Cyrus, King of Persia

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we’re going to talk about Persian culture today.

We left off with Persia conquering Babylon, Cyrus the Great. We’re just going to do a deep dive – well, probably not too deep, probably more broad than deep, but we’ll dip down every now and then. I don’t think we’re talking about Persian cats or Persian carpets. What are we talking about?

Some historical ethnographic background, I suppose. The Persians are a latecomer in history. As far back as the tower of Babel we have reference to the ancestor of the Medes, a man named Madai. He’s one of Japheth’s sons. So the Medes, and later the Persians, are Indo-Europeans and their land formed a portion of what is now Iran or Land of the Aryans.

The Medes and the Persians should be counted, contrary to Greek prejudice, as peoples of the west, not the east, in the sense that if we’re going to draw geographic lines along ethnic boundaries, Japheth is usually counted as the father of western peoples. He’s the father of the Greeks, but the Greeks tried to make this big deal of, “No, they’re eastern. We’re western. They’re despotic.”

“They don’t believe in self-government and liberty.”

“No, they don’t. And they roll around in luxury (because they’re richer than we are)…”

“Which we resent.”

“And they’re conquering more people because we can’t even get our act together, so they’re obviously evil and we are the champions of the free west.”

Looking back now with any kind of perspective makes that really laughable. Nonetheless, that is the flavor that taints most of the history books ever written in the west. They’re all pro-Greek. They’re anti-Media, anti-Persia, except the Bible.

The Bible does know that there are Greek peoples out there. It prophesies the coming of Alexander and the splintering of his kingdom. The first reference is to local pagan tribes capturing Hebrews and selling them to the Greeks. That’s a great way to be introduced to the storyline. But once Media-Persia is firmly placed in the story and we start seeing the Media-Persian kings, most of them that we see do alright.

They’re not coming out of a covenantal background. They don’t remember the God of scripture, as far as we can see. They are not polytheists in the traditional sense, and Rachel is going to talk about the dominant Persian religion later on, but they tend to think of one great sky god who rules at least over all good things, maybe more, so they weren’t automatically hostile to the worship of Yahweh.

The Bible speaks of Cyrus. God says of him by prophecy

That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure, even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built, and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid. Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him…

Cyrus in fact is the one who issues the decree to rebuild the temple, to restore the Jewish people to their land, initiating the second exodus. He apparently is the Darius of the Daniel and the lion’s den story, so he is presented pretty uniformly as maybe not politically sharp where religious and ethics matters come together, but a great warrior, no doubt. But he means well and he loves Daniel and he wants to do what’s right and he wants to listen to the God of Daniel, so there’s that.

The next king who comes along who gets any airtime in scripture is a man named Darius. He was one of Cyrus’s generals. At first he appears a danger because he’s busy pulling the thing together after Cyrus and his son are gone, so he’s kind of busy and he gets this appeal, “Hey, they’re building a city over here that’s going to cause you a lot of trouble,” and he says, “Alright, tell them to stop that for now and I’ll get back to you.” But once they get back to him he’s like, “Um, this is for a temple for the God of heaven? Yeah, let’s do that. We’ll finance it. You take money out of your pocket and you pay them.”

Then we run into – depending on how you interpret scripture at this point – more of Darius or one of his successors sends Ezra to teach the law of God in Jerusalem. He sends Nehemiah, his cupbearer, to rebuild the walls. He marries Esther, and again a little missing the cues here, almost enables a mass genocide of the people.

“Read the fine print, by the way.”

Yeah, he should have learned that one earlier. So it comes back and he ends up married happily ever after. The general perception of scripture is that these people were not particularly evil, no more than the rest of us. They weren’t out to destroy God’s people, except once, and that was kind of a misunderstanding, failure to read the fine print and all that. By and large they were kinder and gentler than the Babylonian and Assyrian kings who had gone before them.

Remember, the Assyrians had just used mass genocide and mass relocation to try to unify their empire, along with a little terror and violence thrown in. The Babylonians tried to co-opt the best and brightest and send them back as their agents, thus Daniel in Babylon U.

The Medes and Persians more or less said, “Yeah, keep your own guys, keep your own laws, keep your own rules, keep your own gods, but you need to supply us with taxes and soldiers because we have some conquering to do. And no, you don’t have to look like us, dress like us, or anything. We don’t care about that.”

A few other odds and ends, just more or less to put some icing on the cake or a little bit of flavor in the flour. The Persians are said to have valued truth above all, and a good deal of their lifestyle and religious orientation was in that direction. A real man does not lie. A real man tells the truth, even if it gets him in trouble, so that was really huge for them.

They did not have the same kind of religious liturgies and hierarchies. They did not have temples. They did not have idols, so Herodotus says. They worshiped gods in the open fields, and I’ll let Rachel talk about anything else that goes there. So they weren’t compelling temple prostitution or any of these wonderful things that the Babylonians and Assyrians had thought up.

One small note that I find humorous, if we are to believe Herodotus, and that’s always a good question – when they wanted to make some really important decision, they all got drunk and then voted on the matter.

In vino veritas.

Yes, exactly. When they recovered, they looked at their decision and if it still seemed good when they were sober, then they went with it.

There’s something to that, I think. I mean, David and I always have a glass of wine with our budget meetings.

There’s an interesting connection between Persian culture and the US mail service. There was a well-established and efficient Persian courier mail system. That was one of the early ones, and they built some of the early road systems that allowed people to move across the empire more efficiently, so they were known for the fact that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness would keep them from accomplishing their task with all speed, even as the US mail service would say later, with a slight variation.

That was originally them.

They didn’t know about snow or sleet or gloom.

And something that goes with that is they were also great road builders. A lot of the roads that Rome will get credit for later on were actually Persian roads that they developed.

Yeah, like Rome was the first empire to think of roads.

“We have a great empire, what shall we do? How shall we ever get around? We don’t know.” Some of those roads are ones that we’ll see Ezra and Nehemiah and others using as they go back to Israel.

After Rachel talks to us about Zoroastrianism we need to talk about how the Persians come in contact with Greece, because it’s kind of important, and all the secular texts certainly spend a lot of time with it. But from a biblical point of view, far more pressing at least immediately, is how the people of God redevelop their religious culture under the protection of Medo-Persia, this thing we call the restoration. So those are the two things that we need to come back to. We probably won’t get to both of them today, but Rachel, why don’t you talk to us now about Zoroastrianism.

Zoroastrianism was considered the primary religion of the Persian empire, though obviously from the Bible we see heavy influences from the true faith on people like Cyrus and others. Zoroastrianism begins obviously with a man named Zoroaster (or Zarathrustra in Persian). That name we maybe would recognize more because of a book that Nietzsche wrote, where he picks up that character and remakes him, so it’s not the same thing.

Before Zoroaster there was a general polytheistic religion among the Persians, but it had a top god, if you will, a king of the pantheon named Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda will then continue into Zoroastrianism. What happens is they move from this pantheon to Zoroaster when he’s 30 and is likely himself a priest in the magi of the gods. He receives a vision that says, “Actually there’s only one true God. Ahura Mazda is the only real god. All the others are fake gods. You need to stop worshiping them.”

There is then an antagonist to the one true god, who is not a god. He’s an evil spirit of some sort named Angra Mainyu. As the Persians valued truth and such things, Ahura Mazda is the symbol of all things true, honest, good, all of that, and his antagonist is lies, evil, destruction, and all of those things that are contrary to the good.

Some of the things that he learned from his vision were that Ahura Mazda is the supreme God. He is the embodiment of everything good, and that goodness is something we then are supposed to embrace through our good thoughts, good works, and good deeds. Those are kind of their trio of good. Each person has to choose the good and reject the evil, but there’s this constant struggle in the world between those two forces, so we get the dualism there.

Because he claimed that Ahura Mazda was the only real god, many historians call this one of the oldest monotheistic religions. I wouldn’t necessarily call it that since there seems to be a lot of other forces, and he is not supreme or any such thing that we would call a true God. And it’s definitely not the oldest monotheistic religion because obviously the true religion has been there from the beginning. So you have it.

But it is interesting that we have fewer examples of pagan monotheism.

This is true. There are little places where it pops up. “Actually, there should only be one true God. Oh, God should actually be good and he should tell the truth and he’s light and not darkness. He doesn’t have this side where he’s conniving and manipulative in the background.” One other interesting thing is Zoroaster said that he actually was the creator of everything as well. It’s interesting because you see these little sprinkles of what we would think of as biblical Christianity and truth, but then shifting and mixing.

What’s the timeline on this? Could Zoroaster have been influenced by knowledge of the Hebrew religion?

They don’t know exactly when he was born, but they estimate it somewhere 1500 BC and 1000 BC.

That’s quite a range.

Yes. It was at least 500 years before the Persian empire as we know it came into being. He was also mostly rejected in his lifetime. He had to flee and go somewhere else and find other people that would listen to him, so it wasn’t like a great wonderful revival religion where he’s running around going, “Hey guys, there’s only one God!” and they’re going, “Go away. We hate you. We’re going to beat you up,” and all that.

Sounds more like Islam, as we were mentioning before we started recording.

Yes. Some really interesting parallels I see in Islam to Zoroastrianism is you have it beginning with a single vision to a single man who has been in a polytheistic setting, and learns, “Oh, there’s actually only one God and you have to choose to follow him and do the good and reject the evil.”

It’s based on your continuous will of choosing to follow him, which is also something in Islam that they speak of. You must choose to stay on the right path, choose the right path, be on the right path, and also the fact that there were no written scriptures or anything at the time. Any of the followers who did believe the revelation memorized and recited everything.

That happened for Zoroaster. It happened for Muhammed, where they go for quite a while before they actually write anything down, so you have this huge separation between the supposed revelation and the actual recording of it, which makes of course lots of questions for the authenticity of what was actually recorded.

The overall message is there’s a general good vs evil. Pick the good God who will give you good things and give you a good afterlife, because he’s one of the early ones among more pagan religions to also speak of the end of the world coming with judgement and there being this afterlife that you’re trying to build towards in this life.

One other fun fact about Zoroastrianism is that he kept something from the previous versions of the religion in his area. They had fire temples with the continuous fire, so they still keep that if they’re able to practice their religion, because that’s their core element. They believe fire was created last and is the best of all the elements.

They, like Islam, also had the revelation that blood sacrifice is no good. The true God does not want blood. He wants your good choices and good actions, so don’t sacrifice anything to him. That’s actually an abomination to him.

Sounds so friendly and kind.

Yes, it reminds me of a lot of Enlightenment religion and things like that. Be good, do good. You can by your own will or knowledge make the right choices and walk on the right path, and all will be well.

And it totally precludes the expiation of guilt.

Yes, we don’t need any blood. There’s always that. Instead you just need to fight in the fight of this good vs evil, and you can win if you will just try hard enough.

We don’t normally have Zoroastrianism neighbors, or I don’t know of any, but the framework that eventually is picked up by Manichaeism later in the early Roman empire is still with us. Good god/bad god. Good god rules over light and spirit and niceness and puppy dogs and rainbows. Bad god rules over matter and material things and sex and money and all that, which has found its way into the church.

The God of the Bible is the good God who only rules over nice spiritual clean things, not nasty things. And the devil is the bad god and there’s this eternal war going on between the two, which is not biblical Christianity.

And how many people would simply give that message to their children. “You just need to say good things and have good deeds and good thoughts, and that’s how we become a good person and please God.”

Contrast that with the traditional prayer of confession that says, “I have sinned in both word and deed.”

Once again, there’s much to be said for traditional liturgies because they remind us of the obvious, that we find not so obvious left to our own devices.

It’s so easy to ignore the obvious.

Yes. Lewis has a great line in Screwtape Letters – “…the neglect and horror of the obvious.” We’re good at that.

Let’s take a moment and look at what’s happening in Israel. Cyrus releases God’s people. He makes it a decree, but it is one of these decrees like, “You can do this if you want to. You all can go back home.” Now, we don’t think of needing travel visas within our own country, but in that part of the world for a very long time, and probably still today, you needed government permission for any kind of significant movement, and certainly for mass migrations, so this is a big deal, allowing a whole mass migration.

He does not know how many people this will be, from wherever they are to this little land in the corner of Palestine, but he has read the prophecies of Isaiah. God through Isaiah had named Cyrus by name, called him his anointed, his shepherd, his Messiah, so Cyrus is about to do this, and he arranges to fund the rebuilding of the temple and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Both are in view.

So God’s people begin well, but as is so often the case, especially when reigniting the covenant, they don’t continue well. The book of Ezra gives us Cyrus’s decree and we’ll read it –

Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled…

That prophecy was that the captivity would last 70 years, so the 70 years are up. Daniel has been tracking that. If you read through Daniel’s prophecy he makes note of, “I knew by the books the time was near and things weren’t going on yet…”

…the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying, Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The LORD God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth [and he does use Yahweh Elohim] and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
Who is there among you of all his people? His God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD God of Israel, (he is the God,) which is in Jerusalem. And whosoever remaineth in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with beasts, beside the freewill offering for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.

Cyrus brings out the temple vessels and commits them to the leaders of the Jewish people and sends them back with additional offerings from himself and his court.

The two men who lead the return we read about in the first half of Ezra and also in the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah. Their names are Zerubbabel and Jeshua (or Joshua or Jesus, depending on how you read it). Zerubbabel is a prince of Judah. He stands in the line of both Mary and Joseph, and that’s a little odd. He’s a prince of Judah for Judah, but not within the Persian empire. He’s the governor in the Persian empire, so he answers directly to Cyrus.

The reason he’s not a prince or king or someone in the kingly line is because back before Jerusalem fell, one of the last kings, a young man named Jeconiah, had been so wicked that God through Jeremiah had said, “Write this down. None of his seed will ever sit on the throne of Israel ruling anymore over Judah.” So God himself had ended the royal prerogative of the Davidic line.

Zerubbabel is in that line, and so will Joseph, Jesus’s adopted father, be. But by God’s own decree that line exists technically after a legal fashion, but it conveys nothing except memories, because no one in that line can be king. The only one who could be king would be a true son of David who was not descended from that line. Anyway, that’s for later.

This Zerubbabel, like Cyrus, becomes a type of Christ in that he is a prince of Judah. He’s the governor’s right-hand man here. He’s rebuilding the temple. He’s leading the second exodus. In the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah he is very much highlighted as God’s man for the hour, but working with him is this other fellow, a high priest, who’s called Jeshua or Yeshua or Joshua or Jesus. They’re all the same name with variations. “Jehovah is salvation.” So again he has our Lord’s name. He helps lead the return from exile. He’s the high priest. He rebuilds the temple and reinstitutes sacrifice, so we have this priest/king combination reigniting God’s worship.

I have spoken of this as the restoration covenant, and once or twice people have said, “Where do you get that? That’s not on the standard list of covenants.” We won’t go there right now, but if you turn toward the end of Nehemiah you will see that once everything is in place, the people of God say, “Let’s make a covenant.” They sign it and seal it and make a big deal over it, but this is after not only worship has been restored and the temple up and running, but the walls have been built. The whole city is dedicated to the Lord and it becomes the holy city.

More broadly, why speak of this as a renewed covenant? Because so many things change. The easy way to see this is just to look and see what Israel does not have anymore. There’s no Davidic king, so in that respect it looks like the Davidic covenant has failed. It hasn’t, but you’d be tempted to think so.

It’s certainly disconnected from their forms of worship and interaction politically and spiritually.

And they’re going to have very few remaining prophets as well, in terms of those that would write scripture, or like the prophets we see with David like Nathan and Gad. You don’t really see that appearance anymore.

No. We’ve got three people we call prophets left. Ezra himself and Nehemiah are prophets after a fashion. It’s right at the beginning at the time of transition and transformation, and there will not be another until John the Baptist comes, at least no one to speak of, so they don’t have that.

They don’t have the ark of the covenant, which is kind of a big deal when it’s time for the Day of Atonement. What exactly did they do with the blood on the Day of Atonement? They go behind the veil and…what?

Sprinkle where the ark of the covenant used to be?

Apparently. I’ve never seen Jewish sources address that. I don’t know what they did. And Christian sources generally are so not interested in such things, that I’ve never actually seen anyone address or even ask the question, “What happened?”

I wonder if some of it is due to the fact that now the Jewish religion attempts to go on without the ark of the covenant, so they have completely remade the way that they practice the Day of Atonement. So I wonder if there’s a certain “not discussing that” because it’s more like, “Well, this is how the Lord actually started us, without that, so we’re not supposed to have it.”

The argument is made for a discontinuity in a certain sense between the covenants. The ark of the covenant is, in a sense and we can tell from the name, an embodiment of the covenant that God had made, and that’s not there anymore.

And what’s inside are the tables of stone which are called “the covenant” more than once, and they’re gone. We don’t know where they are, and probably not in a city called Tanis somewhere in the deep deserts of Egypt. We don’t know what happened. The last reference I believe is during the days of Josiah, when he basically says, “Okay Levites, you’re not messing with this anymore. Leave it alone and go do other things,” and that’s it.

When the city falls we have detailed descriptions of a lot of what happened as the city and the temple were broken down. We know what happened to the big brass pillars outside. There’s absolutely no mention of the ark of the covenant. There’s been all kinds of speculations as to what happened, how it went away, who took it, where it was hidden.

The Catholics probably think it was assumed into heaven like Mary, because Mary is the ark of the covenant.

You couldn’t let the pagans touch it, right? My general guess is the Lord knew we shouldn’t have it and it probably was taken and melted down as if it was nothing.

The only other reference is in the book of Revelation, where oddly enough in vision, in symbol, it is seen in heaven, but that doesn’t mean there’s literally a box there. It means that the covenant henceforth has its focus and center in heaven and the reign of Christ, not in gold boxes.

And if we believe that the heavenly sanctuary is the true sanctuary of which ours was just a reflection, then there would be some sort of true ark of the covenant there in heaven the whole time, so we don’t need it to ascend up. It would already be there.

Yes, it’s just the realization that Christ is the focus since he is the covenant. He’s called such in the prophets – not just the mediator of the covenant, but he is the covenant. So they don’t have that.

There’s the divinely-lit flame on the altar long gone. There’s no Shekinah glory filling the temple. That does not mean God’s glory was not there, it just wasn’t there in lights and effects.

An interesting contrast with Zoroastrianism there, where there’s not a continuity of fire.

Yes. So I may have missed some things, but those are at least some major things that are re-orienting this covenant administration. On the other hand, there are some positives. I mean these are positives, they just don’t look like it.

Once the physical and the outward becomes a crutch and you lose it, you stop trying to walk and you complain you don’t have a crutch anymore, but God was doing other things. He finished the Old Testament, which has a very complete picture of the coming Messiah, so much that Paul could preach from the Old Testament and say, “I’m not saying anything that the prophets didn’t say.” That’s a pretty broad claim. It’s like, “Well, you know, the prophets in principle said these things.” Paul says, “I’m just saying what they said. There’s nothing new here,” so that they had. That was big.

And all the times Jesus said to the Pharisees, “Don’t you know the scriptures?” He means the Old Testament.

Yes. God’s people did not all return to Israel. In fact, most of them didn’t, so they remained spread throughout the empire. And with the coming of Alexander and then of Rome they keep traveling further and further, so that by the time of the Council of Jerusalem James can say, “Moses has in every city the people who read and know about him.” Everywhere the apostles go there are synagogues where they can stop and use as launching pads as bases for beginning to evangelize, so this is huge.

But even in the moment, here we have God’s people spread throughout the world, living in the world, living among Gentiles, witnessing to their Gentile neighbors, meeting on the Sabbath day to hear God’s Word and to chant praises, to hear sermons and to pray, and then go out again and evangelize their neighbors. This sounds kind of familiar. God is getting his people ready for what’s about to come.

It also corresponds to the scattering of the seed. The people have been scattered and in a sense have died. There’s not a cohesive identity, but they’ve been scattered so that when the water of the gospel comes there will be growth.

This is where in history now our vision should start to spread out as well, because we’re trying to track the spread of God’s people, but his people are more everywhere. We should also expect to see more, and can see more influences of the scriptures on other cultures even before the coming of Christ. So when we see them saying things or doing things that align with the scriptures, it’s not far-fetched to say, “Ooo, they probably actually heard it from their Jewish neighbor, or went to synagogue,” or something like that.

It’s not surprising that they should already have heard aspects of the truth.

When we finish Persia we’ll be moving toward Greece, and one question that will come up is did these philosophers read Moses? The church fathers said, “Duh!” The world looks at that and says, “Well, why would they?” Because Jewish people were scattered all over the place and because they actually had a book that was a word from God and they would tell people. Whether they told them in humility and in true faith, or in self-righteousness and cultural pride, they would tell them.

So these philosophers, even if they were listening to their servants – you can think of all the times in scripture where servants and slaves and captives got the right ear of somebody important, and that someone important turned to the God of Israel, either in truth or at least outwardly.

One of the topics that forms the backdrop for a study of history, especially at this point, is the idea of common grace. I’m not sure I like the words, but let’s go with them. The idea is that God spreads his gracious presence and power beyond the bounds of his covenant people, for the sake of his covenant people. That’s really important because too often it’s like they’re separate – God has his saving grace, but then he has this other grace over here and they’re kind of different things. No, that’s not what’s going on here. All grace is in Christ.

I made a reference awhile back that David asked me about. I spoke of Jesus as the savior of all men, especially those who believe. That’s actually a quote from St. Paul from one of the epistles to Timothy. The only savior there is is God. The only savior for the whole world is God. If anybody is saved from anybody, anytime, in any way, it’s God who did it.

And John’s epistles say something very similar, don’t they.

Yes. Or Paul on Mars Hill when he says, “Let me tell you about this unknown god.” He’s not being cute. He’s saying, “This is the true God who has intervened in your history in times past. It’s time for you to get to know him.”

A key element in maintaining any degree of rationality and morality in the ancient world was this constant injection or overflow of knowledge from the covenant people. You can think of Solomon’s servants sailing the seven seas with the Phoenicians and going everywhere, but here this is huge. God’s people are being spread abroad, and continue to spread abroad, and take scripture and worship with them, so that yes, we know they reached the Greeks.

In fact, one of the questions in Greek philosophy we’re going to see is why did these people go from these Olympian deities who were more or less nature gods originally and had been humanized by Homer and Hesiod – why did they suddenly start talking about God as being one and light and truth? Who were their neighbors just about then? Oh, the Persians. Who had the Persians’ ears? Oh, you mean people like Ezra and Nehemiah and Daniel and Esther and Zerubbabel? Huh! I wonder if there’s a connection there.

Of course, secularists would just snort at that and say, “No, that’s ridiculous. You’re trying to mix your Bible with history.” No, the Bible is the heart of history and we should be surprised if these kind of things aren’t happening. But because of the dichotomy that we’ve inherited of “Bible one thing, history another” it just feels weird to make the jump across and to connect things, unless the Bible actually says it. But as I’ve said many times, God for some reason assumes we’re not stupid.

I’m not sure why that is, because we are, both in our own ignorance and our sins. There are so many times when we should be able to say, “Well, here were the people who were in effect running the empire, or at least really close to the emperor. Don’t you think their ideas would be felt throughout?”

We know that when the emperor found out that Mordecai was a Jew, a couple things happened. First, they were afraid of Mordecai. Second, a lot of people became Jews. What? The text says this. We just blow over it.

I can’t imagine studying the founding of the United States and the drafting of our founding documents and all the discourse and discussion that was going on without encountering the Enlightenment. Ideas do ripple through actions.

Yes, and people then act on those ideas, although they don’t actually always admit where they got their ideas. If you went back and read the Enlightenment philosophers you might not know that there ever was such a thing as Christianity, or what you would get by reading them would be a very watered-down secularized version – “Oh, there was this great teacher named Jesus who said some good things about love.”

And yet you can’t have the Enlightenment without Christianity.

No, you can’t. It doesn’t work. But it would be easy enough to pretend it didn’t if you didn’t know what Christianity is, and if you didn’t know the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say.

That may be a good place to wind down because the next step is going to be how the Persians encounter Greece, and how that begins to shift the balance of power, and it will pave our way for talking about Greek culture and philosophy and such.

All right. Shall we close out with some recommendations? Since you mentioned Paul Harvey I’ll just jump in. I grew up with The Rest of the Story on the radio, and I think there were some published collections of the stories that we had. Have you heard of Mike Rowe?

I know the name.

He did Dirty Jobs, the show, and he loved Paul Harvey and sort of picked up his own version of The Rest of the Story and it’s called The Way I Heard It. He’s like, “This is not all documented the way a history should be. This is just the story the way I heard it.” So there’s that podcast that he produces, very similar to Paul Harvey – short and kind of mysterious. You don’t know who he’s talking about until the end.

He also published a book, The Way I Heard It, that is a mixture of his memoirs with these stories, and how he got to be where he is as the jack of all trades of America. It’s a really interesting story and interesting guy, a really fun read.

Okay. Rachel, do you have anything?

I’m going to recommend a book that my mom gave me called Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. It’s put out by the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis. They actually created an exhibit there at the Creation Museum that has a 3D replica of every week of what a baby looks like in the womb, and they’ve created a book that you can buy. It’s more like a picture book, so you could use it with children.

They’re very life-like and they just have real simple descriptions. It’s been fun for me, being pregnant, but also my mom used it with some of her grandkids to say, “Oh, this is what Aunt Rachel’s baby looks like right now.” It's a fun way for kids and adults to get a little look into what’s going on, because we get little bits here and there, but we rarely get that sense of every single week this is what a baby would look like. So I recommend that.

Well, far less interesting and even human, I’m going to recommend The Histories of Herodotus because we keep bringing this up.

And we give him a hard time.

We give him a hard time, and rightly so. He’s called the father of history by humanists who don’t consider scripture to be history, and yet once you start reading him he’s giving us the background for the Greek and Persian wars. So he goes back and gives us the history of Persia and the Greek colonies and so on and there’s a lot of interesting things. The stories intertwine and go generational and there’s a lot of fun stuff there. How many of them are actually historically accurate is something else altogether.

Most modern historians seem to just discount them with the wave of a hand, after insisting he’s the father of history. What they’re really getting at is that he has dismissed the Olympian gods and is telling these stories as brute fact, that this is just what happened, this is what people are. Man is the new god. It’s all about human action. But he writes well and he says interesting things, and some of it may even be true.

It is funny how people used to say the city of Troy didn’t exist. It’s like, “Oh, Homer just made that up.” Not the case.

Herodotus assumes it’s completely true, but then Herodotus is written off because of so many other places he’s gone after urban legends or historical legends or whatever, as far as we know, because you know what? Aside from scripture, nobody else was writing history at this point because it was not a thing in pagan culture.

This is a good point to move – I don’t want to say beyond scripture, but to bring under the light of scripture the little bit of secular history we do have of the time and see what they were saying and how it was being written and to what intent.

And enjoy it.

Yes. He’s a newsy funny kind of writer, and if you like history at all you’ll probably enjoy him. There you go.

Great. Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listener. We appreciate you tuning in.

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