Hey guys! So when a lot of people read the scriptures, they read a single
chapter or a single story without understanding where and how that story
fits into the bigger historical picture. "I can't read." So in this episode we're
going to review largely Old Testament history but also show where a couple of
Book of Mormon events fit into that history. It's going to be super fun and
hopefully you can connect some dots that maybe you haven't connected yet in your
head, so here we go.
Let's start from the very beginning.
We've got Adam and Eve. Eventually they start a family and among
their kids are Cane, Abel and Seth. If you follow Seth's lineage for several
generations, you get Noah as in Noah's ark. In the great flood,
his family survives the flood and his sons
Shem, Ham and Japheth work to restart their civilization.
They get into a little trouble though when their descendants try to build a
tower to get to heaven. As a consequence of their wickedness,
their languages get all scrambled except for a group of people who were
spared and commanded by god to build barges,
cross the ocean, and inherit their promised land in the Americas.
This group comes to be known as the Jaredites and you can read all about
their story in the Book of Mormon. Meanwhile, the descendants of Shem, Ham
and Japheth start spreading out. If you skip down several generations in
Shem's family tree, you'll find a guy named Abraham who had
a son named Isaac, whose son was Jacob. Jacob had 12 sons,
one by the name of Joseph was sold into Egypt by his
brothers where he came to power and ended up later saving his family,
which was forced into Egypt because of a famine. Unfortunately,the descendants of
these twelve sons known as Israelites were eventually enslaved by
the Egyptians until Moses came along and freed them.
Remember biblically these are the descendants of Noah's son Shem.
You've probably heard terms like Semite or anti-semitism
or semitic languages. Those all stem from the name
Shem. After 40 years of living in the desert, the Israelites take their
promised land from the Canaanites and establish a kingdom which is initially
ruled by judges like Deborah and Samson. Then they're ruled by kings such as Saul,
David and Solomon. After Solomon's reign in about 930 BC,
the kingdom of Israel split in two. Roughly 10 of the 12 tribes stay in the
northern kingdom of Israel and the other two, Judah and Benjamin,
live in the southern kingdom of Judah. The northern kingdom lasted for about
200 years until it was conquered by the assyrians in 721 BC.
They hauled off most of the people from those 10 tribes back to Assyria.
Those people come to be known as the lost 10 tribes.
The assyrians repopulated the northern kingdom with assyrians
who intermarried with the sparse remaining Israelites which was a
violation of the law of Moses because the assyrians were gentiles. The
posterity of these relationships would be known as
Samaritans and that's one of the many reasons why people disliked Samaritans.
Many viewed them as mudbloods. That's horrible.
It's disgusting.
In 701 BC, the assyrians also tried to conquer the southern
kingdom of Judah but miraculously the attack on Jerusalem was a complete
flop. This led to the belief that the great city Jerusalem could never
fall. It may be why about a hundred years later Jerusalem residents Laman and
Lemuel thought their dad was crazy when he prophesied that Jerusalem would
fall to the babylonians. That prophet's name was Lehi. In about
600 BC, he, his family, and some others left
Jerusalem, built a boat, crossed the ocean, and set up camp in the americas. The vast
majority of the Book of Mormon is the story of this
family and their posterity and sure enough during the reign of king Zedekiah
in 587 BC, Jerusalem was conquered by the
babylonians. But in the scuffle, one of the king's sons named Mulik escaped with
a small group of people. Like Lehi's group, they also came to the
Americas and their story is also recorded in the Book of Mormon.
Most everyone else in Jerusalem was hauled off to Babylon.
This is known as the Babylonian captivity. The difference between the
northern and southern kingdoms, though, is that these southern captives
were allowed to return to Jerusalem after the babylonians were conquered
by the Persians, even though many just stayed in exile like Esther, hence why
she became a Jewish queen to a Persian king. The Old
Testament ends with the Persians in charge. The new testament begins roughly
450 years later with the Romans in charge. "And it
therefore unto caesar the things which are caesar's.
And unto God the things that are God's." But during that time the holy land
actually trades hands quite a few times. In the 330s BC, the Greeks led by
Alexander the Great took the holy land during their successful campaign
to conquer the Persians. When alexander died, his empire was divided into four
empires. Tolemean and his Egyptian empire ruled
the holy land for a bit until they were conquered by the Syrian
Seleucids. In 167 BC, the Maccabees, a prominent family in Jerusalem,
led a successful revolt against the Seleucids and the holy land was finally
once again independent for a while until the romans incrementally took
control between 63 and 37 BC, thus at the beginning of the new
testament we find the Romans in charge with Mary and Joseph traveling to
Bethlehem to pay taxes. So there's a brief history of events for
you from Adam and Eve up to the birth of Christ.
Let us know in the comments if you learned something new or if you've got
questions and have a great day.