Aug. 6, 2026
Why Ezra-Nehemiah Ends Badly: Gary Edward Schnittjer on One Book, Two Scrolls, and a Failed Reform
Ezra-Nehemiah opens on a high note. Yahweh keeps the word he spoke through Jeremiah, Cyrus issues the edict, and the exiles go home. By the last chapter, Nehemiah is walking the city alone, pulling out men's hair and cursing them, and the collective repentances that filled the middle of the book have evaporated. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer argues that most of the literature, popular and technical alike, has quietly declined to read that ending as an ending.
In this episode, Dr. James Spencer talks with Dr. Schnittjer about his forthcoming commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah in the Baker Commentary on the Old Testament series. They start with the hyphen. Ezra-Nehemiah is one book split across two scrolls for the same practical reason Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles were split, and reading half of an already difficult book makes it nearly unreadable. From there they work through what happens when you let the ending stand: if the exile was supposed to reform the people, it did not, and God will have to keep his word some other way.
Along the way, Nehemiah 8 through 10, where the people ask Ezra for the Torah scroll at the Water Gate on an ordinary day, study Scripture together for eleven days, and then sign an oath committing themselves to a standard higher than the one Torah sets. The canonical question of why the Hebrew Bible ends in Chronicles on a note of hope while Ezra-Nehemiah ends in failure. And the mass divorces, which Dr. Schnittjer reads against the grain of the usual explanations. The book never calls these others Gentiles or foreigners. It calls them non-covenantal. The pressure was economic before it was ethnic, and Ezra-Nehemiah keeps the camera on the whole community rather than the individual households.
Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer is distinguished professor of Old Testament for Cairn Theological Seminary at Cairn University. He writes at Carpenter's Student.
Get Ezra-Nehemiah (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament) at amazon.com.
This is part two of our conversation. In the previous episode we discussed Connected: How Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture, and in the next two episodes we turn to inter-biblical exegesis and Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout.
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To read James's article on this topic, check out his author page on Christianity.com.
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined again by doctor Gary Edward Snicker, and we're going to be talking today a little bit about Ezra Nehemiah. And Gary's written a commentary on Ezra Niamayah the Front that's coming out in the Baker Commentary series, so i'd just encourage you to check that out. I would also encourage you to go to his substack, carpentersstudent dot Com. That's with two s's in the middle, Carpenter's Student dot Com.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: And yeah, we're just going to jump in.
00:00:58
Speaker 1: And one of the things I find when I teach on Ezra and Nehemiah is that people are a little confused about how these books actually work together. We have a lot of these books in the Old Testament sort of get crammed together because you know, maybe they don't warrant a full class, or you know, you just want to teach, you know, a few books at a time. But Ezra and ne and Mayah is a little different. And so Gary, if we can start there, what's the connection between these two books and how do you think about it?
00:01:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's a really great place to start. But I even like the way from the question, like you teach on Ezra Amayah, that's great. Not everybody does that. They're they're kind of a poor step child in the Old Testament. Well, yeah, in the New Testament we have First Corinthians and Second Corinthians. Those are two separate letters. Of course they are to the same people. But in the Old Testament there's three books that we know of as first and Second Samuel, first and second Kings, and first and second Chronicles. Those are one book. Now, back then, these scrolls. Scrolls are a pain, and so to make them more manageable, they broke these huge scrolls into two smaller scrolls, which the name first and Second Ezra Amiyah is the same situation as that it's one story, one book, but it's easier scrolling to do in two scrolls. Now, when you know, we we we'd a w hold discussion with this. The folks at Baker when they were they actually called a meeting James. At their meeting, they decided, what should we call this commentary, and they decided, let's call it Ezra ne Amayah. But then even when they brought it back to me, they brought it with an n dash as that it was the Book of Ezra through the Book of an Amiah. I said, no, no, it needs to be a hyphen like, yeah, well hyphen and I said, yeah, it's on the analogy and I explained first and second chronicles and all that. Yeah, well, well then it should be. And I said no, no, no, I said, it can be first ez Amiah and second israni Amayah. It could be that, but it's it's one book, and so we need to sort of reflect that in the title. And I think you're right. It gets treated as two books usually in the English Bible.
00:03:26
Speaker 2: It does.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you have that hard division. Now you have that in first and second Samuel too. But because it's Samuel and Samuel, people tend to get the connection Kings and Kings, chronicles and chronicles, you tend to get that sort of continuity between the two. But with Ezra and the Amayah, because you have the two different names there and really two different characters dominating the narrative in the different sets of book, it can feel like it's two separate narratives.
00:03:54
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, but I think that we do ourselves at disservice. It's already a very hard book to a in terms of yeah, so if we if we break it into a half book, then it becomes almost just obscure. So it's it's it's very important to think of it in terms of its coherence and unity across the entire book of Ezra Nehemiah.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:04:20
Speaker 1: Actually, you only get sort of a partial closure at the end of Ezra's main part, and I'm speaking of the character Ezra at this point. You only get a partial closer at the end of his main thrust, and then you move into Neamiah. You have to almost wait till the end of Neamiah to really get the whole scope and understanding of what's going on in the overarching narrative, and they do inform one another to some degree.
00:04:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's right, and I think the complexity is something we've not attended to. My commentary has two angles, really. I mean, it goes through a passage by pass is like normal, but a couple of neglected things that have really needed to be surfaced. And so there are things I emphasize in my commentary. One is the bad ending. It has a bad ending. But what's amazing in the literature, and this is both in the literature for pastors and Bible study guides and also even for the technical literature, which is more familiar to Old Testament folks like myself and yourself. The bad ending a few few people acknowledge it, but then they deny it. They say, oh, it's an appendix. The book ends in Neomiah twelve with the parade around the walls of Jerusalem, and that's the major technical commentary say this as Kenazi's and Williamson's and others. Right, So there's there's just a surprising lack of treating the book with a bad ending. And so it's very important to think that this book starts on a high note. The Yahwe's fulfillment of his word through the prophet Jeremiah, through his servant, the Messiah Cyrus. It starts on this wonderful fulfillment, but the book at its end leads to a bad ending. And so I don't think that there's been amazingly adequate study of this book within the framework of a bad ending by the time we get to this end of the book. Nehemiah, who I love Namiah, but he's well, he's practically an American, but he's walking around Jerusalem. They have the walls, they have Torah reading, they have Sabbath keeping, but it's in everything's in full rebellion, and he uses his goons to beat people up and chase people away and scream at people and rip their hair out.
00:07:05
Speaker 2: But we have the real.
00:07:07
Speaker 3: Sense, like all of the collective reformations that we've seen a series of these and Ezra Amiah, they're gone. At the end. It's just Neamiah alone in his zeal And. We say, if the exile was supposed to reform people, it didn't work, didn't I mean, we need if God's going to fulfill his word, if he's going to bring to pass all that he promised he's going to have to do it another way, and that really sets us up for the profit that arises from Nazareth.
00:07:44
Speaker 1: So I've looked at that bad ending for a long time, and one of the things that I sort of started just thinking about was the canonical arrangement of the Old Testament. So English readers know that the Old Testament ends in used to tell my freshman students Malachi, the last Italian prophet.
00:08:04
Speaker 2: And so it ends in Malachi.
00:08:07
Speaker 1: But the Hebrew canon actually ended with what we know as Second Chronicles, and at the end of Second Chronicles, you have this sort of looking forward and hope the Jews haven't gone back to the land yet they haven't. You don't see this quote unquote bad ending just yet. It ends on a note of hope, looking forward to something that's going to come. And I actually think that's really helpful. It helped me when I was looking at this bad ending and Emi to realize that even though this is embedded and it's a little out of sequence, and you know, it doesn't chronologically fit a clean narrative across the whole thing, the Jews are still hoping for more at the end of their cannon, and they have this moment within as we Nemiah, where you sit back and you say, yes, we're still hoping for more. Hasn't come yet, but we know that it will. Despite the situation we're describing here, I actually think the bad ending is crucial to understanding what the Jews believe is happening, right, But also obviously the theology that is being conveyed here is that we're going to need God's intervention. Something else is going to have to come in here. The law is insufficient, the practices are insufficient, the cult is insufficient. We've got to be looking forward to more. And I'm just sort of, like I said, I don't know that there's any sort of technical connection between all of.
00:09:37
Speaker 2: That, but just as an early reader of.
00:09:39
Speaker 1: These texts, that's where I landed when I looked at that arrangement.
00:09:44
Speaker 3: Well, good, we're kindred spirits in that. But it's the literature is not that way. The literature that's out there, in all its variety, is about a happily ever after Hollywood ending, and so people have found a way to ignore the way that Ezrami is. But I guess your point is to put it in the context of the whole Old Testament. Yeah, now the bhs U and I guess they follow the the town the town with the Babylonian town would and then Chronicles the BHQ. Once they finish going through the editorializing of it, they're going to put it in the order of the Leningrad Codex, where Ezrami is actually last last. Yeah, so they're going to kind of mess everything up both with n A twenty nine is going to mess up the order of the New Testament. HU is going to mess up the order of the Old Testament that we're used to anyway. But that's very interesting that the met that it is sort of last because it goes after Chronicles, right, second, Chronicles thirty six overlaps Ezra one. So that's right, sort of as I is a good ending, but or is appropriate ending. But then in the Babylonian Talmen, it's arranged the way you say they put before Chronicles, and it ends on this hopeful note, which is I agree with you that there's this sense of we we know that Chronicles, you know, the immediate sequel is going to end in failure, but Chronicles is a good way to reach past that failure that we already know about in sight and all those among his people, let them go up to Jerusalem. Yes, I mean that's that's that's the right ending.
00:11:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, it isn't that this sort of in this moment that people coming back to Jerusalem and rebuilding the walls is the end of all things, Like we finally come to this solution that we've always wanted, and we're back from exile and every you know, it's all puppies and rainbows.
00:11:58
Speaker 2: It's not that and they know that.
00:12:01
Speaker 1: And so to end on this note of we've still got to push forward, We've still got to look ahead for what God is going to do with us.
00:12:09
Speaker 2: I think is really.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: A fantastic reading, and I don't fully grasp I'm with you on the critical scholarship. I don't fully understand why people ignore that last chapter of Nehemiah, because to me, it fits so well with the overarching message that we see, whether that's in the profits, whether that's in you know, the rest of the Old Testament, or even in the New you know, you even if you just look at something like Ezekiel thirty six, twenty six and twenty seven, right, there is going to have to be something more than just bringing you back from exile.
00:12:41
Speaker 2: I'm going to have to change your heart from stone to flesh.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: I'm going to have to put my spirit within you to empower you to keep my laws in commands. And so that hasn't happened yet, but we have clear evidence that it needs to. And so to me, that Ezrai and I ending fits with that sort of broader Old Testament theology.
00:13:02
Speaker 2: I suppose.
00:13:03
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, that's that's how Torah ends right across the Jordan River. It's not in the Promise and propriat. That's how we call it. The former prophets, the rise in the fall of the Hebrew kingdom in Joshua judges Samuel King. It ends in exile. Yes, Johoya chen is released, but he's he's still just he's an exile. And that's how the profits end waiting for, you know, the the return of Moses and Elijah. There in Malachi as you would say, or Alakai as we say.
00:13:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a there's an And I think it's interesting. Is again, I don't want to go too far afield from Mesmer and Yamaya, but I think it's interesting to consider all of the different places where the Bible, I wouldn't just say the Old Testament, but the whole Bible leaves us in an anticipatory state. We're not in any particularly different sort of state. Now, we're anticipating something that is to come, but we're living within the groanings of creation, waiting for you know, the glorification of the sons of God.
00:14:19
Speaker 2: You know, Roman's aid has that sort of gesturing forward.
00:14:21
Speaker 3: To Yeah, I don't want to get way laid in the New Testament either, but you know, the whole idea of the Lord rising from the dead and descending on high, but his people are the marginalized and the just the riff raff of society, if you will. It's not the dominant culture. It's not until the Emperor is converted to Christianity that Christianity becomes part of the prevailing culture. So we come from a heritage that's upside down from the way the whole Bible was. You know, we're used to Christianity being the prevailing culture, but it's that's not the way any part of the Bible is framed.
00:15:08
Speaker 1: So if we skip back, just with that point, if we skip back to the Jews coming back from exile into Jerusalem, they are a marginal class. I mean, they are being allowed to come back. They're not an autonomous nation at this point. And Ezra recognizes this, knows that it's not just about rebuilding the temple and the walls and the you know, all those kind of things, not just about being in the city. There has to be something more. And so he begins teaching on the law. How do you think about that entree into this, Like, why is Ezra teaching on the law so significantly and why does he touch on the very particular laws that he does.
00:15:52
Speaker 3: So let me just prebble a little further. Yeah, are you asking me about Ezra nine and ten, the big divorce? Ask me about Neamyah chapter eight, the reading Torah and this.
00:16:05
Speaker 1: Let's go Nemiah eight first and then maybe we'll circle back around to the other.
00:16:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you.
00:16:11
Speaker 3: Yeah. So in nea My eight, it's it's really this complex, and it's it's a really just one of the really wonderful parts of all of scripture to be in because they're studying scripture in such a vibrant way. So we have neam I eight where they they read and study scripture among the people, not just the priestly class, among people for eleven days, and then in Namiyah chapter nine, uh, the Levites lead the people in a scripture saturated prayer. It's the the longest panoramic retrospective prayer all of scripture that starts all the way at the beginning and comes all the way up to their moment. And then Niamiah chapter ten, the people in writing sign an oath, a solemn oath that they're going to obey. So only your viewers can see this. I'm holding my hands out right now if you're listening. Torre says this. But then the people say, no, no, no, we're going to do more than this. I'm raising my hands a little higher. So all of the things they promise to do are above the standards that Torah calls the people to do. So it's this really exciting moment of eleven days of scripture study. They sort of revive the way they do tabernacles and celebrate that they have. The Levites lead them to this great prayer of confession, this retrospective sort of realigning their identity, and then they promise to obey God and be faithful to him, and they don't quite come out with what they're asking for but it seems, probably from the retrospective, that they're hoping that if Abraham was faithful and God blessed him, we're going to be faithful, and maybe you do a little bit of Abraham stuff for us. But it all begins there in Neam I eight with you know, this exciting moment of Ezra reading Torah. I think, James, what a lot of people don't pause to see is that this is not Ezra's idea. The people say to him, get the tourist scroll and read it to us. And this isn't at the temple, this isn't the watergate. So this is a public event. It's not a sort of and it's not on a worship day. They do later in chapter eight during tabernacles. They do have scripture reading on the holy days as well, but it begins with the people. It's their desire to study scripture. And so we don't know of anything like this, this collective scripture study for eleven days anywhere in scripture. The only thing that's close to it is maybe the early days of the Way and Acts. Yeah, but that's not focused as much on scripture study as what we have here in ezraneam Ale.
00:19:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, It's really fascinating as you think through the dynamic. You know you talked about. You know, Abraham was faithful, God blessed Abraham. Maybe if we're faithful, God will bless up like key blessed Abraham.
00:19:40
Speaker 2: Do you see in any of this.
00:19:41
Speaker 1: Sort of a continued misunderstanding of what Tora requires, even after the reading and even after the signed oath, or do you see this as a genuine expression of we get it, We want to commit ourselves to this teacher even though.
00:20:01
Speaker 2: They're not able to right you, how do you think about that?
00:20:07
Speaker 3: I think it's a mixed bag. But I want to say it's no different for them than it is for us. It's no different for them than it is for Jesus followers or the Pharisees of his day. There's something to our zeal and our desire. I mean, as Deuteronomy says it, it's not too hard for you, right, It's there in your mouth. And so there is a sense where tor is given to as the ten Commandment says, all Yahweh lovers obey scripture. But what we find ourselves is in the camp of the Yahweh haters who put something before God. And so I think that the people are not wrong to study Torah and try to obey to her. I think that Ezra eight nine and ten is just a moment that all of us should embrace. It really is a moment that shows the best of us, because I mean, these are the people that captivity is sort of waned now that the Persians have taken over. But it's better living there because living in Judah it's a wasteland. Nebukanzer in his rage after the people rebelled once again in five eighty two, this is four years after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple when they assassinated Gdalaya the governor, he came back and he decimated the infrastructures. So when we look back, say to our great grandparents generation of the Great Depression of the United States, it's those three years in nineteen thirty to nineteen thirty three where it just marked the whole generation and we still feel the reverberation of it in our current culture. Well, it's like that, except it goes on for hundreds of years in Judah. I mean, it's really tough living there, and that's why when the people come back, they're the best of the people, because they're leaving sort of their stable ghettos and slave camps back in Babylonia where life is predictable, and they're going to a place where they don't know how they're going to provide for their families. And that's why there's this special temptation towards intermarriage with the established folks of the land. We find it all these social destable, destabilizing moments in Deuteronomy and Joshua. There's teachings for hey, don't marry unbelievers. It's tempting, but don't don't give your sons to their daughters. Don't take their sons for your daughters. Don't do that. And the same temptation is there in Ezrane Amayah. And it's very understandable because ancient people in an arranged marriage culture, they want to help their children and they know that they're starving and as Rene and I we know Neamiah five. Because of the poverty, many people had to sell their children, even their daughters, into debt slavery, and they can't redeem their daughter's back. That's the nature of it. In Exodus twenty one, so it's a very hard time so we can understand the temptation to better their children by marrying them into establish people as the lens A. It's a tough thing because people tend to do the worst things for the best reasons. Yeah, as the days of Zerniami are no different in that respect than our own.
00:23:48
Speaker 1: Let's tease out a little bit of that because I think that again, whenever I've interacted with people on the inner marriage issue, what inevitably comes up is, well, there's going to be a religious or ideological drift that you're supposed to stay away from these people so that you don't adopt their foreign gods. Now I don't I don't think that's wholly wrong, right. I think that depending on what narrative you're looking at, that can actually be correct, right, Like, this is what's going on here. It really has never seemed to me that that's what's going on in Ezra. It seems to me that there's something more fundamentally, there's something more fundamental to Jewish identity going on there, and to I would almost argue more theological going on there, not the adoption of foreign gods, but the development of dependency on foreign nations as opposed to trusting the Lord.
00:24:58
Speaker 2: What's your how would you now the gate through that?
00:25:02
Speaker 3: Well, in terms of the big point you're making, I want to embrace it. Yeah. The thing that needs to be tweaked on the front end, though, is people just read into the text. Ezraeyami is very careful as a book as a whole, So I don't know if it's made up of many sources. So the editor might have author editor might have had to tweak them to do this. But nowhere are the others defined as gentiles. Nowhere they're defined as unbelievers. And so there's a sense of which because there's a whole hodgepodge of people. And we need to remember that the book of Ezraneami covers two hundred years. The main narrative covers about one hundred and twenty, but then there's another one hundred years there, and it's contemperous with It begins with the Edict of Cyrus and goes to the Rise of the Last Less, goes to win Alexander the Great comms. So it's exactly on the Persian Empire anyway. The point being here though, that the other is ever present. There's an opposition between God's people Israel. The aloistic Judeans. They are called many things in this book, and the other the enemy of the peoples of the lands, but it's the peoples of the lands, those peoples of the lands. Some of them are Judeans who were never exiled. Some of the people's the lands are people that were brought there by that old Assyrian Empire who reshuffled people's and they were exiled to Israel. Some of these people are from the Northern Kingdom. Some of these people are gentiles, and a lot of them are intermarried from any of these different lines of people. So the book never though names them as foreigners. Even in Ezra nine to one, the report of the leaders of Jerusalem that Ezra agrees with, they say they act like the Canaanites acted. They don't say they are Canaanites, and actually there's actually no such thing as Canaanites anymore, but they act like that, and so it's a it's a very different thing. So that's the problem is these non covenental others. And then getting back to the really perceptive thing you said, when the when the wives are put away and its wives, because there is evidence in Neemia chapter six that Judean females are marrying out. Okay, so it's it's both genders, males and females are marriage. But it's a patriarchal culture, so there's no there's no apostasy husbands. There's only a positive wives or apothecy husbands. Are you know you've already sent your daughters out to them, they're they're dead to you. But think about it again, in economic terms, there's evidence from the Elephantine uh Papyri that we have that when women left the marriage they take their dowries with them. So anybody that's marrying to get an economic or social advantage, when they're forced to divorce their spouses, they lose those economic and social advantages. Yes, so it's it's not you know, the women, they're part of an established society. They take those advantages with them. So I think that we have things a little bit backwards sometimes when we think of this, and maybe one more point, and this isn't your question, but it's one more like lingering thing in here. Yeah, we tend to be very individualistic when we focus on the personal things that happened to the people in these mass divorces that happen over and over again. In Asrane Amayah, Ezrani Amiah never focuses on the individual in the mass divorce. They're all collective revival events, they're all collective repentances. Yes, there are individual circumstances, and divorce is always painful for every single one, but none of that's the issue. In Ezranee Amiah. Yeah, there's this zealous social cultural it's the whole society saying we need to get right with God or God's wrath's going to break out upon us. That's basically Ezra's prayer. And Ezra not Yeah, he's thrown himself on the ground, ripping his hair out. The people are weeping, and they agree, and they he doesn't come out with the words, but he agrees with it. That check and I says, then we should divorce our wives. And so he uses language that's only used here. And in First Kings eleven he says the foreign wives. Now the foreign wives in First Kings eleven, same thing as an azrae Eliah. It's not their ethnicity that's an issue. I think that's not a problem because right you think about Ria Baum's mom, the ammonitis, that's not an issue, right. The crown princess from an amonitis. The issue is that these are marrying out. These are marriage treaties that Solomon's getting into. He's they're not converts, they're not assimilations. They're worshiping at the high places to their own gods that Solomon builds for them, all around the temple that he's building, so that their dad's the kings of all these nations don't get upset and come give Solomon any trouble. Solomon's the peace king, and he makes peace in the bedroom with all of these treaty wives. So anyway, that kind of got lost there. But the point I'm getting at is, Amaya, there's no there's no sense, there's no attention at all given to the individual hardships of the divorces. The folks is all collective and corporate on God's wrath's going to break upon us, and so we need to do this extraordinary thing and hold a mass divorce. And they force the mass divorces in some cases upon the people.
00:31:42
Speaker 2: That is uh, that is why you wrote the commentary. Man. I never I kind of missed that whole I knew it.
00:31:51
Speaker 1: I knew when you when you raised first King's eleven, second King's eleven. I was like, yeah, the foreign wives, that make perfect sense there. I'd never caught it in Azranya Mile like, I just hadn't thought through it.
00:32:07
Speaker 3: Shaka and uses that term foreign women that's only used in the plural there and one Kings eleven meam I thirteen. Neamiah comes back around to that, and he says, when he's ripping out the hair of the faces of these men who are in apostate marriages again, you know, every twelve years they have one of these big divorces. But then in the end of Azni Amayah, neam I is not getting a divorce, getting them divorced. He's just ripping their hair out and beating them up and cursing them. But he says to them, is this not what happened to Solomon when he married all of these foreign women, even he who loved, who was loved by the Lord was drawn astray? Yeah, Neami puts words to it.
00:32:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:32:53
Speaker 1: No, it's a great connection. No, that that helps clear up so much and it's so much cleaner. Who was I reading? Jason Staples I think is his name. He wrote a book here recently on dealing with the various ways that israel Is used in the Old Testament and then Judean is used in the New Testament, which was really helpful and fascinating.
00:33:19
Speaker 2: His argument was.
00:33:20
Speaker 1: That the Israelites were not considered ju Dian, but that the Judeans could be considered Israelites. It was a subset within and so just as you were talking through all that, it's like, yes, that makes good sense. Like you've got a covenantal structure. The people who are concerning are the people who are outside of that covenental structure. They're now being globbed on to covenantal people and creating this sort of these sort of rifts and problems, which is sort of fascinating. Man.
00:33:54
Speaker 3: You've got it made. So podcasters like you get people to come on their podcast. You're reading books before the published literature, like already like me, like all hoy POLOI we're all like ten years behind you. So you have to have cocktail parties with all the podcasters that have current conversations.
00:34:16
Speaker 2: It's it's the only reason I do it.
00:34:23
Speaker 1: Well, Gary, this has been really helpful, and I just encourage everybody go get Ezra Niyamaya Baker commentary series. Baker commentary on the Old Testament series Ezrani Amia is just I wouldn't say it's my favorite set of books, but.
00:34:40
Speaker 2: I really do love them.
00:34:42
Speaker 1: I think I've always been sort of a narrative guy, and so I started with Pentituke, but I've taught through Samuel King's and as rahny A Maya and Ezrani and Maya is just this fantastic moment after the exile, that if we can get our head around it, we have such a stronger understanding of what is really going on here, what God is trying to do, how all this is working. It's a fantastic set of books, and I think Gary's commentary would be a great guide. So Ezra hyphen Nehemiah is the title, and and you can find it on Amazon. Also check out Gary's substack Carpenter's student dot com. That's Carpenter's with an S student with an S dot com. So two s is together there. And yeah, Gary, thanks for being here, Thanks for talking to us through this. Really appreciate it.
00:35:33
Speaker 3: Thanks, Jams A real pleasure, especially with somebody who teaches on Azerniamayah, that's that's exciting.
00:35:42
Speaker 2: That is really exciting.
00:35:45
Speaker 1: Well, I'm looking forward to getting the commentary, reading through it, and teaching on this again. I think I'm going to plan for my next set of Wednesday Bible studies. We're doing Philippians right now, and then I'll flop them over into Ezra Namayah.
00:35:56
Speaker 2: They won't know.
00:35:57
Speaker 1: What's going on, so it's going to be beautiful, perfect anyway. We'll catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christian, So come on back. We're gonna be talking a little bit about what is inner biblical exit.
00:36:11
Speaker 2: Jesus next, I think, so you won't want to miss that.
00:36:13
Speaker 1: I'll be back again with Gary and really appreciate everybody listening.
00:36:18
Speaker 2: Take care. We'll see on the next episode.
00:36:20
Speaker 1: I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined again by doctor Gary Edward Snicker, and we're going to be talking today a little bit about Ezra Nehemiah. And Gary's written a commentary on Ezra Niamayah the Front that's coming out in the Baker Commentary series, so i'd just encourage you to check that out. I would also encourage you to go to his substack, carpentersstudent dot Com. That's with two s's in the middle, Carpenter's Student dot Com.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: And yeah, we're just going to jump in.
00:00:58
Speaker 1: And one of the things I find when I teach on Ezra and Nehemiah is that people are a little confused about how these books actually work together. We have a lot of these books in the Old Testament sort of get crammed together because you know, maybe they don't warrant a full class, or you know, you just want to teach, you know, a few books at a time. But Ezra and ne and Mayah is a little different. And so Gary, if we can start there, what's the connection between these two books and how do you think about it?
00:01:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's a really great place to start. But I even like the way from the question, like you teach on Ezra Amayah, that's great. Not everybody does that. They're they're kind of a poor step child in the Old Testament. Well, yeah, in the New Testament we have First Corinthians and Second Corinthians. Those are two separate letters. Of course they are to the same people. But in the Old Testament there's three books that we know of as first and Second Samuel, first and second Kings, and first and second Chronicles. Those are one book. Now, back then, these scrolls. Scrolls are a pain, and so to make them more manageable, they broke these huge scrolls into two smaller scrolls, which the name first and Second Ezra Amiyah is the same situation as that it's one story, one book, but it's easier scrolling to do in two scrolls. Now, when you know, we we we'd a w hold discussion with this. The folks at Baker when they were they actually called a meeting James. At their meeting, they decided, what should we call this commentary, and they decided, let's call it Ezra ne Amayah. But then even when they brought it back to me, they brought it with an n dash as that it was the Book of Ezra through the Book of an Amiah. I said, no, no, it needs to be a hyphen like, yeah, well hyphen and I said, yeah, it's on the analogy and I explained first and second chronicles and all that. Yeah, well, well then it should be. And I said no, no, no, I said, it can be first ez Amiah and second israni Amayah. It could be that, but it's it's one book, and so we need to sort of reflect that in the title. And I think you're right. It gets treated as two books usually in the English Bible.
00:03:26
Speaker 2: It does.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you have that hard division. Now you have that in first and second Samuel too. But because it's Samuel and Samuel, people tend to get the connection Kings and Kings, chronicles and chronicles, you tend to get that sort of continuity between the two. But with Ezra and the Amayah, because you have the two different names there and really two different characters dominating the narrative in the different sets of book, it can feel like it's two separate narratives.
00:03:54
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, but I think that we do ourselves at disservice. It's already a very hard book to a in terms of yeah, so if we if we break it into a half book, then it becomes almost just obscure. So it's it's it's very important to think of it in terms of its coherence and unity across the entire book of Ezra Nehemiah.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:04:20
Speaker 1: Actually, you only get sort of a partial closure at the end of Ezra's main part, and I'm speaking of the character Ezra at this point. You only get a partial closer at the end of his main thrust, and then you move into Neamiah. You have to almost wait till the end of Neamiah to really get the whole scope and understanding of what's going on in the overarching narrative, and they do inform one another to some degree.
00:04:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's right, and I think the complexity is something we've not attended to. My commentary has two angles, really. I mean, it goes through a passage by pass is like normal, but a couple of neglected things that have really needed to be surfaced. And so there are things I emphasize in my commentary. One is the bad ending. It has a bad ending. But what's amazing in the literature, and this is both in the literature for pastors and Bible study guides and also even for the technical literature, which is more familiar to Old Testament folks like myself and yourself. The bad ending a few few people acknowledge it, but then they deny it. They say, oh, it's an appendix. The book ends in Neomiah twelve with the parade around the walls of Jerusalem, and that's the major technical commentary say this as Kenazi's and Williamson's and others. Right, So there's there's just a surprising lack of treating the book with a bad ending. And so it's very important to think that this book starts on a high note. The Yahwe's fulfillment of his word through the prophet Jeremiah, through his servant, the Messiah Cyrus. It starts on this wonderful fulfillment, but the book at its end leads to a bad ending. And so I don't think that there's been amazingly adequate study of this book within the framework of a bad ending by the time we get to this end of the book. Nehemiah, who I love Namiah, but he's well, he's practically an American, but he's walking around Jerusalem. They have the walls, they have Torah reading, they have Sabbath keeping, but it's in everything's in full rebellion, and he uses his goons to beat people up and chase people away and scream at people and rip their hair out.
00:07:05
Speaker 2: But we have the real.
00:07:07
Speaker 3: Sense, like all of the collective reformations that we've seen a series of these and Ezra Amiah, they're gone. At the end. It's just Neamiah alone in his zeal And. We say, if the exile was supposed to reform people, it didn't work, didn't I mean, we need if God's going to fulfill his word, if he's going to bring to pass all that he promised he's going to have to do it another way, and that really sets us up for the profit that arises from Nazareth.
00:07:44
Speaker 1: So I've looked at that bad ending for a long time, and one of the things that I sort of started just thinking about was the canonical arrangement of the Old Testament. So English readers know that the Old Testament ends in used to tell my freshman students Malachi, the last Italian prophet.
00:08:04
Speaker 2: And so it ends in Malachi.
00:08:07
Speaker 1: But the Hebrew canon actually ended with what we know as Second Chronicles, and at the end of Second Chronicles, you have this sort of looking forward and hope the Jews haven't gone back to the land yet they haven't. You don't see this quote unquote bad ending just yet. It ends on a note of hope, looking forward to something that's going to come. And I actually think that's really helpful. It helped me when I was looking at this bad ending and Emi to realize that even though this is embedded and it's a little out of sequence, and you know, it doesn't chronologically fit a clean narrative across the whole thing, the Jews are still hoping for more at the end of their cannon, and they have this moment within as we Nemiah, where you sit back and you say, yes, we're still hoping for more. Hasn't come yet, but we know that it will. Despite the situation we're describing here, I actually think the bad ending is crucial to understanding what the Jews believe is happening, right, But also obviously the theology that is being conveyed here is that we're going to need God's intervention. Something else is going to have to come in here. The law is insufficient, the practices are insufficient, the cult is insufficient. We've got to be looking forward to more. And I'm just sort of, like I said, I don't know that there's any sort of technical connection between all of.
00:09:37
Speaker 2: That, but just as an early reader of.
00:09:39
Speaker 1: These texts, that's where I landed when I looked at that arrangement.
00:09:44
Speaker 3: Well, good, we're kindred spirits in that. But it's the literature is not that way. The literature that's out there, in all its variety, is about a happily ever after Hollywood ending, and so people have found a way to ignore the way that Ezrami is. But I guess your point is to put it in the context of the whole Old Testament. Yeah, now the bhs U and I guess they follow the the town the town with the Babylonian town would and then Chronicles the BHQ. Once they finish going through the editorializing of it, they're going to put it in the order of the Leningrad Codex, where Ezrami is actually last last. Yeah, so they're going to kind of mess everything up both with n A twenty nine is going to mess up the order of the New Testament. HU is going to mess up the order of the Old Testament that we're used to anyway. But that's very interesting that the met that it is sort of last because it goes after Chronicles, right, second, Chronicles thirty six overlaps Ezra one. So that's right, sort of as I is a good ending, but or is appropriate ending. But then in the Babylonian Talmen, it's arranged the way you say they put before Chronicles, and it ends on this hopeful note, which is I agree with you that there's this sense of we we know that Chronicles, you know, the immediate sequel is going to end in failure, but Chronicles is a good way to reach past that failure that we already know about in sight and all those among his people, let them go up to Jerusalem. Yes, I mean that's that's that's the right ending.
00:11:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, it isn't that this sort of in this moment that people coming back to Jerusalem and rebuilding the walls is the end of all things, Like we finally come to this solution that we've always wanted, and we're back from exile and every you know, it's all puppies and rainbows.
00:11:58
Speaker 2: It's not that and they know that.
00:12:01
Speaker 1: And so to end on this note of we've still got to push forward, We've still got to look ahead for what God is going to do with us.
00:12:09
Speaker 2: I think is really.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: A fantastic reading, and I don't fully grasp I'm with you on the critical scholarship. I don't fully understand why people ignore that last chapter of Nehemiah, because to me, it fits so well with the overarching message that we see, whether that's in the profits, whether that's in you know, the rest of the Old Testament, or even in the New you know, you even if you just look at something like Ezekiel thirty six, twenty six and twenty seven, right, there is going to have to be something more than just bringing you back from exile.
00:12:41
Speaker 2: I'm going to have to change your heart from stone to flesh.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: I'm going to have to put my spirit within you to empower you to keep my laws in commands. And so that hasn't happened yet, but we have clear evidence that it needs to. And so to me, that Ezrai and I ending fits with that sort of broader Old Testament theology.
00:13:02
Speaker 2: I suppose.
00:13:03
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, that's that's how Torah ends right across the Jordan River. It's not in the Promise and propriat. That's how we call it. The former prophets, the rise in the fall of the Hebrew kingdom in Joshua judges Samuel King. It ends in exile. Yes, Johoya chen is released, but he's he's still just he's an exile. And that's how the profits end waiting for, you know, the the return of Moses and Elijah. There in Malachi as you would say, or Alakai as we say.
00:13:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a there's an And I think it's interesting. Is again, I don't want to go too far afield from Mesmer and Yamaya, but I think it's interesting to consider all of the different places where the Bible, I wouldn't just say the Old Testament, but the whole Bible leaves us in an anticipatory state. We're not in any particularly different sort of state. Now, we're anticipating something that is to come, but we're living within the groanings of creation, waiting for you know, the glorification of the sons of God.
00:14:19
Speaker 2: You know, Roman's aid has that sort of gesturing forward.
00:14:21
Speaker 3: To Yeah, I don't want to get way laid in the New Testament either, but you know, the whole idea of the Lord rising from the dead and descending on high, but his people are the marginalized and the just the riff raff of society, if you will. It's not the dominant culture. It's not until the Emperor is converted to Christianity that Christianity becomes part of the prevailing culture. So we come from a heritage that's upside down from the way the whole Bible was. You know, we're used to Christianity being the prevailing culture, but it's that's not the way any part of the Bible is framed.
00:15:08
Speaker 1: So if we skip back, just with that point, if we skip back to the Jews coming back from exile into Jerusalem, they are a marginal class. I mean, they are being allowed to come back. They're not an autonomous nation at this point. And Ezra recognizes this, knows that it's not just about rebuilding the temple and the walls and the you know, all those kind of things, not just about being in the city. There has to be something more. And so he begins teaching on the law. How do you think about that entree into this, Like, why is Ezra teaching on the law so significantly and why does he touch on the very particular laws that he does.
00:15:52
Speaker 3: So let me just prebble a little further. Yeah, are you asking me about Ezra nine and ten, the big divorce? Ask me about Neamyah chapter eight, the reading Torah and this.
00:16:05
Speaker 1: Let's go Nemiah eight first and then maybe we'll circle back around to the other.
00:16:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you.
00:16:11
Speaker 3: Yeah. So in nea My eight, it's it's really this complex, and it's it's a really just one of the really wonderful parts of all of scripture to be in because they're studying scripture in such a vibrant way. So we have neam I eight where they they read and study scripture among the people, not just the priestly class, among people for eleven days, and then in Namiyah chapter nine, uh, the Levites lead the people in a scripture saturated prayer. It's the the longest panoramic retrospective prayer all of scripture that starts all the way at the beginning and comes all the way up to their moment. And then Niamiah chapter ten, the people in writing sign an oath, a solemn oath that they're going to obey. So only your viewers can see this. I'm holding my hands out right now if you're listening. Torre says this. But then the people say, no, no, no, we're going to do more than this. I'm raising my hands a little higher. So all of the things they promise to do are above the standards that Torah calls the people to do. So it's this really exciting moment of eleven days of scripture study. They sort of revive the way they do tabernacles and celebrate that they have. The Levites lead them to this great prayer of confession, this retrospective sort of realigning their identity, and then they promise to obey God and be faithful to him, and they don't quite come out with what they're asking for but it seems, probably from the retrospective, that they're hoping that if Abraham was faithful and God blessed him, we're going to be faithful, and maybe you do a little bit of Abraham stuff for us. But it all begins there in Neam I eight with you know, this exciting moment of Ezra reading Torah. I think, James, what a lot of people don't pause to see is that this is not Ezra's idea. The people say to him, get the tourist scroll and read it to us. And this isn't at the temple, this isn't the watergate. So this is a public event. It's not a sort of and it's not on a worship day. They do later in chapter eight during tabernacles. They do have scripture reading on the holy days as well, but it begins with the people. It's their desire to study scripture. And so we don't know of anything like this, this collective scripture study for eleven days anywhere in scripture. The only thing that's close to it is maybe the early days of the Way and Acts. Yeah, but that's not focused as much on scripture study as what we have here in ezraneam Ale.
00:19:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, It's really fascinating as you think through the dynamic. You know you talked about. You know, Abraham was faithful, God blessed Abraham. Maybe if we're faithful, God will bless up like key blessed Abraham.
00:19:40
Speaker 2: Do you see in any of this.
00:19:41
Speaker 1: Sort of a continued misunderstanding of what Tora requires, even after the reading and even after the signed oath, or do you see this as a genuine expression of we get it, We want to commit ourselves to this teacher even though.
00:20:01
Speaker 2: They're not able to right you, how do you think about that?
00:20:07
Speaker 3: I think it's a mixed bag. But I want to say it's no different for them than it is for us. It's no different for them than it is for Jesus followers or the Pharisees of his day. There's something to our zeal and our desire. I mean, as Deuteronomy says it, it's not too hard for you, right, It's there in your mouth. And so there is a sense where tor is given to as the ten Commandment says, all Yahweh lovers obey scripture. But what we find ourselves is in the camp of the Yahweh haters who put something before God. And so I think that the people are not wrong to study Torah and try to obey to her. I think that Ezra eight nine and ten is just a moment that all of us should embrace. It really is a moment that shows the best of us, because I mean, these are the people that captivity is sort of waned now that the Persians have taken over. But it's better living there because living in Judah it's a wasteland. Nebukanzer in his rage after the people rebelled once again in five eighty two, this is four years after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple when they assassinated Gdalaya the governor, he came back and he decimated the infrastructures. So when we look back, say to our great grandparents generation of the Great Depression of the United States, it's those three years in nineteen thirty to nineteen thirty three where it just marked the whole generation and we still feel the reverberation of it in our current culture. Well, it's like that, except it goes on for hundreds of years in Judah. I mean, it's really tough living there, and that's why when the people come back, they're the best of the people, because they're leaving sort of their stable ghettos and slave camps back in Babylonia where life is predictable, and they're going to a place where they don't know how they're going to provide for their families. And that's why there's this special temptation towards intermarriage with the established folks of the land. We find it all these social destable, destabilizing moments in Deuteronomy and Joshua. There's teachings for hey, don't marry unbelievers. It's tempting, but don't don't give your sons to their daughters. Don't take their sons for your daughters. Don't do that. And the same temptation is there in Ezrane Amayah. And it's very understandable because ancient people in an arranged marriage culture, they want to help their children and they know that they're starving and as Rene and I we know Neamiah five. Because of the poverty, many people had to sell their children, even their daughters, into debt slavery, and they can't redeem their daughter's back. That's the nature of it. In Exodus twenty one, so it's a very hard time so we can understand the temptation to better their children by marrying them into establish people as the lens A. It's a tough thing because people tend to do the worst things for the best reasons. Yeah, as the days of Zerniami are no different in that respect than our own.
00:23:48
Speaker 1: Let's tease out a little bit of that because I think that again, whenever I've interacted with people on the inner marriage issue, what inevitably comes up is, well, there's going to be a religious or ideological drift that you're supposed to stay away from these people so that you don't adopt their foreign gods. Now I don't I don't think that's wholly wrong, right. I think that depending on what narrative you're looking at, that can actually be correct, right, Like, this is what's going on here. It really has never seemed to me that that's what's going on in Ezra. It seems to me that there's something more fundamentally, there's something more fundamental to Jewish identity going on there, and to I would almost argue more theological going on there, not the adoption of foreign gods, but the development of dependency on foreign nations as opposed to trusting the Lord.
00:24:58
Speaker 2: What's your how would you now the gate through that?
00:25:02
Speaker 3: Well, in terms of the big point you're making, I want to embrace it. Yeah. The thing that needs to be tweaked on the front end, though, is people just read into the text. Ezraeyami is very careful as a book as a whole, So I don't know if it's made up of many sources. So the editor might have author editor might have had to tweak them to do this. But nowhere are the others defined as gentiles. Nowhere they're defined as unbelievers. And so there's a sense of which because there's a whole hodgepodge of people. And we need to remember that the book of Ezraneami covers two hundred years. The main narrative covers about one hundred and twenty, but then there's another one hundred years there, and it's contemperous with It begins with the Edict of Cyrus and goes to the Rise of the Last Less, goes to win Alexander the Great comms. So it's exactly on the Persian Empire anyway. The point being here though, that the other is ever present. There's an opposition between God's people Israel. The aloistic Judeans. They are called many things in this book, and the other the enemy of the peoples of the lands, but it's the peoples of the lands, those peoples of the lands. Some of them are Judeans who were never exiled. Some of the people's the lands are people that were brought there by that old Assyrian Empire who reshuffled people's and they were exiled to Israel. Some of these people are from the Northern Kingdom. Some of these people are gentiles, and a lot of them are intermarried from any of these different lines of people. So the book never though names them as foreigners. Even in Ezra nine to one, the report of the leaders of Jerusalem that Ezra agrees with, they say they act like the Canaanites acted. They don't say they are Canaanites, and actually there's actually no such thing as Canaanites anymore, but they act like that, and so it's a it's a very different thing. So that's the problem is these non covenental others. And then getting back to the really perceptive thing you said, when the when the wives are put away and its wives, because there is evidence in Neemia chapter six that Judean females are marrying out. Okay, so it's it's both genders, males and females are marriage. But it's a patriarchal culture, so there's no there's no apostasy husbands. There's only a positive wives or apothecy husbands. Are you know you've already sent your daughters out to them, they're they're dead to you. But think about it again, in economic terms, there's evidence from the Elephantine uh Papyri that we have that when women left the marriage they take their dowries with them. So anybody that's marrying to get an economic or social advantage, when they're forced to divorce their spouses, they lose those economic and social advantages. Yes, so it's it's not you know, the women, they're part of an established society. They take those advantages with them. So I think that we have things a little bit backwards sometimes when we think of this, and maybe one more point, and this isn't your question, but it's one more like lingering thing in here. Yeah, we tend to be very individualistic when we focus on the personal things that happened to the people in these mass divorces that happen over and over again. In Asrane Amayah, Ezrani Amiah never focuses on the individual in the mass divorce. They're all collective revival events, they're all collective repentances. Yes, there are individual circumstances, and divorce is always painful for every single one, but none of that's the issue. In Ezranee Amiah. Yeah, there's this zealous social cultural it's the whole society saying we need to get right with God or God's wrath's going to break out upon us. That's basically Ezra's prayer. And Ezra not Yeah, he's thrown himself on the ground, ripping his hair out. The people are weeping, and they agree, and they he doesn't come out with the words, but he agrees with it. That check and I says, then we should divorce our wives. And so he uses language that's only used here. And in First Kings eleven he says the foreign wives. Now the foreign wives in First Kings eleven, same thing as an azrae Eliah. It's not their ethnicity that's an issue. I think that's not a problem because right you think about Ria Baum's mom, the ammonitis, that's not an issue, right. The crown princess from an amonitis. The issue is that these are marrying out. These are marriage treaties that Solomon's getting into. He's they're not converts, they're not assimilations. They're worshiping at the high places to their own gods that Solomon builds for them, all around the temple that he's building, so that their dad's the kings of all these nations don't get upset and come give Solomon any trouble. Solomon's the peace king, and he makes peace in the bedroom with all of these treaty wives. So anyway, that kind of got lost there. But the point I'm getting at is, Amaya, there's no there's no sense, there's no attention at all given to the individual hardships of the divorces. The folks is all collective and corporate on God's wrath's going to break upon us, and so we need to do this extraordinary thing and hold a mass divorce. And they force the mass divorces in some cases upon the people.
00:31:42
Speaker 2: That is uh, that is why you wrote the commentary. Man. I never I kind of missed that whole I knew it.
00:31:51
Speaker 1: I knew when you when you raised first King's eleven, second King's eleven. I was like, yeah, the foreign wives, that make perfect sense there. I'd never caught it in Azranya Mile like, I just hadn't thought through it.
00:32:07
Speaker 3: Shaka and uses that term foreign women that's only used in the plural there and one Kings eleven meam I thirteen. Neamiah comes back around to that, and he says, when he's ripping out the hair of the faces of these men who are in apostate marriages again, you know, every twelve years they have one of these big divorces. But then in the end of Azni Amayah, neam I is not getting a divorce, getting them divorced. He's just ripping their hair out and beating them up and cursing them. But he says to them, is this not what happened to Solomon when he married all of these foreign women, even he who loved, who was loved by the Lord was drawn astray? Yeah, Neami puts words to it.
00:32:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:32:53
Speaker 1: No, it's a great connection. No, that that helps clear up so much and it's so much cleaner. Who was I reading? Jason Staples I think is his name. He wrote a book here recently on dealing with the various ways that israel Is used in the Old Testament and then Judean is used in the New Testament, which was really helpful and fascinating.
00:33:19
Speaker 2: His argument was.
00:33:20
Speaker 1: That the Israelites were not considered ju Dian, but that the Judeans could be considered Israelites. It was a subset within and so just as you were talking through all that, it's like, yes, that makes good sense. Like you've got a covenantal structure. The people who are concerning are the people who are outside of that covenental structure. They're now being globbed on to covenantal people and creating this sort of these sort of rifts and problems, which is sort of fascinating. Man.
00:33:54
Speaker 3: You've got it made. So podcasters like you get people to come on their podcast. You're reading books before the published literature, like already like me, like all hoy POLOI we're all like ten years behind you. So you have to have cocktail parties with all the podcasters that have current conversations.
00:34:16
Speaker 2: It's it's the only reason I do it.
00:34:23
Speaker 1: Well, Gary, this has been really helpful, and I just encourage everybody go get Ezra Niyamaya Baker commentary series. Baker commentary on the Old Testament series Ezrani Amia is just I wouldn't say it's my favorite set of books, but.
00:34:40
Speaker 2: I really do love them.
00:34:42
Speaker 1: I think I've always been sort of a narrative guy, and so I started with Pentituke, but I've taught through Samuel King's and as rahny A Maya and Ezrani and Maya is just this fantastic moment after the exile, that if we can get our head around it, we have such a stronger understanding of what is really going on here, what God is trying to do, how all this is working. It's a fantastic set of books, and I think Gary's commentary would be a great guide. So Ezra hyphen Nehemiah is the title, and and you can find it on Amazon. Also check out Gary's substack Carpenter's student dot com. That's Carpenter's with an S student with an S dot com. So two s is together there. And yeah, Gary, thanks for being here, Thanks for talking to us through this. Really appreciate it.
00:35:33
Speaker 3: Thanks, Jams A real pleasure, especially with somebody who teaches on Azerniamayah, that's that's exciting.
00:35:42
Speaker 2: That is really exciting.
00:35:45
Speaker 1: Well, I'm looking forward to getting the commentary, reading through it, and teaching on this again. I think I'm going to plan for my next set of Wednesday Bible studies. We're doing Philippians right now, and then I'll flop them over into Ezra Namayah.
00:35:56
Speaker 2: They won't know.
00:35:57
Speaker 1: What's going on, so it's going to be beautiful, perfect anyway. We'll catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christian, So come on back. We're gonna be talking a little bit about what is inner biblical exit.
00:36:11
Speaker 2: Jesus next, I think, so you won't want to miss that.
00:36:13
Speaker 1: I'll be back again with Gary and really appreciate everybody listening.
00:36:18
Speaker 2: Take care. We'll see on the next episode.
00:36:20
Speaker 1: I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
