This is the Baymont podcast with Marty Salman. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we look at the

different leadership styles seen during the rebuilding of Jerusalem in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.

And this seems weird because aren't Ezra and Nehemiah two separate books and yet we're doing one

podcast about both of them. Right. Yeah. The Jews have always seen Ezra and Nehemiah as very,

very close companion volume volumes. And oftentimes just seen as one volume itself. The Maseretic

Text, which is one of the manuscript texts that we use, one of two major ones. The Maseretic Text

written in Hebrew, right? Written Hebrew is, has Ezra and Nehemiah as one book as one story.

And really, even if you keep them as two separate books as we have in our Bible, it's great and fine.

It's really hard to isolate them and see them independently of each other. It's like one continuous

story. And Ezra and Nehemiah make appearances in both. And so it's just, I've always found it

good to read them. But also what I'm going to do with Ezra and Nehemiah's best if we just package

them together. Is it continuous story or parallel stories? I would say probably more continuous. I

wouldn't say there's not necessarily overlap, but I've always seen them as more of a continuous

narrative. They're covering, it's a continuous narrative of the same period of history, the same

return, so to speak. And I got to be honest, this isn't a section of, I'm still studying Ezra

and Nehemiah. There's a ton of stuff going on in the, in the guts of the book. Like if we were to

really dive into some passages, we won't, we're going to quote a couple of passages as we go today.

But I've always been moved by just stepping back and making some big observations of the story in

Ezra and Nehemiah. It can be somewhat problematic at times. We're going to see that today. But as I,

as I could try to step back, I try to view an in historical context at that place in history,

what human consciousness was and try to appreciate it where it sits. I've really pulled away what I

feel like are some, some good lessons from Ezra and Nehemiah. But before we do that, we got into the

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