Ep 382 | Ezra; Nehemiah, Come Follow Me 2026 (July 27-August 2)

**Bryce Dunford** (0:03)
Hey everybody, welcome to Talking Scripture, a podcast where we illustrate relevance and application of the scriptures in Come Follow Me.

**Mike Day** (0:10)
We also dive into the history and cultures of the text.

**Bryce Dunford** (0:13)
Thanks for taking the time to share and subscribe to this podcast.

**Mike Day** (0:16)
For show notes, head over to our website, talkingscripture.org. Welcome to Talking Scripture, I'm Mike.

**Bryce Dunford** (0:25)
And I'm Bryce.

**Mike Day** (0:26)
And today we're going to be in Ezra and the Book of Nehemiah.

**Bryce Dunford** (0:30)
Which puts us into a new time period. If you remember, we've broken in this podcast, the Old Testament, into nine time periods. We did the creation and the beginnings. We did Abraham, the covenant and family. And then we saw the covenant in Egypt, in bondage, when we have a king ruling over us and afflicting us. Then number four, we go into the desert. And we receive the law, but we're afflicted in the desert. And there's manna, and the Lord guides us in the desert. Number five, we come out of the desert and settle the promised land. And we divide up by tribes. Number six, we have a unified kingdom under Saul, David and Solomon. And then number seven, we have a divided kingdom. So those are the first seven time periods. Number eight, is we're gonna watch the kingdom of Judah go into captivity, into Babylon. Now we're not gonna cover that history this week. We kind of skip that history until we get to the writings of Daniel. He's the only one that really writes in captivity. Now we've got the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but we'll mainly look at Daniel as the time period of the captivity. And then Cyrus the Great and the Persians conquer Babylonia and he has a dream in which he sends... The Lord asks him to send the Jews back to Jerusalem. So the last time period of the Old Testament is sending the Jews and anyone who wants to go from Babylon back to Jerusalem under the king's authorization. A couple of main characters we need to talk about that aren't necessarily highlighted strongly in the text, but become very symbolic.
So, when Cyrus sends them back, he appoints kind of a political leader and a religious leader.
And to the best of their ability, they try to follow the royal line of David. And so this man named Zerubbabel is the political leader. And so he kind of represents the king and the political family.
And Joshua is kind of the religious leader. And so he kind of represents the priests. And so those two are going to come up throughout the text. They're going to come up throughout Ezra. And then the prophets that we're going to talk about that really come into play here are Haggai and Zechariah.
So those four, with Ezra and Nehemiah, there's kind of six names you need to know. Ezra, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel and Joshua, Haggai and Zechariah. Haggai and Zechariah are the prophets. Zerubbabel and Joshua are kind of the political and religious figureheads that lead the return and oversee that whole group. And then we've got the stories of Ezra and Nehemiah.

**Mike Day** (3:21)
And big picture, Ezra is going to talk about the rebuilding of the temple. Nehemiah is going to get into the weeds on the walls of Jerusalem being rebuilt and gets into some of the gates. And so, between the two books, we're rebuilding Jerusalem. Now, just know that they weren't originally two books. Ezra and Nehemiah was kind of one thing. And it wasn't until the Christians got a hold of it where they changed it. Origin was this early Christian thinker that said, hey, these are two books. And then when Jerome goes to Bethlehem and he takes the Hebrew Bible, and he translates the Hebrew into Latin, and this Bible is going to be called the Vulgate, he translates the Greek of the New Testament into Latin, and the Latin Vulgate kind of becomes like the standard, and he splits them into two. The Jews don't split Ezra and Nehemiah into two books until centuries later. But just know that originally they were one. I think it's really wise that in Come Follow Me, we teach them both at the same time, because we're talking about the same stuff. Once again, Ezra is focused on the temple, Nehemiah is focused on the walls. I think the main thing of Ezra and Nehemiah is, what does building the temple and building the walls look like in my life?
It's at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah that the rise of the law and keeping of the law becomes preeminent, at least in the canonized text that we have. But there's another vein of Scripture that don't make it into the canon, and that's apocalyptic literature.