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0:30Oh, not loud. No, not loud enough. Come on, go ahead, read it. Use it. Then they sojourned from Bethel, and when there was still some distance to go to Ephra, Rachel began to give birth, and she suffered severe labor. And it came about when she was in severe labor that the midwife said to her, Do not fear, for now you have another son. And it came about as her soul was departing, for she died, that she named him Ben-Oni, but his father called him Benjamin. So Rachel died and was buried on the way to Ephraath, that is, Bethlehem. And Jacob set up a pillar over her grave, that is the pillar of Rachel's grave to this day. Then Israel journeyed on and pitched his tent beyond the.

1:11Oh, that's you. You've read enough. Okay, good. All right, so. How far back does Bethlehem go, folks? All the way back to Abraham. Jeremiah 31, 15 through 17. Thus says the Lord, a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more. Thus says the Lord. That's good. You got it. All right. Okay, Ruth 1:1 through 6. About in the days when the judges governed, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem and Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife and two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech.

2:08Very good. And his wife, Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Melon and Chileon, the Ephritites of Bethlehem and Judah. Now they entered the land of Moab and remained there. Then Elimelech, Naomi's husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. They took themselves for a Moabite woman as wives. The name of the one was Orpah, and the name of the other, Ruth, and they lived there about 10 years. Both Malon and Chileon also died. And the woman was bereft, her two children and her husband.

2:50That's it. She arose with her children. You got Lisa, that's as far as you need to read. Okay. So, once again, the location where this begins: Bethlehem. All right. Ruth 1, 14 through 18. Who has it? No, we just won't shorten little sections. Okay. All right. At this, they wept aloud and damn poorly for the second one. Then Orpa kissed her mother-in-law goodbye. Bye, but Ruth clung to her. Look, said Naomi, your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her. But Ruth replied, Don't urge me to leave you or turn back from you. Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my God, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.

3:47When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her. So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. Okay, so the story starts at Bethlehem. They leave Bethlehem. The story ends. Where are they? Back at Bethlehem. 1 Samuel 16:1. The Lord said to Samuel, How long will you go? How long will you mourn for Saul since I have rejected him as king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil and be on your way. I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem. I have Chosen one of his sons to be king.

4:33Okay, so also, who's anointed king of Israel? From Bethlehem. David. Okay. So, Matthew 1, 5 through 6. Now we're to the New Testament. You got a little genealogy here? Solomon was the father of Boas by Rehab. Boaz was the father of Obed by Rut, and Obed the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of David the king. David was the father of Solomon by Betsheba, who had been the wife of Uriah. Okay, then Matthew 1 through 17.

5:16Who had that? I'll read it. So all the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon, 14 generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to Christ, 14 generations. All right, so you have the house of David beginning there at Bethlehem. We got the story about Ruth there at Bethlehem. We got Abraham bearing his wife there. Long history of stuff. And let's do the passage that I think is very important in terms of the item we're going to be looking at today. We cannot prove that it was the place where the soldiers came from, but. I'm pretty confident that they did come from this place. All right, Matthew 2:1 through 18, Visit of the Wise Men. Now, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him. When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the land, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet. And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people, Israel. And Herod summoned the wise men secretly, ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem, saying, Go forth diligently, search for the child. When you have found him, bring me word, so that I too may come and worship him. After listening to the king, they went on their way, and behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, notice the house, they saw the child with Mary and his mother. You know, so this is sometime after, you know, we always get the Christmas story kind of conflated here. And so, anyway, they fell down, worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold, frankincense, myrrh. Y'all know all this, right? And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way. Now, when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, said, Rise, take the child, his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you. For Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him. And he rose and took the child and his mother by night, departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord has spoken by the prophet, out of Egypt, I call my son. Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious. And he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time he had ascertained from the wise man. A voice, and this was prophesied that this would happen, a voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be comforted because they were no more. Okay, what we're going to be looking at today, we can get back to the slides.

8:40We're going to be looking at the Herodian, which is an incredible fortification built by Herod, literally overshadowing Bethlehem. And there's how we get our title in the shadow of Herod. But the shadow of Herod appears throughout the New Testament, even after he's. Dead, his kids and his grandkids are still around and they're still causing problems. One of them is going to kill John the Baptist, another one's going to kill the brother John, another one's going to, of course, you know, be up there in Caesarea, and you know, they proclaim him a God, and the Lord's going to strike him down. He says, eaten by worms, right? And so this is pretty interesting, the history of this family. Well, backing up, I don't know how, yeah, there we go.

9:32Antiochus. Okay, let me go to this. After, just give you a little bit of background here, you got the Empire Alexandria. All those different colors up there used to be one color under Alexander the Great. He dies, it breaks up in all these different various Hellenistic kingdoms. Every king of every one of these kingdoms wants to be another Alexander. And that goes on for a long, long time, which is a whole nother lecture. But if you see the blue there, that's the Antigonid Empire, founded by the general Antigonus. And that's where we get the name Antioch. You know, the first called Christians in Antioch. That's one of his capital cities. And then you got and usually his name is Antiochus. Antiochus first, second, third, fourth, a whole bunch of Antiochuses. And this Antiochus, oops, there we go. This one is a time period there where he wants, oh, I guess just back up and say this. Then you see the green is Egypt. Over there, you got sort of the pink, that's the Seleucid Empire. They are all going at it, each other. And guess what they're fighting over? One of the things they're fighting over, it is what is today, Israel. They're constantly fighting over that area. And this guy, Antiochus III, he decides the way to solve the Jewish problem, kind of like what Hitler did. He decides, let's just wipe out Judaism. Of course, now he's not trying to kill the Jews. He's just trying to make them into nice Hellenized Greeks. And so one of the things he does, he shuts down the sacrificial system. Well, actually, he doesn't shut it down. He switches it. He wants them to start sacrificing pigs on the altar. Now, if you know anything about Jews, Jews and pigs do not go together.

11:23And so he's trying to get them to do this, and that is what brings on a Jewish rebellion against Antiochus. And you've got this priest. I kind of like to call him a Hillbrute Billy Priest. He's a tough, tough character, Matthias. And when they tell him to kill the pigs, he and his son kill the soldiers. And that starts what is called the Hasmonean revolt, Hasmonean revolt. And a long, long, long story there. But eventually, they're going to win independence from these Hellenized Greeks. They're going to beat the Ptolemies down in Egypt. They're going to beat the Antigonids, and they're going to even beat the Seleucids. And for a brief period of time, there, Israel re-emerges. And all this red here is the greatest extent of what's known as the Hasmonean Empire. Well, not empire, it's just kingdom.

12:17And yet, it's never truly totally free. They had to pay off, they had to pay tribute, they had to lie with different groups against other groups. And in the process of this, to make a long story short, you're going to have the Hasmonean dynasty, which starts out as sort of a fundamentalist religious group who wanted to remain the purity of scripture and all this. They become liberalized. And it's during this time period that you have the formation of the Pharisees, you know, who are not Pharisee, remember from vacation Bible school, and then you got the Sadducees who are Sadducee. Okay, and these two groups emerge, and of course, the Sadducees were the priestly group. And which is kind of ironic, but there is a modern-day parallel. You know how a lot of our seminaries a few years back got real liberal?

13:06And first thing they teach you is that Jesus didn't really exist, you know, or something like that. Well, it's not quite the same thing, but let's just say that the priestly class, those who are actually doing, you know, the leading of the people, the priests, they become very liberal. They become very Grecianized, Hellenized. And you know, by the time of Jesus, they're the ones who are running the temple, and they are the Sadducees. All right, and then you've got the Pharisees who remain sort of the fundamentalists of their day, only they go beyond that. You know, they want to build a hedge around Scripture so that you can't even possibly break Scripture. And so they come up with all these incredible rules and regulations. They're not in Scripture. Like, you know, 500 different laws on how to prepare squash. Now, who can keep up with that? If you're a woman, you know, you can't look at a mirror on the Sabbath. It's illegal for a woman to look at a mirror on the Sabbath. You know why, ladies, right? Especially getting my age. Of course, if I did what ladies did, I wouldn't have any hair at all. Because, you know, the lady on the Sabbath looks in a mirror, she'd be tempted to pull out that gray hair that popped in there. And that's work. You just violate the law, you see. And so they got all these incredible rules and regulations, all this sort of stuff. But getting back to the topic here, here's a Hasmonean kingdom at its greatest extent. And just to give you an idea of how chaotic it was, that's all the kings and princesses of the Hasmonean period. And you probably can't even see it too good, but I'll summarize it for you. This ruler becomes ruler, he gets killed. This ruler becomes ruler, he gets killed. This ruler becomes ruler, he gets killed. I think out of about 17, 18 folks up there, only six of them died natural deaths. All right, so I don't think I want to be a Hasmonean king myself. So it wasn't too good of a situation there. You know, if y'all want these PowerPoints, by the way, I just pulled these PowerPoints off the internet, and since they're for educational purposes, I'm making no money. I think I'm legal doing that. Now, things got pretty nice for the Hasmoneans by the end of it because this is like one of their palaces at Jericho. By the way, Herod would rebuild this. And by the way, in one of those swimming pools there, Herod's going to murder the last Hasmonean heir that possibly could cause him problems. He made him high priest. He's a young kid, I think early 20s. But then the people responded to him so well. He had a lot of charisma, real good-looking young man. And they wanted to make him king. Herod, of course, insanely jealous, has him drowned in one of those swimming pools there. Okay, but and by the way, this is Herod's palace there at Jericho. And you see those little rooms over to there to the side? That's the bathroom. Multiple bathrooms. Because he had a sauna.

16:05I forget the caldarian, a tipperarium or something like that. They had cold water, hot water, basically a sauna. It was pretty nice digs. And every one of his palaces, he always had that. He loved to have lots and lots of water around, you know, living in a desert land. This, of course, is one of his palaces that he built in the middle of nowhere, out in the desert. This is overlooking. The Dead Sea. This is Masada. And there's a long story there, which we may get back to. It's just incredible. The hanging palace there, you know, there in Masada, and that's what's left there today. All the Israeli soldiers, they go there today and they take their oath of allegiance there because of something that happened there, which we may or may not have time to get to. And of course, this is Jerusalem at the time of Herod.

16:56And there's one of the grand staircases going up to the one of the, you know, the, I almost call it the plaza, but it's one of the courts of the temple that Herod built. It's not just the temple building on top of the temple. What he did was he leveled out the mountain by building this giant platform. And actually, you could go inside the platform as well. Vast areas up in that thing. And there's a city at the time of Herod. And I don't know if you can see very well. See, I'll show him moved up front. You got a theater over there, which is a Greek theater, which I'm sure the Pharisees weren't too happy about. And you notice over there to one side, you got a horse track. I'm sure the Pharisees weren't too happy about that.

17:43See, at the time of Herod, Israel was not all Jewish. It was really kind of a polygot kingdom. You had all kinds of other people mixed up there in amongst the Jews as well. And some of them were very Hellenized. And also in the distance, you see the platform of the temple. Back behind there, you see the Fortress Antonia, and that was, he's always trying to impress the Romans, whoever's the ruler at the time. At that time, he was supporting Mark Antony, and he names it Antonia in honor of Mark Antony.

18:14And that's his digs there in Jerusalem. That's Herod's part of his palace complex. Notice in the background, you got the temple again, and further in the background, you got the Fortress Antonia there. And this is an entire city he built that did not exist. And this, of course, is mentioned in the New Testament. This is Caesarea. And the thing is, Israel did not have a harbor, did not have a seaport. So he just goes out there and makes one. He came up with his way. First, I know, record it. Later on, the Romans do this as well. Where they got the idea for him or he got from the Romans, we don't know. But he came up with concrete that would harden underwater, underwater. They took the special pumice from volcanoes and they built this harbor out into the ocean there. And that's in the distance you see there. It became one of the top seaports in the Mediterranean. That's one of the reasons Herod's so wealthy is because of Caesarea. Of course, who's he named that for? Caesarea.

19:14Caesar Augustus. That's who his patron is at that point in time. Name a city for him. And you notice once again, he's got... And Caesarea was basically a Hellenized city. It was not very Jewish at all. And you got your racetrack there. And then right up in the foreground. You got his palace, and that's an interior view of the palace there. This famous place incident takes here, which hopefully we'll get to next time, takes place at this palace there at Caesarea. There's a cut of it, and there you show, you know, he has the palace jutting out into the ocean, just wonderful panoramic ocean view there. And this is another fortress he built. Anyone know what famous event took? Well, I just told you there. All right, that's where John the Baptist, you know, this is yet another structure built by Herod that's mentioned in the Bible. Horrible, terrible event occurs there. All right, so we're going to skip through these because we don't have time.

20:08We'll get back to them later. This is what we're going to be looking at today. And I first want to show you a brief little, this is from History Channel Clip telling you a little bit about this Herodium. What does it look like to you just looking at it there? Yeah, it kind of looks like, hey, we're in Hawaii and that's a volcano about to go off. It's not a volcano. Can you run the clip there, James? Okay, I think it does quite well make a point. And one of my reasons to go back, and I'm going to pull back some of the ones I did years back, and this is one of the ones I thought just sort of as a foundation for where we're going.

20:47Sometimes I think is hopefully not this group present, but I have seen some when they get to approach the Christmas story, it's almost like a fairy tale. I wanted to get across to you. This was so real. And while you might think you're being overwhelmed by the world today, the early Christians, as you're going to see as we go into it next time, what they were up against is just astounding, you know. And for them to take on a power like Herod and then his successors, it's just truly, truly amazing. You know, what a person devoted to Christ, submitted to Christ, led by Christ, you know, these 12 men, the apostles, they literally overturned the world. And that should make us excited. And that should make us realize we need to get off of it.

21:49And so, so anyway, I'm not quite through with Herod. I want you to know a little bit of his sad story. And then we want to talk a little bit about his kids. And if I can just jump, oh, in case you're wondering where Jude, the Herodium is in location to Bethlehem, see, they're just right together. And then, oh, by the way, he had all these tunnels up under the Herodium. There, those are the big cistern tanks and all that.

22:21That's the, you know, that sauna thing he had. Just pretty amazing. That they just recently found. They're still digging around it. That's one of the big, I don't even know what you call the thing, a basin that they just recently found there, which gives you an idea. I'm sure they stripped everything they could once he died, but it's still some amazing decorations that must have been there. And that shows his funeral procession. And you see that little tower there? That was his tomb. And we weren't sure what it looked like. Only thing we had about him being buried there was from Josephus. And they have actually found now where the tomb was. Since this film was made, they found the tomb. And there's the tower there, partially reconstructed. And that's where the devil himself was buried, right there in that stone sarcophagus there. And they found that. Of course, the later Jews, you know, they hated him, and so they destroyed it. But the fragments, they found them to kind of put them together there. And of course, you know, after Herod and after Jesus' resurrection, you know, he predicted that, you know, it's going to be terrible destruction coming. And this is Titus the Roman breaking the walls of Jerusalem down. It's going to be a horrible, terrible massacre coming. But and just to give you an idea how big of an impact, these are other family members. And we'll come back to this next time. And if you get to looking here, it is really, really weird. You got basically the family members are marrying each other. And that's what gives John the Baptist's head cut off because he stood up against that.

24:06But all the red there are these rulers, and they're mentioned in the New Testament. So they're still causing trouble, even after the dead he Herod's dead. So anyway, but that's as much time as we have for today. And we'll complete and the shadow of Herod next time and talk a little bit about his kids, and then we're going to be moving on. So, Brother Thomas, would you close us in prayer, please?