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Old Testament Basics - Lesson 07.
Old Testament Basics.
Dr. Sid Buzzell.

Lesson Seven.
At the end of the last lesson, the people of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, had been taken captive by the Babylonians and been transported over to Babylon to live outside that great city of Babylon. In this lesson, we want to look at a bit more detail on that destruction and what it was like to live in exile, and then also to talk about how the Persians allowed the Jews to go back home and rebuild their lives and their culture back in their own homeland.

This period of exile and reconstruction is taught in 11 Old Testament books. Now it gets a little complicated, so just work through with me here. This is a bit detailed, but work with me. The chronological books are 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52. Those two chapters, the last chapter of 2 Kings, the last chapter of Jeremiah, actually describe how the Babylonians finally destroyed Jerusalem and took the people away. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah describe how the people were released from bondage in Babylonian by the Persians and allowed to go back home and rebuild their life and their culture, so the three chronology books, or actually four chronology books.

Second Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52 give us the chronology of the destruction of Jerusalem. And then the books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell the story of rebuilding the land after they were allowed to go home by the Persians. Two color books: the book of Lamentations describes the horrible feeling that Jeremiah the prophet had as he saw his beautiful city of Jerusalem and God's temple lying in rubble. The book of Esther, written during the reconstruction period, gives us a picture of life for the people who didn't return to Jerusalem but stayed in the Persian Empire and lived in the city of Babylon.

Okay, you tracking with me there? It's a little bit difficult. We're going to come back and talk about this in a bit more detail. So I'm giving you the overview. I'll come back and revisit this. And then the next series of books that we have to look at to flush out this period are six of the prophetic books. There are six books written by prophets during this period of exile and the period of reconstruction and we will talk about those briefly and then we will look at them in more detail when we study the lesson on the prophets, okay?

So what we've said is this exile and reconstruction is covered in 11 books. It's covered in 2 Kings. The end of 2 Kings and the end of Jeremiah tell us the story of the destruction of Jerusalem. Then we jump ahead to the books of Ezra and Nehemiah that talk about how the Jews were allowed to go back home and rebuild what the Babylonians had destroyed. And then there are six prophets that prophesized during this time. And as we read their prophecies we get more detail and more color about what life was like during this period of exile and during this period of reconstruction.

Okay, now let's look at a bit more detail, and as we look at this it'll flush out what we've already talked about. The time period covered during the exile and the reconstruction is a period of a little over 200 years, actually about 210 years. And we divide this 210 years into two segments. The first segment is the actual period of exile, 70 years, 70 years the people were in exile. And then the reconstruction period from the time the Jews were allowed to go back home to the end of the Old Testament covers a period of 136 years. Okay, so that's the time period we're looking at, a total period of over 200 years. Seventy of those years the Jews were in exile and then the next period, about 130 years, the people were allowed to go back home and rebuild their land.

Now let's talk for a bit about this exile. It's easy to think that it was an event, that the Babylonians came, destroyed Jerusalem, and carried these people off into captivity. But actually what happened was that the Babylonians came and besieged various cities in the province of Judah and defeated those cities and took those people back into exile. But they were not ever able to actually destroy Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a great, fortified city.

But this deportation, this movement of people from Judah and Jerusalem over to Babylon, occurred over three different deportations. Now here's why I tell you that. In one of the first deportations, a young man named Daniel was captured and taken back to the city of Babylon. So when you read the book of Daniel, those first 6 chapters of Daniel, you'll read about what life was like for these early captives who were taken back and actually taken into the city of Babylon and became members of the court. These young men were trained and taught and cultivated to be future leaders in the empire of the Babylonians.

In another deportation, a young man named Ezekiel was captured and he was taken among those captives back to Babylon. But unlike Daniel, Ezekiel didn't actually go into the palace and live in the palace. Ezekiel lived outside the city of Babylon with many people who were just taken there basically as slave labor to work and to cultivate the land and to grow crops for all of the people that were being imported by the Babylonians to live around the great city of Babylon and become part of the Babylonian Empire.

A third part of the story is told in the prophet Jeremiah. He was a prophet who was trying to urge the kings to obey God and to allow God to protect the city of Jerusalem. And so this third view of this period leading up to the actual destruction of Jerusalem is given by Jeremiah in his prophecy.

It would almost be like if you were watching CNN during that time and you'd hear Jeremiah saying, "Now from Jerusalem let me give you the latest scoop on what's going on inside Jerusalem as the Babylonians are threatening and they're moving into our province of Judah and they're destroying all these cities. And I'm telling the kings that they better turn or burn. They better get with it or God's going to destroy them. Now to you, Daniel."

And then Daniel says, "Now from inside the palace of Babylon and the rule of Nebuchadnezzar, let me tell you what's going on actually inside. I've got the inside scoop. Now Ezekiel, what's going on out there in the fields?" And then Ezekiel gives us a report of what life is like for people living out in the fields, out in the villages of Babylon, around Babylon, outside Babylon.

And so what you get, what God gives us are these various views of what life was like in the final gasp of Jerusalem, this nation of Judah before the Babylonians finally came in and besieged Jerusalem for years. The people were actually starving to death inside the city of Jerusalem. And then finally they built up these mounds of dirt that allowed them to get up and finally actually destroy the city of Jerusalem and carry the rest of the people off.

So it wasn't just an event. And so to get a picture of what this period was like, you actually have to read the books of Daniel and Ezekiel, which are prophets. You have to read the latter chapters of the book of Jeremiah, another prophet, and then you have to read those latter chapters of the book of 2 Kings.

So that's why we say it gets a little bit complicated, because you don't get the story in any one place. Well, finally the Babylonians did destroy the city of Jerusalem and they took off the last of the inhabitants, exported them over to Babylon. Now when we use the word "Babylon," realize that Babylon was an empire, the Babylonian Empire. The capital of Babylon was the city of Babylon.

And even after the Persians destroyed the Babylonian Empire and became the new empire, their leaders, the emperors of the Persian Empire, still lived in the city of Babylon. So even after the Babylonian Empire moves off from history, you still read about the city of Babylon, because it was such a magnificent city that the Persians who defeated the Babylonians and took over their city didn't destroy it; they just lived there.

So now for 70 years, the people of God are living as vassals, as virtual slaves around the city of Babylon. And then in 538, the Persians defeated the Babylonians. And now the Persians are ruling over that part of the world. Well, when the Assyrians, you remember the Assyrians, in 722, the Assyrians destroyed the northern nation of Israel. Their policy to keep the defeated peoples subservient was to destroy culture, to destroy nationalism, and to destroy religion.

The Assyrians forced the peoples they defeated to intermarry so that you no longer had a person who said, "I am an Israeli." You had a person who said, "Well my mother was an Israeli, my father was a Philistine, so I guess I'm an Assyrian." And so the Assyrians obliterated the culture and religion of the peoples that they defeated.
God preserved Jerusalem from being defeated by the Assyrians. He supernaturally protected Jerusalem from this fierce huge army of the Assyrians and preserved them until the Babylonians were in power, because the Babylonians' policy was to take people as a group, allow them to keep their nationality, allow them to preserve their culture, allow them to practice their religion, but just to move everybody in mass over to the city of Babylon.

And so all around Babylon you have these peoples living together in their culture around the city of Babylon. During the exile, that's where the people of Judah lived. The Persians had a third policy, and so God preserved Judah as a people living outside of Babylon until the Persians came into power. And in 536, the Persian emperor Cyrus wrote a decree. And he said, "You know what? We don't want all these people living around here. 

Another way to keep the Persian Empire strong is to keep these people happy, to keep them productive. Let them go home."

So he said to the Jews, "Go home. Go back to Jerusalem. Rebuild your city, rebuild your temple, carry on your life, carry on your religion. Plant your crops, carry on commerce and business, and we will rule you in your own homeland with governors. And those governors will tax you and send the tax money back here to the Persian Empire."

So now the good news was the Jews could go home. And so this next period of time called the reconstruction period, a period of 136 years from Cyrus' decree in 538 until 400 bc when the Old Testament period ends, is the story of these people who are now delivered and able to go back home and rebuild their city and rebuild their temple.

The first part of that story is recorded in the book of Ezra. Ezra tells the story of the first waves of Jews who returned to their homeland and rebuilt the temple. Chapters 1–6 of the book of Ezra tell the story of rebuilding the temple. After chapter 6 of Ezra, you have a 58-year period gap, and as you're reading the book of Ezra, it's important to realize that when you end chapter 6 and then your eyes just move to chapter 7, there's a 58-year gap there. If you don't realize that, you're sort of reading along in that second part and saying, "What's going on here?" So take your Bible, and maybe right between there just draw a couple lines and put 58 years. The latter part of the book of Ezra, chapters 7–10, talks about a great revival under the scribe Ezra. In chapter 7, Ezra himself came back to Jerusalem and discovered the Law in the rubble of the temple that they were rebuilding and read the Law. And it was a great revival.

So the rebuilding of Jerusalem's temple is recorded in the book of Ezra chapters 1–6. Chapters 7–10 of Ezra tell the story of a great revival among the people. Well, building a temple is one thing; the enemies of the Jews who lived around Jerusalem didn't work overly hard to keep the Jews from rebuilding their temple. There was some opposition, you'll read about that in the book of Ezra, but every time they tried to rebuild the walls, the enemies of the Jews came in and destroyed those walls.

A city with a temple is a city that can be a religious city, but a city with walls becomes a military threat. So the enemies of the Jews who lived around Jerusalem worked overtime to keep them from rebuilding the walls. So for 90 years, from Cyrus' decree allowing the Jews to go home, for the next 90 years the people were never able to rebuild those walls.

Enter Nehemiah, the book of Nehemiah. The first 6 chapters of Nehemiah tell us how 90 years after the Jews returned to their land, they were able to rebuild their walls. Make no mistake about it because Nehemiah makes it completely clear that this was not just the work of Nehemiah, this was the work of God. Because in chapter 6 of the book of Nehemiah we read, "The walls were completed in 52 days, and even the enemies of God said this was the work of God." Magnificent story, marvelous story!

And then just as the latter chapters of the book of Ezra record a revival among the people, so Nehemiah 7–13 also talks about another revival among the people of God. So this period of time is an extremely important period. But if you don't understand what's going on, that the people had been in captivity, and then when you start reading the books of Ezra and Nehemiah they're back in their land and they're rebuilding the temple, that can be very confusing if you don't understand what actually happened during that period of time.

But not all the Jews went back. Just because Cyrus made a decree allowing the Jews to go home and many, many did, not all of them went home. Many of them stayed there in the Persian Empire. And so this color book of Esther tells a story of what life was like for the people who didn't return, the people who stayed back in the city of Babylon under the Persian rulers.

The story of Mordecai and Esther is an intriguing story. It's a marvelous story of how God protected His people even there in the captivity. But if you don't understand when this occurred or what the situation was, the book of Esther makes no sense at all. So realize that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah are the chronological books that tell the story of the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Not everybody went home and went back to Jerusalem, and this color book of Esther tells another part of the story of what life was like for Jews after the Persians had defeated the Babylonians.

Then you add the prophets of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi to that reconstruction period, and you get God's view of what life should be like during this time. People got discouraged. People were greedy just like today. Not everybody wanted to participate in rebuilding the temple and rebuilding the walls. They wanted to rebuild their own homes; they wanted to rebuild their own lives.

And so God raised up these three prophets of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi to urge the people and to encourage the people to cooperate with what He was doing there in Jerusalem in rebuilding life and culture and most of all relationship with Himself for the people who had returned, a marvelous period, intriguing period of history for the Jews.

The one thing we see throughout is the story that we've seen all through the Old Testament, although God's people were unfaithful to Him, He was always faithful to them. People then weren't really all that different from people today. They were people; they were humans. They had their struggles. They had their tragedies. They had their disappointments. Some of them handled those disappointments and tragedies very poorly. They got angry at God. They shook their fist in God's face and said, "I'm gonna do it my way."

But then there's always the story of the Ezras and the Nehemiahs and the Esthers and the Haggais and the Zechariahs and the Malachis who say, "It may appear that God has abandoned us, but we know better. And the way we handle our tragedies and our disappointments is we don't shake our fist in God's face, we come and embrace God. And by faith we get the strength that we need to handle those disappointments and those tragedies in our life."

Don't we still have that same choice today when life doesn't go the way we want it to? What's our response? The awful addition to the tragedy by shaking our fist in God's face; or comfort, encouragement, and strength and direction by coming to God and saying, "God what should we do now?" I think the second way and the books that tell us about the destruction, the exile, and the reconstruction certainly affirm that the only wise way to live life is God's way.