, under Persian control. It's one of the top and first priorities of Cyrus the Great once he solidifies power around 540 BC in Babylon. Now, relations are already going to be a little bit strained here between Cyrus the Great of Persia and of Bible fame, and of Croesus the Rich of not Bible fame, but of money fame. Now remember, Cyrus the Great overthrew his grandfather Astyages the Mead. And also remember, Astyages the Mead is married to Croesus' sister. So Cyrus's grandma is Croesus the Rich. It's his sister, meaning that Cyrus's great uncle through his grandma's side is Croesus. Well, this is gonna be awkward at Thanksgiving. Actually, it's not gonna be all that awkward at all. Cyrus just asserts authority immediately. And Croesus, of course, is like, no, we're the Lydians, we're powerful, we've been around for a long time, and we're fighting back. Roughly in this time frame, Cyrus the Great beats Croesus, captures Sardis, and doesn't just take it in like a oh cool, I got a nice town. He makes it the western kind of almost capital of the Persian Empire. The great Persian highway that runs horizontally across Turkey and Iraq and Iran, connecting the whole empire. Its western terminus is in Sardis. And increasingly, in the years of Cyrus's reign, he really clamps down on Lydia and makes Sardis, and with it, our favorite town of Colossae solidly Persian. But it's a really interesting Persianification that happens here because Persia mushes cultures, they don't just truly Persianify anything. So Persia in ancient Lydia looks really Lydian. There is just an administrative kind of veneer over the top of Lydian culture. And on top of that, Greek culture has started to mush into Lydia more and more as well across the Aegean Sea. So during the late 500s BC, our favorite town, Colossae, is getting hit from three different directions culturally, maybe four. You still got very recent living memory of the horrors of the Sumerians coming to town. You've still got memory of the good old days of when we were just Phrygia, and the capital was in Gordium before it got burned. But you've also got memory of a pretty nice, neat, tidy integration with Lydia that brought wealth and stability. And I mean the capital's just right there, just a stone's throw from Colossae. This feels okay. But now you've got Persia there, and you've got truly Greek culture from the golden age of Greece starting to leak across the Aegean Sea and all mingle and swirl around. Our friends in Colossae then in the late 500s, they're becoming something really unique. And we can start to see that texanification that we talked about happening here, where the effect of these changing flags that fly over Colossae, it's starting to show. These people are starting to become a real product of a whole lot of mingling of a whole lot of different things in a whole lot of different eras. Well, you remember at the beginning of this conversation when I was like, which side was Russia on in World War II? So it is with Colossae and Sardis. They are anti-Persian, fighting back against Cyrus and later rebelling against Cyrus, even as Cyrus is being really nice to the Jews in the Bible in the book of Ezra. But then Cyrus and his descendants finally get the clamps on this rowdy, rebellious, rich far end of their empire, and they start thinking to themselves, we'd like to push it just a little bit further. Well, Persia didn't read that very well because they were extended as far as they could extend their influence when they got to Lydia or old Phrygia. Nobody had the administrative capacity to go much of any further than that. And I have contended in the past that you can pretty much get a compass, you know, like the pencil and the little poinky thing. You can put it in the middle of an ancient empire pre-electricity and pre-certain other technologies that came around in the last thousand years or so, and you can just make a circle. And that's about as much as you can hold with just word of mouth and written records. And Persia is just like everybody else. It's just as far as you can go. Persia, as you know, pushes it a bridge too far in the early 400s BC. Pun was intended there because Darius and Xerxes invade mainland Greece. They invade what's called the Attican Peninsula, which is where Athens is. And in order to get there, Xerxes literally makes a floating bridge across the little pinch point between Asia and Europe to get over there. But it proved to be a bridge too far. The Persians won a couple victories against the Greeks, but the victories didn't matter because the Greeks either did enough damage in losing, as at the case at the famous Battle of Thermopylae, when Leonidas and the Spartans stood their ground against the invasion of Xerxes in the late 480s BC, or at other times the Persians just straight up lost, and they were devastating losses, as is the case at the Battle of Salamis, which is basically the Battle of Athens on that same campaign, where Xerxes lost his fleet. Then they lost again at the Battle of Plataea, and that pretty much set the boundary in place between Persia and Greece. So starting in about 480 BC, roughly the time between chapter one and chapter two of the Book of Esther, when Xerxes goes off on a big war campaign and then he comes back changed and defeated, and he's like, I miss my wife who I deposed.
SPEAKER_00Maybe I should have a contest to get a new wife to see if I feel better about losing to Leonidas and the Spartans and Themistocles and the Greeks.
SPEAKER_01And all of his eunuch advisors are like, Yes, Xerxes, that's what you should do. You're insufferable right now. Let's have a great big contest. And then Esther wins the contest, and the rest is history there. Well, in that dynamic moment around 480 BC, the line between Persia and Greece gets drawn, basically, in our favorite town, Colossae, just a little bit west of there. Lydia becomes the end of Persia pretty much permanently. And Greece, everything in mainland Europe, just continues to be Greece, and it's going to stay that way for a real long time. So, in conclusion of this one, two, three, four, fifth flag episode that we're doing as a history run-up to understanding Colossae at the time of the New Testament, Persia firmly owns Colasse and Lydia and historic Phrygia for pretty much, I mean, really, the entire time that the Persian Empire exists, from 540 BC to the arrival of Alexander the Great, who we're going to talk about yet again next time around, in 333 BC, Colasse is under the thumb of Persia. But I think Colasse kind of likes being under their thumb because it was a time of peace, it was a time of prosperity, and Lydia was well treated because it was a very beloved, very productive, very strategically important Western frontier, which had as the jewel in its crown, the posh, Western Lydian capital of Sardis, which was just right down the road from Colossae. Well, next time we're going to talk about how in 333 BC, Alexander the Great showed up and snatched the jewel that was Sardis right out of the Persian crown, and then went and chased down the guy who was wearing the Persian crown and straight up uh killed him and put the crown on his own Alexandrian head. But can you feel it? Are you feeling how the flags are starting to come together? Are you feeling more like a Colossian? Because it's working on me. Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.