OTAN Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Thanks for coming. Hi, I'm Avi. This is my co-presenter Cindy. She's very small. Cindy sadly got sick and couldn't run. I think she's running online. So thank you Cindy if you're here, you're here in spirit. Today I just want to talk about just a few very simple subjects like removing barriers to education through distance learning. We are a text. I should have put high flex in the title. It's in the presentation, but it's not the title. Highplex ahead. Yeah. Okay. What happened in 2019? We were so innocent. Distance learning back then. Do you remember people telling you that they were taking online classes? What was your reaction back then? Oh, excuse me. Must have been expensive. Exactly. Yeah. Don't you want a real class? That's what virtual means is almost real, right? Not real. In other words, not real. It's not a class. Right. Almost a class. Yeah. And I wanted to help people who got degrees online. Oh, you got your PhD from Phoenix or whatever it might be. Okay, you're not going to be my boss. Right. That's that was the answer. I don't think it's like that anymore. Anyway, so back then, there was very little adopted by all schools that you all know. And there were some by universities, community colleges have led the way since the beginning. Let's just, let's just be real. They still do. All of the, yeah, all of the colleagues that are most jealous of teach for community colleges, I do as well, but not to the extent that they do. It's, it's very nice. So, anyways, when a, when a penguin in the back love each other very much, we get big results. But we learned from 2019, great time to buy stop and zoom. So we know what happened then, emergency online learning, which all of our administrators were very happy about universally beginning to end right. And we're teachers, not just those closer to retirement but those closer to grad school. Right. Nobody, I didn't want I certainly did not want to do it. I thought it was going to be terrible I was teaching French at Davis at the time. I said language teaching online. Are you serious, nobody's going to participate. Nobody's going to learn anything everybody's going to cheat. It's going to be terrible. None of that stuff happened. And none of it happens now. So, this is an emergency. Just as learning became a domain of 93% of students. That is from the US census I didn't just make that one up. So, at that time I was teaching at two adult schools and a university. One of the adult schools is very rural, very, very few staff, a few students, we only had two ESL teachers were both very much part time. And also I pulled some Cordova adult school, which is a medium size. My boss likes when I say that. It is this medium size. And so in my, my foreign language department, we had immediate full adoption. In fact, all across the university there was immediate full adoption. Adult schools to we weren't going to lose, you know, the steps that the steps that we've taken out here we weren't going to let go, any of us. Right. So within about a week we turned it around. Didn't we remember what happened. We turned it around. Didn't want to do it. It was expensive. It was difficult. People are afraid of getting sick. And we did. So, and again, the community colleges were pretty much already ready to do it. So we learned a few things from them. So when I'm learning at Folsom, Florida adult school, our classes exams were all administered online. We don't do that anymore because it's very, it's very staff intensive. And we don't have tons of staff that can do that. You know, all of us were probably exposed to a variety of solutions for this. For us, we had Cindy actually, one reason I would have loved her presence. She did all of the online classes testing. You know, we didn't have too many people do so. We had more of a sort of drive by process kind of thing. She might have experienced as well. And some other strategies like that. At the community college where I teach, we still do that for all of my online courses process is uniquely administered online. It's they don't ever, they'll never come to campus. Okay, what's our takeaway from 2020 aside from all the other things. One science fits some hashtag OS FS that's going to come up. Not all students enjoy online learning and we know not all teachers enjoy online teaching. What's more, not all teachers should be teaching online. You have to be a very dynamic presenter. It was really funny. I didn't include this mean that there's a great was a great one about engaging students online. And just, you know, involves feather boas and lots of stuff like that just trying to really trying to get everyone's attention. And the students are sitting there like Bernie, right at the inauguration. So we had the same the same skism among the instructors. I think students online is not always easy. If you're not comfortable with black squares and can't do his job, right, because there are a lot of folks who are different reasons. Cantor won't activate a camera. So that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But for folks who do this a lot, it doesn't, it doesn't make us uncomfortable. And I don't think, in my experience. I don't think is losing anything because they're not turning their camera on some of my most participating students. So I'm most participating students are leads who for cultural reasons will won't turn on their cameras, and they're just talking to you talking to you. They're some of my best. So the box players don't don't scare. All right. So I'm going to just fill the leg here. I've been zooming for a while. Okay. A couple of just three little best practices things things I'm going to rag on just a little bit. How many people have seen these in a zoom meeting.  The presenter usually doesn't know nobody tells them, right. So what I often do is I try to simulate the experience that my students are having. So I joined on my phone, and I joined on my computer. See what it looks like to them. If my grandma can't read that, but it's not working. She is dead, but if you're alive, right. They metric, same metric. Yeah, 2011, I'm slowly getting over it. We need to really think about human computer interaction and how it differs, even from like street to street neighborhood to neighborhood, never mind around the world. We don't. My agency doesn't at this time have the bandwidth to loan Chromebooks to everybody. We, we did for a while and they not many came back, even when we disabled them. So it doesn't seem like it's in our experience it hasn't been something that has contributed, aside from during the emergency phase when we just really need to get people on there. So, ideally for me, I know this is hoping for a lot, but ideally a student would have their phone so they can participate. They can have some other thing like a small tablet Chromebook, maybe a computer, so they can be doing the Burlington or the canvas or the what have you. But I want to be able to participate if they, all they have is a phone. So that means when I design Canvas courses, I need to make sure that there's not a whole bunch of extra stuff. All these kinds of things I'm not a, you know, a UI guy, but I try to think about what it looks like to somebody else. Sorry, this is a, this is a pet peeve. When we're, when we're sharing Google Docs, who doesn't, right. We're sharing Google Docs. If we do the normal control plus plus control minus minus to make it bigger for grandma, then what's going to happen is you're going to get a much bigger ribbon, and the text doesn't change size. I like to show people, I like them to feel like they're watching a movie, but there's nothing, there's nothing there except the experience. So, what I'll do is, first of all, I'll punch this up to about 150 or 200. This is for me to write, I can't read those. I can't read words that small, even standing right here, it's pretty hard. So, I punch it up to about 150 200, press F 11, get rid of that stuff. Right there. So that's the other option for that. We're probably all familiar or you can pick up 11. They don't make it easy on these keyboards, not just this one, but lots of keywords out there. There's always some other activation key right here first different on every one. So, yeah, it's a process. Okay, 2021. I don't want to go back to work. I'm going to talk about the agencies where I was working at the time. I don't know what happened with everybody, but we did a lot of new input surveys and exit surveys like you all do. You get a lot of quantitative and qualitative data for people, how many do this, how many like this how many don't. So, we started doing classes test administration in person again was, it was the practical thing to do. And vaccine was widely available people were taking it. Our distance learning program continued to the life of some and the chagrin of others. Not everybody, not everybody likes it, but that's what this whole visitation is about. One size fits some. We heard about the great visitation around 2021. I'm not sure it's supported by data, but we all know that everybody has a friend who says I'm not going back. I'm not going back. That was me. I went back, but that was my, that was my memory of working in industry and then working in a cube a cube farm in education didn't want to do that again. So across agencies and institution types. There's, there's broad broad variation. I'll tell you about four that I was working for at the time, compare their different strategies. So let's continue in. It's a fairly large program in Anaheim. And I teach there online every day. Their program is fully 50% distance learning. And it's not because the administration decided they wanted it that way is what the students continue to ask for it. That's just this campus. It's not everywhere. We still, as I mentioned before, we all do classes online for all those online courses. Co-op assessments are all done online. It's really, really streamlined. The co-op process is really, really streamlined there. It's, it's Microsoft forms. Yeah, I don't, I'm not a fan, but as soon as they complete those, it was right to the data people. I don't have to print anything out and I have to waste any paper. It's just done. It's amazing. I finish all instructions online and all homework is on the LMS. And aside from Burlington English, I've been really good at talking people into getting Burlington for my students. So only, only my class, the whole community college has Burlington English. So aside from Burlington English, we use absolutely nothing that costs any money. So I switched to completely OER texts for this class at all my classes. And the data bear out in the student's trial, strongly prefer online learning. Over here at UC Davis, back in, I'm talking about 2021 now, all of our overseas programs, so we're made 100% online. When American students did foreign language placements, they were all online, they still are. It's kind of a self assessment now. Whether in person or distance, all of their midterms or finals, all the big stuff, it's all on the LMS. So we really left forward there. And I think that, you know, I actually, I want to thank that panel in the back, not for most of what they did, but because we got this, we got this leap forward that we weren't prepared to do before that before we were forced to do it. We weren't ready to do it. I would still be driving, you know, 17 hours a week to go to work. And so a lot of people. You see Davis in the next year. I can't see what it says. Yeah. Okay, so these days, we're down to about 10% distance learning. We kind of relegate it to when someone is violently ill. Okay, that kind of thing. The students are extremely flexible now in learning modality. They can, they're coming to us from high schools where they may have done two years online already. So they're totally primed for this. They don't think it's weird. They don't think it's not a class. Right. You tell them, oh, we have to be online. I did this yesterday. Sorry folks to be online and being San Diego. Have a time. That's the question. That's the whole question. We've become quite normalized. And we're still doing formal language presence for efficiency placement exams online and everything on LMS is. And this is true both at the main campus and at the center for professional education where I teach international students. Okay, what about Wilson cord over. This is the school that I am here representing today in 2021. From about 50% to about 25% distance learning students indicated very rigid preferences in terms of their modality.  And at this, at this time, instructor online courses were teaching from offsite gradually started coming back to the campus 100% of costs is testing being done in person. As far as the online courses go, everything has been done all on the LMS for a couple of years and assessments and all those kinds of things, even in face to face classes. By this point, it about, yeah, we'll come to that. Okay, 22 about 25%. I teach French here. These days, when I started teaching there 22% percent distance learning that's on a regular schedule, but anytime we need to do distance learning we do that as well. Students are very very flexible. As I was describing a moment ago. People who are teaching online courses are teaching from onsite and offsite, and in a hybrid manner so the way our hybrid courses are set up there. We have a computer on a podium with a camera facing instructor and a camera facing the audience. It's pretty cool, but it's no out. Right. So it works, but it's not, it's not ideal. All of course, all course we can assessment so on the LMS are done are done on the LMS. And we've done a lot of work on canvas this year, which I'll come to. Okay, 2022, you guys know what happened. We're in person but not 100% distance learning is normalized at all levels kindergarten to grad school. Agencies and instructors figured out they need to be very agile. We might have to jump into distance learning if there's a natural disaster. You guys know we had some very bad flooding in Northern California recently. So, and what about the next pandemic, right, I hear that I hear that from people sometimes, or the next disaster whatever happens right. So in some cases where you're not going to want to be driving for safety concerns. Okay, so causes test administration purpose in person continues a pace. And our distance learning can program is continuing at at Folsom Cordova. We have begun adding hybrid courses that's just a beta test we're doing this year. Next year, we want to add high flex courses. Okay, I'd like to talk about our educator training program. This is one of our biggest CTE it programs. Before, before the virus, it was taught in person. It was three or four times a week. So we're not astounded. And everything was done on sort of static PowerPoints with a mathematics focus so probably just like your districts, we have a district level proficiency test that people need to pass or that can be, you know, brought on as a parent here. It's never the math that people have problems but it's always the English. So in our, in our district so being a language teacher, I rewrote this program. And turned it into a heavily English focus program with mathematics included. Back then, the supplemental stuff was just all flat PDF just really scans of like many graphs or something really not easy on the eye. And we had eight graduates per semester, which would render about four paras for our district at a time. And they asked me to take over the course. So I put it all online. In 2020, our enrollment numbers double. And the next year, triple, and now they've stayed, they've stayed steady since then. We do everything dynamically on our own as of course. It's a language arts focus with math, I use going our text for math I'll tell you exactly which one later on. The supplemental stuff is dynamic everything in there they interact with. So there's no teacher how can I study my math. I don't know, look at this piece of paper. Right. None of that. Now we have, we graduate about 25 per semester which gives us about half that many educators, not everyone goes on to be a pair educator in our district, but they usually do so somewhere. I also added a lot of asynchronous content. Okay, like we're just a YouTube face. And asynchronous content. This is where I'm live streaming right now on my YouTube channel, which has 56 subscribers to subscribe if you would. My program is delivered 100% synchronously but what if you're sick, what if you have to take your kid to blah, blah, blah, all these kinds of things. I want that to be available for folks. And they tell me that they really appreciate it. I thought that I'm always really self conscious about about lectures. You can see this was 45 minutes long. And I think to myself, nobody wants to watch that. But that's not what they tell me. Yeah, this is, this is the face that I imagine, right when I post these things I think, oh, it's just me talking but consistently these are the qualitative data we get. Good good stuff. Okay, more about the PTP from 2021 on we started growing the course it went from being a course to being a program. We have two courses now. We take both courses in order to graduate. It's 100% online 100% synchronous. And I expanded the curriculum with OERs. So we started putting more human development content into the curriculum. And that being that if our, if our students graduate and become para educators, and then take six units of human development, then they have the right, as you guys probably know, they have the right to become preschool teachers. So, I want to really prime them for that. If they didn't have any background in my cloud. If they didn't have any background in it to begin with and if you're going to prime them. We also want to bring community college courses on to our campus starting next year. Hope that's what's going to happen. And the students do as well. Right, and elementary elementary algebra. I'll show you exactly which books those are. Julie is a professor of human development at Folsom Lake College. So she was a real win for us. And if the plan that I have described is carry out next year she'll be the instructor for those courses. We added the IETVSL course, ask me how to make lots of extra money for your district. This is it honestly. Teaching this course, we instruct the 70.2 co-op, which is the instructional assistant and doing that alongside the IET course renders a lot of good stuff on the back end. Right, HEL civics, we get tangible benefits. The students also get tangible benefits. Okay. Keep doing the program. Now it's, I don't know, people keep telling me it's it's a big deal. I don't know if it is, but it continues. Now we are able to administer the ESSA compliant test at our office instead of having to send people to the district office. So that's been really helpful until by staff. And for those who don't pass and haven't taken our course. They can take it until they pass. It's kind of like a driver's license though you've got to wait two weeks before you can, you can do it again. But usually what we say is what do you, when you take the course, you come to the course it's only like four and a half months long, and then take the test again. So that's an option as well for them. Okay, what did we learn, what have we learned to date. The first one is this barrier to education that we didn't know was there. It's kind of like proving a null, you don't know that something is not there. In some cases, so the form of physical location in space this was a problem for a lot of people, we didn't know that till 2020 95% of our participants are moms who only have free time between X and Y. That's where the course falls. It's perfect for them. Or they've been moms for a very long time, and they're looking for a change, something else to do. So, and then there are cultural considerations to I am a male instructor.  So moving online, really remove this barrier. And yeah, it could be happier. Could be happier. I mentioned before we do a lot of qualitative and quantitative analysis of what the students want what they want from us. And overwhelmingly they say, we want online. We've asked them pointedly again and again, would you like to come on one day a month, Friday afternoon for an hour checking with us. Nope, we sure don't. We had one out of 25 last semester, say that they did. And we would accommodate that person she could come in, you know, and he would would have a session with her but not happening. Yes. So, firmly online. But who doesn't like it. So, we removed even more barriers by adding these OER texts. I think sometimes people look at community college courses and they focus on the college part and they say, oh, it's going to be hard. It's going to cost money. It's going to do this. This removes that fear, because it's free, and it's accessible. Sign up, it takes five minutes to sign up. I found the comments, I found the straight book. Imagine, imagine to recall even development, it's put out by the Portland State University Press. There's a link every single one of these pages here has title, any little URLs for everything that I, that I talked about so if you see the presentation later on you don't want it from somebody will be able to click on all those things. Okay, at this point. So, I think more of these institutions where currently work have adopted OER texts. And I'll talk about each one I've talked all about NOCE and Folsom Portova, we'll actually come back to those next in this slide, which I just touched it. At UC Davis I stopped using any kind of for pay curriculum like ASR, ASR as I said, or anything else like that. And at Sacramento State, we have decided to stop asking the students to buy $300 textbooks. Who would have thought, you know, so we really like VHL it's kind of the foreign languages equivalent of Burlington English. It's nice to mix these easier teachers does not make things easy for students. And so for folks you might be struggling just to pay for gas to get to class that day, you know, we don't want to do that also we want people to enroll for our majors. So, free. Okay. This is something I really want to evangelize for this. This is a series of ESL books.  As opposed to the stuff you pay for right, but it was like image licensing is expensive. Anyways, Rebecca Alhider, she's a professor at Reedley College. I always, I always talk to somebody who knows her. I've spoken to her before she's great. She's written all these different ESL books, and there's a great crossover between we are comments and canvas comments, because she has taken like four of her books and put them online in in full four. So everything from the books has been translated to dynamic exercises in canvas. I'm a new student and beginning ESL, intermediate ESL advanced ESL. I said, guys, here's the whole book. The first, the first module in the class is textbook. One word, right textbook. You can download the book, it's big, or you can just look at all these modules because literally it's exactly the same thing. And sometimes they look and say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this. And sometimes they do and they don't tell me, I don't know, but I don't want to tell us. So, I always acknowledge her every, every time I'm teaching with her stuff, I say, well, teacher Rebecca says the book. Okay, what else. The Latin lesson today, I'll be aware. Students succeeded succeed when we hold an in person, an in person orientation and talk about per educator training program, but we want to do this for more of our, more of our offerings. We want to do it for the first four semesters that I taught the class, and then he showed up and it was kind of her idea she said why don't we do this.  We showed them how to get on soup, we showed them how to get on campus, we showed them how to do this do that. And you know what, I didn't spend a week with tech trouble. The first week of class. And so I had noticed, I personally had no desire to do any in person training, but we did it. And we'll do it again because it was such, it was, it was such a come up. It was really nice. One size fits up. Right. So, I was a little rigid my thinking I thought I don't, I don't want to do that on campus, you know, lots of folks are not vaccinated. But, Mass, it's pretty much over. So I put one of those up. Okay, let's talk about DLAC project. We're really excited about it. You guys know that high flex is kind of new in adult education. That person put over it's entirely new. We don't have any towels yet. We do have three of these. They're all on cameras, which are cool, but they take unidirectional pictures. So if I were to set one up up here, and get all of you folks and get the top of my head, right it would follow me around like the owl does. It's not quite, it's not quite the same experience or if it would the back of the room would be equally as effective, but it's myopic. So, we're doing some sort of alpha and beta testing in terms of the hybrid courses. It is bolt on right now it's not built in. It's something that is probably perceived by people as being extra or, you know, not endemic to instruction, but I can be projecting on that when I haven't done the qualitative research to find out. One of the proposals to implement high flex learning modalities in a BSE ESL and it out of success Academy. We've got teachers identified for all of these are really really good folks. Every time I go into their classrooms is just, wow, you are great. So those are the ones that we want doing this kind of thing, you know, in my in my view. Okay, there's may teaching the unvaccinated with the Polycom camera. So I'm just over here, Cindy took this photo. Thanks, Cindy. And just beta testing it just to see how people enjoyed it. You know what, it's amazing. These guys are from an earlier class. They came to my earlier class, and came to this class, because that's it's extra learning it's extra free stuff. Why wouldn't I want to do that. I don't have anything else to do today. Right. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And it's been working well but since I, you know, certain things are just the domain of unions I can't map things on walls I can't paint my classroom but I can't do stuff like that. So I can't take the polycon and mount it back here if I want to. I can't put it on top of the whiteboard if I want to, I want to, but I'm not going to do that because it's not. Our new modality behind flex we assume that 100% online and 100% offline are also one size fits some approaches that they don't cover everyone. Some students can't do either. And some want to do both. So, this might may not be a revelation to you all. But to me it sort of was. Oh hey, there's a middle ground there's a middle ground there. In fact, here's our timeline. Next year 2023 2024 school year. Our process is is is this. We have complete completed our do you like project proposal that's why I'm here today. Our principal has just finished the grant application I think it's measure H grant. I think it's what it was. That's done, wouldn't hear back from that. And part of that grant is of course the the owls, but right now we're carrying out the polycom camera beta testing. I should mention that we have those cameras and two other classrooms and the teachers are trying them out as well. In March, we always do a needs assessment. So that'll happen has as it does usually it's coming up. I personally need to get on that actually pending the grant approval we want to implement the usage of the owls in the first weeks of the next year. And then I'm going to have to do a lot of teacher training. August is going to be busy you guys. I'm taking July off. So I'll call me now. Yeah. And doesn't do it when I want it to. Okay. I did something wrong. There we go. Okay, so thank you for coming to my Ted talk. That was essentially everything in a nutshell we hope to see you in Fremont next year and present on what we will be found in the first semester for further language teaching adventures please come find me on YouTube at language teacher in 3266. I didn't do anything about it. And also, you can check me out on academia. And hire me to do something. I could create classes for your, for your, for your district, wherever you might be. Also, oh, 10. And I had my email address here. But you can find that easily now. I'm curious. Okay. Please contact me at Jojo's at usd.org. I've been Avi. Thank you very much.


Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States and the Mrs. Reagan. Ladies and gentlemen, the national anthems of the Republic of Ecuador and the United States of America. President, Mrs. Febrez-Codero, other distinguished guests, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you as friends of the United States and as friends of human freedom. Ecuador's return to elected government in 1979 was one of the first waves of a rising tide of liberty witnessed throughout the hemisphere. President Febrez-Codero, we have watched with admiration as you and your government have strived to come to grips with the serious threats to Ecuador's economic, political, and social well-being. You are an articulate champion of free enterprise and those democratic ideals that are close to the hearts of the American people. All those who love liberty are impressed with your courage and responsibility in attacking not just the symptoms, but the underlying causes of misery, poverty, and unemployment. Mr. President, by protecting your country's good name and creditworthiness, by avoiding simplistic solutions and quick fixes, by unleashing the economy building forces of the marketplace, you are leading your country to a better tomorrow. Your uncompromising faith in political freedom is consistent with your support of economic freedom. We applaud your efforts to bolster the democratic institutions of your country. We also applaud your moves to encourage private sector growth and invigorate your economy. The United States stands by your side and we will continue to do all we can to help. When I say the United States stands with you, that is especially true when it comes to your determination to defeat the twin menace of international terrorism and narcotics trafficking. You have put yourself on the line against these violent and insidious forces. Your courage and integrity and that of your people have not gone unnoticed here. Drug traffickers and terrorists are the enemies of all decent people. The United States is proud to be your ally in this brave struggle. In a speech to your countrymen, Mr. President, you advised your citizens to, quote, stand up when it is a matter of defending honor and freedom. Well, that is exactly what Ecuador under your leadership has been doing. Few countries in the hemisphere have made the tough public stand against dictatorship left and right, as has Ecuador. As you've pointed out on several occasions, democracy and the protection of human rights is the surest way to peace as well as freedom. It is no mere coincidence that those few nations controlled by oppressive communist regimes can be tied to so much of the turmoil and bloodshed that is plaguing this hemisphere. It should surprise no one that the rifles used to take over a court building and murder judges in a democratic nation can be traced to a country controlled by those who don't believe in freedom, human rights, or democracy.  Your voice, Mr. President, is doing much to alert the freedom-loving people of this hemisphere to this continuing danger. The path of democracy, peace, and free enterprise is often difficult. But with courage, moderation, and wholehearted commitment, you are leading your people down that path. In doing so, you are not only building a stronger Ecuador, but you are contributing to a more peaceful and secure hemisphere. The dream of freedom and opportunity is the property of no one country. It is the birthright of every American, and that means every person from the north slope of Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. We are all Americans. And today, we are proud to welcome you, President Pedro Coderro, as the leader of free people, as a man with a deep and abiding conviction, and as a statesman we respect and admire. President Febreus Coderro, welcome. President Reagan, Mrs. Reagan, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, for my wife and me, it is a great satisfaction to be received on this state visit by you, Mr. President, and by your wife. It is always a pleasure for a president of Ecuador to visit the United States. The long tradition of friendship between our peoples and the identification with the same democratic principles makes the return of an Ecuadorian chief of state to this great country not only enjoyable, but also stimulating. The fact that the United States of America and the rest of our continent share the same historic goals is not a recent phenomena. It began with simultaneous battles to obtain political independence, and it continues today with the present defense of democracy, of liberty and of individual rights, a defense which has meant a long series of shared efforts. During moments of particular anguish in international relations, from that era of struggle to claim the value and use of the American wealth from commercial monopolies until the tremendous confrontation of the Second World War, our peoples have been united and our governments have enjoyed very strong cooperation. This historical path becomes especially important when a government in the United States, headed by you, Mr. President, coincides with an Ecuadorian government headed by me, both working toward common goals to vigorously restore to our peoples the pride of belonging to their respective countries, to revitalize economies that have suffered setbacks, to return to the individual and groups the right to carry out initiatives without the need for bureaucratic interference with the understanding that the state exists to serve the individual, not to be served by the individual. The cooperation between our peoples and governments and international cooperation in general are indispensable to confront the problems the world is experiencing. The goal of that remarkable man of our times, His Holiness John Paul II, of making 1986 the year of peace requires us to adopt important attitudes. Peace must come from the fact that between human beings there exists the willingness to cooperate and that hope grows within every human being. Peace must be based on the concept of justice, law, and harmony. Peace, unfortunately nowadays, has great enemies. The savagery of terrorism, which in its evil neither respects nor distinguishes among people, places, or circumstances. Its ally, drug trafficking, which corrupts and destroys physical and moral integrity. Governments which consider that men is at the center of creation and that men is the main act of history should cooperate to combat these crimes against humanity. Peace has also another enemy. The agents of war, the ideological motivators of aggression which contribute to the unjustifiable armed buildup. It will only be possible to have true and enduring peace in our world when through the willingness of all men a disarmament process may start in the world. My country, Mr. President, is a country with a pacific tradition.  We practice a democratic system which we seek to expand and to perfect since we believe that it allows for the best social organization. It is only by prevalence of democratic regimes that stem from the sovereign will of our people that are continent and the whole world will be able to enjoy a true and enduring peace. We are careful observers of the standards of human rights generated by national and international laws. There is no conflict we believe between respecting those rights and exercising a serene but determined authority to use power to guarantee to the nine million Ecuadorians who have the right to work, to be educated, to live fully. It's an imperative which consigns perfectly with the fights against lawlessness. Above all, that lawlessness which in its cruelest form terrorism undermines society with the greatest savagery and cruelty. In no way does it deny criminals the protection provided to them by the law but it allows them to go unpunished for their crimes. Mr. President, Ecuador has met its international obligations in an effort which has been widely recognized by the international press and the world financial community. We have successfully rescheduled our foreign debt. We have regained our prestige as a serious country which we have gained after many years of fruitful and responsible economic relationship with all countries of the world. We have been able to recover our economy as all indicators clearly show. We have achieved these through a reasonable application of sound economic policies, letting the market play its fair role and allowing for free initiative to flourish. We have promoted harmony between labor and capital within the observance of law and order. We have not at any time neglected and it keeps being our main concern, the social policies. Those are the final objectives of our action. It is undoubtedly the well-being of our people what we are looking for with all our energies. Social welfare within the framework of justice it is the most appropriate soil for peace to flourish with our peace and the well-being of all our peoples. The stability of this whole hemisphere is a danger. In order to achieve social well-being we require the solidarity and cooperation from those who are capable of working together with us, from those who have the capacity to assist us. We have to demonstrate to the world that there is no need of despotism, that there is no need of collectivism to mitigate our people's sufferings. Yes, Mr. President, we have reached to prove that with liberty and free initiatives it is indeed possible to reach a standard of livings which are adequate to the human being. I am sure, Mr. President, that this visit


Last time we started looking at the psalms in a number of different genres or forms in which the psalms appear. And we were just looking at a psalm last time, which seems to explicitly reject the Deuteronomystic interpretation of the national history and the national tragedy, depicting Israel as innocent and rebuking God for his inaction. There's another psalm in this genre that I'd like to read from. This is Psalm 44, Selective Passages. In God we glory at all times and praise your name unceasingly, yet you have rejected and disgraced us. You do not go with our armies. You let them devour us like sheep. You disperse us among the nations. You sell your people for no fortune. You set no high price on them. All this has come upon us, yet we have not forgotten you or been false to your covenant. Very different from what the prophets have been screaming. Our hearts have not gone astray nor have our feet served from your path, though you cast us, crushed to where the sea monster is, and covered us over with deepest darkness. If we forgot the name of our God and spread forth our hands to a foreign God, God would surely search it out, for he knows the secrets of the heart. It is for your sake that we are slain all day long, and that we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. Rouse yourself. Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awaken. Do not reject us forever.  We lie prostrate in the dust. We cling to the ground. Arise and help us. Redeem us as befits your faithfulness. So here's a psalm full of anger that contains an explicit denial of the rhetorically inflamed charges against Israel that we read in many of the prophetic books. We have not forgotten you. We haven't been false to your covenant. Our hearts have gone astray. We haven't swerved from your path. Why are you behaving this way? This astonishing protestation of innocence that accuses God of sleeping on the job is reminiscent of Job, in a way, the two conflicting viewpoints that we see running through a lot of this literature, one in which there is suffering, therefore there must be sin. Israel has sinned horribly, and the other there is inexplicable suffering. We haven't done anything that would deserve this, anything at all. It really is reminiscent of Job. It seems to give us these two perspectives on Job's suffering as an individual. We see that now played out on the level of the nation. One that is asserting, what we have here is a view that is asserting God's negligence rather than Israel's guilt. But then you can contrast Psalms like 44, the one I've just read, and 74, which I read at the end of the last lecture, with Psalms 78 and 106. These Psalms belong to the category of hymns. Some people call this category hymns in celebration of divine action in Israel's history, the sort of historical reviews that praise God for all he has for Israel, and they toe the Deuteronomistic line in their recapitulation of Israel's history, from the creation, from the Exodus, and on to the conquest of the Promised Land. They stress Israel's utter indebtedness to God. God has patiently endured Israel's constant faithlessness. So when you juxtapose these two types of Psalms, they're just remarkably different. He performed marvels in the sight of their fathers, in the land of Egypt, the plain of so on. He split the sea and took them through it. He made waters stand like a wall. It continues. He split rocks in the wilderness, so it's a recounting of all the marvelous things that God has done. But they went on sinning against him, defying the most high in the parched land. To test God was in their mind when they demanded food for themselves. They spoke against God, saying, can God spread a feast in the wilderness? True, he struck the rock and waters flowed and streams gushed forth. But can he provide bread? Can he supply his people with meat? It's interesting that this is in the third person. They did all these terrible, sinful things. The Psalm that I just read previously, that protests Israel's innocence, is in the first person. We have not strayed at all. We've been completely faithful to you. Why are you treating us this way? So God's faithful actions, Israel's faithful, faithless responses, are featured in the Psalm that I just read and also in 1.06. They toe the Deuteronomistic line, and again we see this clear attempt to explain Israel's tragic end. And here again the tendency is to blame Israel and to blame God at all costs. We move on now to the genre of psalms. Actually, these are sort of two genres that I'm putting together, genres of blessing and cursing, obviously they're rather antithetical. But these are psalms. First of all psalms of blessing are psalms that invoke God to bless the righteous. It might be the nation Israel, or it might be the righteous within the nation, and to punish or afflict the wicked. And again that can be enemy nations, or it can be the wicked within Israel and other nations. And sometimes these psalms can be quite shocking in their violence and in their fury. Psalm 137, by the waters of Babylon, very rarely people read all the way to the end of that particular psalm. It's very poignant at the beginning, but at the very end it calls for vengeance on the Babylonians who destroyed Jerusalem, verses 8 and 9. Fair Babylon, you predator, a blessing on him who repays you in kind, what you have inflicted on us, a blessing on him who seizes your babies and dashes them against the rocks. Psalm 109 contains this very lengthy list of terrible afflictions that the psalmist is asking God to smite, his foes with, that was a poorly constructed sentence, that the psalmist is asking God to, I don't want to say bestow, but inflict upon his foe, verses 8 and 10. May his days be few. May another take over his position. May his children be orphans, his wife a widow. That's a nice way of saying, may he die. May his children wander from their hovels, begging in search of bread. May he be clothed in a curse like a garment. May it enter his body like water, his bones like oil. Let it be like the cloak he wraps around him, like the belt he always wears. May the Lord thus repay my accusers and all those who speak evil against me. So, again, it's hardly the simple piety that we often associate with the book of Psalms. The last category I just want to briefly mention is a category of psalms that have a reflective or meditative tone. These are psalms of wisdom, psalms in praise of instruction, or Torah, and meditation. They're somewhat proverbial in nature. Many of them will begin with this sort of stock phrase, happy is the man who. So, we see that in Psalm 128. Happy are all who fear the Lord, who follow his ways. You shall enjoy the fruit of your labors. You shall be happy and shall prosper. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house.  So shall the man who fears the Lord be blessed, or reveres the Lord, is the sense of fear there. Many Psalms we've seen seem to presuppose worship in the temple and can even have that antiphonal character, the call-and-response or call-and-echo character. There are three that instead have this theme of meditating upon or delighting in the Torah, that's Psalm 1, Psalm 19, and Psalm 119, conveniently enough. 119 is the longest psalm because it's written in acrostic form. There are different stanzas, a different stanza for each letter of the alphabet, twenty-two letters. And there are eight lines in each stanza, all eight lines beginning with that letter of the alphabet. It's a very, very long psalm. And the psalm represents Torah as an object of study and devotion. Studying Torah makes one wise and happy. Psalm 19, verses 8 through 11. The teaching of the Lord is perfect, renewing life. The decrees of the Lord are enduring, making the simple wise. The precepts of the Lord are just rejoicing the heart. The instruction of the Lord is lucid, making the eyes light up. The fear or reverence of the Lord is pure, abiding forever. The judgments of the Lord are righteous altogether, more desirable than gold, than much fine gold, sweeter than honey, than drippings of the comb. And so this elevation of Torah reflects a shift that begins or starts to occur in the Second Temple period, the late Second Temple period, in which Torah is of growing importance. And in about two minutes we're going to start to talk about this period and the importance and centrality of Torah. It's centrality in terms of study and the study of Torah as a form of worship. So there are many different ways to categorize and classify the Psalms. Many individual Psalms seem to combine units that belong to different categories. So, for example, you have Psalm 22, which opens as a lament. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That's the well-known RSV translation. And then it changes to a hymn of praise. It goes on into a kind of confident triumph. At least one Psalm, Psalm 68, really defies any kind of rigid categorization. So we can't be too strict in trying to impose these forms. They are helpful guides to the interpretation of the Psalms. But again, we can't be too rigid about it. But from the sampling that we've seen, it should be apparent that the Psalms are a microcosm of the religious insights and traditions of ancient Israelites. Perhaps because so many of them lack historical specificity, some of them are quite historical, some of them, in fact, recount Israel's history in order to praise God, but many of them, very, very many of them, lack any real historical specificity. And that is probably the reason that the Psalms have become a great source for personal spirituality in Western civilization. Some of them were composed perhaps as many as 3,000 years ago, and yet they can be inspiring or they can feel relevant to contemporary readers. They can provide an opportunity to confess one's failings, or to proclaim good intentions, or to rail against misfortune, or to cry out against injustice, or to request assistance, or to affirm trust in divine providence, or to simply express emotions of praise and joy and wonder at creation, or reflect on human finitude in the face of divine infinitude. I mentioned briefly the centrality of Torah. Actually, no. Let me finish talking about Psalms, and also move on to another major poetic work. Then we'll come back to talk about the Restoration Period. Another poetic book within the anthology of the Hebrew Bible is the little work known as the Song of Songs. And for many people this is perhaps the most surprising book to be included in the Hebrew canon. It's a beautiful and very erotic love song that celebrates human sexuality and physical passion. The opening line seems to be a late superscription that attributes the book to Solomon. And it seems more likely, however, that the sensuous love lyrics are post-exilic. The attribution to Solomon was probably fueled by the fact that in I Thirst Kings chapter 4 we read that Solomon, or there's a tradition there, that Solomon uttered 3,000 proverbs and 1,005 songs. So it seems natural to attribute this song to Israel's most prolific composer of songs and proverbs, according to tradition. The speaker in the poem alternates most often it is a woman. She seems to be addressing her beloved. Sometimes she addresses other women, the daughters of men, at times the speaker is a man, but he's not identified as Solomon. Solomon's name is mentioned about six times, but Solomon is not said to be one of the speakers, and for the most part the main speaker is female. There's a pastoral setting for the book. The two young lovers express their passion through and amid the beauties of nature. There are frequent references to gardens and vineyards and flowers and perfumes and doves and flocks of goats and shorn ews. There are very vivid descriptions of the physical beauty of the lovers. They are described in highly erotic passages. Translations of the song of songs vary tremendously, as you might imagine. So I'm going to read one little section from the translation by someone named Walsh, C.E. Walsh, which I think captures the tremendous eroticism in some of the passages of song of songs. I slept, but my heart was awake. Listen, my lover is knocking. Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is wet with dew. My lover thrust his hand into the hole, and my insides yearned for him. I arose to open to my lover, and my hands dripped with myr, my fingers with liquid myr upon the handles of the lock. I opened to my lover, but he was gone. These poems are very unique. They give expression to the erotic feelings of a woman, and as I say, translations will vary tremendously. According to Jewish tradition, the ancient rabbis debated over whether or not the song of songs should be included in the canon. And it was Rabbi Akiva, a sort of late first, early second century sage whose view prevailed. He declared, it was only created, so to speak, for the day on which the song of songs would be given to it. Why? Because all the writings are holy, but the song of songs is the holy of holies. But for some religious authorities over the centuries, the candid descriptions of passionate love proved to be too much, and so the explicit content of the book, which contains no reference to God, by the way. God is not mentioned anywhere in Song of Songs. So it seems to have been a completely secular poem originally. The explicit content of the book has, at times, been interpreted away. So not only do we have translations that tone down a great deal of the eroticism, but we also have a tradition of interpretation that interprets away a lot of the explicit content of the text. So we have trends within Jewish tradition that read the book as a metaphor or an expression of God's love for His chosen people Israel. Christians have allegorized the song, seeing it as an expression of Christ's love for His bride, which is the spiritual church. And I think all the sections will be dealing with the Song of Songs this week, so you should have an interesting time looking at some of the interpretations of this text. Now I want to move on a little bit more to the historical background of some of the books that we'll be looking at in today's lecture and then also the last couple of lectures. We left the Israelites in exile in Babylon. In 539 BCE, the Babylonian Empire was itself defeated by the Persians under the leadership of Cyrus. Cyrus of Persia, 539, he manages to establish the largest empire that's been seen in the Ancient Near East to date. It stretches from Egypt all the way north up to Asia Minor, which is modern-day Turkey, and all the way over to Eastern Iran, huge empire. Unlike other ancient empires, the Persian Empire espoused a policy of cultural and religious independence for its conquered subjects. The famous Cyrus cylinder, this is a nine-inch-long fired clay cylinder, and it's covered in cuneiform writing. And it tells of Cyrus' conquest of Babylon. The conquest is described as being at the command of Babylon's god, Marduk. So obviously, the Babylonian's god Marduk wanted our Cyrus of Persia to come in and conquer his nation, and it tells it his conquest and it tells of Cyrus' policy of allowing captives to return to their homelands and to rebuild their temples and worship their gods. And this is consistent, this archaeological find is consistent with the picture that's presented in the Bible. According to the biblical text we'll be discussing soon, Cyrus in 538 gave the Judean exiles permission to return to Jerusalem and reconstruct their temple. The exiles did return, many of the exiles returned. They returned to what was now a Persian province. It's the province of Yehud, I don't think I wrote that up there. Yehud is the name now of Judea, and Yehud is where we're going to get the word Jew. Yehudi is the word Jew, one who belongs to the province of Yehud. And so many of the exiles returned to this now Persian province, Yehud, and they exercise a fair degree of self-determination. Now, periodization of Jewish history tends to center on these events. So the period from 586 to 538 or so, that's known as the Exilic period. Most scholars maintain that the traditions of the priestly source, the traditions of the Deuteronomistic source, pretty well reach their final form in those years. Obviously, older traditions go into the composition of those corpora, but they reach their final form, for the most part, in that period. So the post-exilic period following is also known as the Persian period. I should put that there too at first, but of course the Persians won't rule for long. Alexander's going to come marching through the ancient Near East, so after the Persians we'll have the Hellenistic period. But the period after the exile is referred to as the Persian period, the period of the restoration, post-exilic period. It's also called the Second Temple period, because by about 520 they will have reconstructed the temple. So it's not inaccurate really to refer to this time as the Second Temple period. The Second Temple will stand until 70, the year 70 of the Common Era. So the period, of course, before the exile, we think of as the First Temple period. The temple is destroyed in 586. So the First Temple period or pre-exilic period. Now the books of First and Second Chronicles provide a second account of the history of Israel. Genesis all the way through Second Kings has given us one long account. First Chronicles actually begins with Adam, and it does go through. First and Second Chronicles do go up to the Babylonian exile. They echo a good deal of what we find in the books of Samuel and Kings. But they have more of a priestly bias, and they eliminate a lot of material that sheds a poor light on Israel's kings. So, for example, you won't find the story of David and Bathsheba when you're reading the Chronicles account of the reign of David. So Chronicles is already an interpretation of, it's an inter-biblical interpretation. It is the Bible interpreting itself, right? Later strand of tradition reflecting on earlier strands of tradition and representing that material in a particular light. The chronicler is less interested in David's political genius, for example. It doesn't go into his strategy and his political accomplishments nearly so much as it does go into his role in establishing Jerusalem as a religious capital, in planning a temple, in organizing the music for temple worship. These are the interests of the chronicler. The Book of Second Chronicles concludes with the Decree of Cyrus, permitting the Jewish captives to return to their homeland and build their temple. We have a second fuller version of this decree, which, as I said, seems to be consistent with what we know of Persian policies, the policy of tolerating and even encouraging local religious cults. So that fuller version appears in Ezra. I'm going to read first from Second Chronicles. Second Chronicles 36, verses 22 to 23. And in the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, when the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah was fulfilled, the Lord roused the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia to issue a proclamation throughout his realm by word of mouth and in writing as well. Thus said King Cyrus of Persia, The Lord God of Heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has charged me with building him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Any one of you of all of his people, may the Lord his God be with him and let him go up. Then in Ezra, there's an addition, Ezra 1, verses 3 and 4, let him go up to Jerusalem that is in Judah and build the house of the Lord God of Israel, the God that is in Jerusalem. And all who stay behind wherever he may be living, let the people of his place assist him with silver, gold, goods and livestock besides the free will offerings to the house of God that is in Jerusalem. Notice that the decree at the very beginning in Chronicles, in the second Chronicles version, the decree is said to fulfill the word of the prophet Jeremiah. Now you remember that Jeremiah prophesied that the Babylonian exile would last seventy years. He wrote the letter. He said, settle down. He wanted to last a while, plants and build homes. So he had prophesied seventy years for an exile. Well, from the time of the first departure of exiles in 597, maybe to the return in 538, 61 years, it's close. If you look from the destruction of the first temple, perhaps, in 586 to the completion of the second, somewhere between 520, 515, we're not really sure. That's about seventy years. Either way, it seems that in the eyes of the chronicler it was close enough. This seems to have been a fulfillment of Jeremiah's prediction that it would be about seventy years before they would return. So the books of Ezra and Nehemiah give an account of the return of the Babylonian exiles in the late sixth and fifth century. And Ezra and Nehemiah were regarded as a unit. Those two books were regarded as a unit in the Hebrew Bible until the Middle Ages. They may in fact have formed part of a larger historical work, Ezra, Nehemiah, First and Second Chronicles. Ezra and to a lesser degree, Nehemiah, seemed to have a good deal in common with chronicles and therefore may derive from the same author. So sometimes in secondary literature you will see references to the chronicler, which refers to the hypothetical author of First and Second Chronicles and Ezra and possibly Nehemiah. The chapters report the initial return of the exiles, the rebuilding of the temple, the career of Ezra, and the career of Nehemiah. All four of the books were probably edited in the late fifth century BCE, maybe close to the fourth century, it's our best guess, when Judah was a small province still within the massive Persian Empire. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah, however, contain conflicting information about the return, about the restoration, and as a result our knowledge of the timing of various events is quite poor. It's really not clear who returned first to help build Jerusalem, whether it was Ezra, a priest, or Nehemiah, a scribe. He was a Persian, not a scribe, he was a governor. Ezra was a priest and a scribe. Nehemiah was a Persian-appointed governor of Judah. And even though the chronicler dates events according to the year of the reign of the Persian king, the king is Arduxerxes, and unfortunately there are two kings named Arduxerxes in the fifth century and there's one in the fourth, so it's extremely difficult to figure out when these events happen. So keeping in mind that even the experts cannot agree at all on the sequence of events, we're simply going to look at the career of Ezra, the career of Nehemiah, not going to claim priority for either of them. And because the events are not presented in chronological order, even in the books, I'm going to skip fairly freely between, back and forth, between the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. So the book of Ezra opens with Cyrus Decree, which we've heard, and then provides a long list of those who returned to Judah after 538. They're led by Shesh Bazaar. Shesh Bazaar, and then among the exiles, he says there was Yeshua, who was a priest, and Zerubavel. Zerubavel was a grandson of King Yehoiachin, who was the last Davidic king, who had been kept in house arrest in Babylon. He had been among the exiles in 597. He eventually had been released from Jerusalem in Babylon. So now his grandson, Zerubavel, a Davidite, was returning to Jerusalem. And you can imagine that this would have stirred hope in the hearts of many. Chapter 3 of Ezra describes the sacrifices offered on a rebuilt altar and the beginning of the process of rebuilding the temple, probably around 521 or so. When the builders had laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, priests in their vestments with trumpets and Levites, sons of Asaph, with symbols, were stationed to give praise to the Lord as King David of Israel had ordained. They sang songs extolling and praising the Lord, for he is good, his steadfast love for Israel is eternal. All the people raised a great shout extolling the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord had been laid. Many of the priests and Levites and chiefs of the clans, the old men who had seen the first house, the first temple, wept loudly at the sight of the founding of this house. Many others shouted joyously at the top of their voices. The people could not distinguish the shouts of joy from the people's weeping, for the people raised a great shout, the sound of which could be heard from afar. So, the older generations who remember the magnificence of the first temple of Solomon shed tears. The younger people are shouting for joy at the establishment of a new temple. But the building doesn't proceed smoothly, and that's due largely to the hostilities of the surrounding communities. These surrounding communities are referred to as adversaries, adversaries of Judah and Benjamin. In chapters 4, 5, and 6, these Samaritans, in many cases, offered to assist in the project of Reconstruction. Their offer is rejected. And as a result, the Samaritans insulted, persuade the Persians that this is a bad idea. Rebuilding a potentially rebellious city is a bad idea. And the Persians listen to them, and they order the rebuilding stopped. There are two prophets then, Haggai and Zechariah. So, these are prophets now of the post-exilic period. As we go through our periodization of prophets, you'll want to add this fourth category, post-exilic prophets, third category. They urge the continuation of the building. A Persian official objects the Jews' appeal to the new Persian emperor Darius, and they ask him to search through the court records, look for the original authorization by Cyrus. We have been authorized to do this. And according to the text, Cyrus' edict is found. Darius agrees not only to enforce it, but to honor his obligation to supply money for the rebuilding. This is under Persian imperial sponsorship, and he will honor the obligation to supply money for the rebuilding and to procure sacrifices as well. The temple is finally dedicated, we think, to the 15 BCE, and a Passover celebration is celebrated in the sanctuary. There are other social tensions in the restoration community, specifically friction between those who had remained behind in Judea during the exilic period and the returning exiles, who, although they were few in number, enjoyed imperial support. These self-styled children of the exile, they refer to themselves as the sons of the exile or children of the exile. They refer to the local people as the local Judeans as peoples of the land. This is a derogatory term that seems to cast dispersions on their very status as Jews. They're like the other nations or peoples of the land. They seem to be classifying even Judeans in that category of other. And as we will soon see, some radically different views of Jewish identity are going to emerge during this period. So that's the initial restoration, the process by which the temple was rebuilt. Let's jump now, we think, somewhere to the mid-5th century, perhaps. Nehemiah, he's a Jewish subject of Persia. He's the official cup-bearer to the Persian emperor Artaxerxes in the court at Suza. This is a position that probably entailed his being a eunuch. The Book of Nehemiah opens with a description of Nehemiah's grief. He hears these reports of the terrible conditions of his people in Jerusalem, sometime around the mid-5th century. And weeping, he asks for the consent of the emperor to go to Jerusalem and to help rebuild the city. So Nehemiah travels to Jerusalem. We think about 445 BCE, and he undertakes the re-fortifications of the city. And he meets with opposition. There's some internal opposition. There's a female prophetess, Noadia, in Nehemiah 614, seems to be opposed to this. There's some external opposition as well, from Israel's neighbors, the Samaritans, the Amonites, some Arabs. They resent this reconstruction, and they see the reconstruction of the city's defensive walls as an affront to Persian rule. But Nehemiah continues. He gives his workmen weapons so that they can protect themselves against enemy attack. And the walls around the city are completed in record time. These re-fortifications help to establish Jerusalem as an urban center. And eventually Nehemiah is appointed governor of Judah under Persian domination. The text says that he institutes various reforms, economic reforms, social reforms. He seems to be trying to improve the situation of the poor and establish public order. We think that the governorship of Nehemiah overlapped to some degree with the mission of Ezra, and Ezra's activities are reported in both the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Some scholars believe that they didn't overlap, that that's an illusion created by our sources. But Chapter 7 of the book of Ezra introduces Ezra. He's a Babylonian Jew. He comes from a priestly family, but he's also described as a scribe who is expert in the Torah of Moses. And in verse 10 of Chapter 7 it said that Ezra had dedicated himself to study the teaching of the Lord so as to observe it and to teach the laws and rules to Israel. So Ezra is commissioned by the Persian emperor in a letter, in the text of which is represented or reproduced in Chapter 7, verses 12 to 26. And the emperor commissions him to travel to Jerusalem, as the temple, and to assess how well mosaic standards are being implemented in the Judean province. He's charged with appointing scribes and judges to administer civil and moral order. He has the backing of the Persian empire to institute mosaic law as the standard and norm for the community in Jerusalem. And this is standard operating procedure for the Persians to find loyal subjects to regulate their own local cults, according to ancestral traditions. And Ezra's work needs to be understood in that light. Chapter 7, for you are commissioned by the king and his seven advisors to regulate Judah and Jerusalem according to the law of your God, which is in your care. And you, Ezra, by the divine wisdom you possess appoint magistrates and judges to judge all the people of the province of beyond the river, C. Jordan, who know the laws of your God, and to teach those who do not know them. Ezra does not obey the law of your God and the law of the king, be punished with dispatch, so he has powers of enforcement, whether by death, corporal punishment, confiscation of possessions, or imprisonment. In addition, Ezra's appointed to bring treasures of silver and gold to the temple. The text says that Ezra brings with him a copy of the mosaic Torah in order to regulate and unify Jewish life in the Restoration community. And together, Ezra and Nehemiah bring about a revival. Ezra's reforms are aimed at strengthening the religious identity of the Judahites. He wants to revitalize morale, and he also wants to prevent the decline of mosaic standards and to prevent the decline of biblical monotheism. His two most important acts are the dissolution of foreign marriages, this is a first, and his renewal of the covenant. Say a little bit first about the dissolution of foreign marriages. Ezra is said to have been distressed when he arrived to discover that many of the returned exiles had married with, we think, non-Israelite women. It's not clear. Sometimes peoples of the land might refer to Judeans who had remained behind, but who themselves had perhaps become lax in Ezra's eyes in their observance of mosaic standards. But they had married women who seemed to follow pagan practices, perhaps. Chapters 9 and 10 describe his efforts to reverse this and he begs God to forgive the people for this violation of his law, and then at a great assembly he calls upon all the people to divorce their foreign spouses. Now, this isn't, in fact, Pentateuchal law, plainly read. The prohibition of marriage with any foreigner is a great innovation on Ezra's part, and it's one that, as we shall see, was not universally accepted at all.  Even priests were among those who didn't view intermarriage, per se, as a violation of the covenant. And in the next two lectures we'll see other perspectives on this question of integration of foreign groups within the community. So I raise it as an issue now. We're going to see many different attitudes as we move through the last section of the Bible. The text of Ezra's prayer before God is a fascinating presentation of Ezra's interpretation of Israel's history and prior texts, and again constitutes yet another response to the calamity that had befallen the nation, but also constitutes another example of interbiblical interpretation, later levels or layers within the biblical text turning to older traditions and interpreting them or reinterpreting them. So listen to how Ezra understands biblical tradition and listen to how he interprets Israel's history. This is from Ezra 9. He's praying to God before the assembled people. From the time of your fathers to this very day, we have been deep in guilt. Because of our iniquities, we, our kings and our priests, have been handed over to foreign kings, to the sword, to captivity, to pillage and to humiliation, as is now the case. But now, for a short while, there has been a reprieve from the Lord our God, who has granted us a surviving remnant, remember the prophetic idea of a remnant that would survive, and given us a stake in his holy place. Our God has restored the luster to our eyes and furnished us with a little sustenance in our bondage.  The land that you are about to possess is a land unclean through the uncleanness of the peoples of the land, through their abhorrent practices, with which they in their impurity have filled it from one end to the other. Now then, do not give your daughters and marriage to their sons, or let their daughters marry your sons. Do nothing for their well-being or advantage. Then you will be strong and enjoy the bounty of the land and bequeath it to your children forever," unquote. So he's quoting earlier tradition.  Will you not rage against us till we are destroyed without remnant or survivor? So Ezra's argument is, first of all, following the Deuteronomistic line. History reflects God's judgment. Israel's tragic fate is because of her sins. And indeed, she's been given a mercy and a reprieve. She hasn't been punished as fully as she deserves. He also follows the prophetic line that this remnant has been saved and now restored. So the covenant hasn't been completely abrogated. But notice his identification of the sin for which Israel was punished. Israel has mixed in, and this is the language that he uses elsewhere, Israel has mixed in, has mixed holy seed with common seed by uniting through marital unions with the peoples of the land, meaning foreigners certainly, but possibly also some of these Judeans who had remained in the land during the exile and who seemed to have adopted some of the customs of their neighbors. And if history is any guide, he's warning, the community is placing itself at great risk by intermarrying again. And those who will, intermarrying with those who will lead them into the worship of other gods and the performance of abhorrent practices. And surely, he says, this time God will not be so merciful as to spare even a remnant. So learn from history. We sinned once by intermarrying. That was the sin for which we have been exiled. If we do the same thing again this time, we will be punished without any hope of a remnant. So, his interpretation of mosaic prescriptions about marriage is an expansive one. The Torah does prohibit intermarriage with the native Canaanites at the time of the conquest, the rationale being that they would lead Israelites into abhorrent pagan practices, child sacrifices, and so on. But of course, there is actually a legal provision for how to go about marrying a captive Canaanite woman. So it's not a completely unqualified prohibition to begin with. The Torah then also prohibits intermarriage with certain very specific foreigners, Moabites and Ammonites specifically, because of their cruel treatment of the Israelites during their trek from Egypt to the promised land. Egyptians are prohibited only to the third generation. But there's no prohibition against marriage with other foreigners, you know, of Phoenician and Arab. So long as they enter into the Covenant of Yahweh, as long as they don't lead the Israelite partner into the worship of other gods, the rationale for intermarriage prohibitions in the Pentateuch are always behavioral, right? They're always moral. If this person will lead you astray to abhorrent practices, that is prohibited. But marriage into the group is not prohibited. Indeed, Israel's kings married foreign women regularly. Many of the kings of Israel were themselves offspring of these foreign women. They were still fully Israelite. Israelite identity passed through the male line. But Ezra, who is protective of Israel's religious identity, is zealous for the Lord, is wary of God's wrath. He's interpreting and promulgating these prohibitions in such a way as to create a general ban on intermarriage of any kind. Israel mustn't make the same mistake twice. Israelite identity is now made contingent in Ezra's view on the status of both the mother and the father. One is only in Israelite if one is both an Israelite mother and an Israelite father. Both must be of the holy seed. This is a phrase which is being coined now in Israel's time and is now serving as a rationale for intermarriage, the ban on intermarriage. It's not that a person is prohibited because they will lead you astray to the worship of other gods. That's something that can be corrected if the person in fact enters into the religious community of Israel. The rationale is that they simply are not of holy seed, and there's nothing that you can do to change that. So, this becomes a permanent and universal ban. So, that's the first very important thing that Ezra tries to do, the dissolution of marriage with foreign spouses and to establish a blanket universal ban on intermarriage, to make Israelite identity dependent on the Israelite status, the native Israelite status of both mother and father. Second deed is the renewal of the Mosaic Covenant. And this act is reported in Nehemiah 8. There's an extended public reading of the Torah of Moses, and that's followed then by a renewal of the Mosaic Covenant. When the seventh month arrived, the Israelites being settled in their towns, the entire people assembled as one man in the square before the Watergate, and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring the scroll of the teaching of Moses with which the Lord had charged Israel. On the first day of the seventh month, Ezra the priest brought the teaching before the congregation, men and women and all who could listen with understanding. He read from it, facing the square before the Watergate, to the men and the women and those who could understand. The ears of all the people were given to the scroll of the teaching. The word here is Torah. Ezra the scribe stood upon a wooden tower made for the purpose. Ezra opened the scroll in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people. As he opened it, all the people stood up. Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, Amen, amen, with hands upraised. The leaders and the Levites explained the teaching to the people while the people stood in their places. They read from the scroll of the teaching of God, translating it, and giving the sense, so they understood the reading. Apparently, the assembled people no longer understood the classical Hebrew of the Bible, if it was formulated in that. I mean, what he was actually, what is this scroll? I mean, this is the first time now that we're hearing about the Torah as a scroll and being read to people. So this is historically quite fascinating. But the people don't seem to be able to understand it. Ezra and his assistants are probably translating it into Aramaic, which is now the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, giving the sense of the text perhaps as it's being read. We really can't be certain what it is that Ezra was presenting as the Torah of Moses. It may have been the Pentateuch basically in the form that we now have it. Both D and P are very strongly reflected in Ezra. He quotes from them, he refers to them, and then interprets and applies them in new and interesting ways. And in any event, this Torah was to become the basis and the standard with a lot of good, heavy Persian imperial support for the Jewish community from that time forward. And at a festival celebration a few weeks later, there was an additional public teaching of the Law and a recital of Israel's history that once again laid special emphasis on Israel's obligations, what she owed to Yahweh. The recitation of that history is found in Nehemiah 9, and again as an interpretation of the calamities that Israel had faced, it's consistent with the earlier prayer of Ezra that I read. God has withheld nothing from Israel, yet Israel has defied God, rebelled against him, killed the prophets who had urged them to turn back to the Covenant. And God tolerated Israel's sin as long as he possibly could, but finally he had to punish her. But even so, in his great compassion, God didn't abandon Israel completely. Verse 33 of this prayer then turns and addresses God, Surely you are in the right with respect to all that has come upon us, for you have acted faithfully and we have been wicked. So again, this justification of God and blaming of the Israelites for all that has befallen them and learning a lesson for that in the future, no intermarriage. All of this is but a prelude then to the people's reaffirmation and renewed commitment to the Covenant, and it's spelled out in great detail in Nehemiah 10. In view of all this, we make this pledge and put it in writing. And then there follows a list of all the officials, the Levites, the priests, the heads of the people, and it says that all of these officials and leaders in conjunction join with the people, verse 30 and 31, they join with their noble brothers and take an oath with sanctions to follow the teaching of God, given through Moses the servant of God, and to observe carefully all the commandments of the Lord our God, His rules and laws. Namely, we will not give our daughters in marriage to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our sons. So we then read the various obligations that the people are committing themselves to, and these include observance of the Sabbath day and the Sabbath year as well as supplying the needs of and the upkeep of the temple. But it's surely significant that the ban on intermarriage and the observance of the Sabbath top the list. Tonight we are going to commit ourselves again to God's teachings, His rules and laws, namely, we won't intermarry and we'll observe the Sabbath. So these are singled out as the top, at the top of the list, as central covenantal obligations. And chapter 13 describes Nehemiah's efforts to see that the people live up to this pledge. And he scurries around Jerusalem. He's enforcing the cessation of work on the Sabbath. He's persuading individuals to give up their foreign wives. Ezra and Nehemiah were zealous in their promotion of the renewed covenant. And in their view, the centerpiece of the covenant was the ban on intermarriage and the observance of the Sabbath. And it is interesting that these two phenomena, in addition to circumcision, will emerge as the three identifying features of a Jew in the ancient world. When you look at external literature, there are circumcised people. There's one day of the week that they don't work and they don't marry outside their group. These are the themes that you start to see in writings of ancient Greeks and so on when they talk about this people. Ezra and Nehemiah's reforms can be seen as a direct response to the events of Israel's history. What's happened before just cannot be allowed to happen again. And they view the tragic history as a cautionary tale. It's calling upon the people to make the necessary changes to avoid a repeat disaster. There's only one way to guarantee that Israel will never again be destroyed. She has to live up to the covenant she failed to honor in the past. She has to rededicate herself to the covenant, and this time she has to be single-minded in her devotion to God, because history has shown that God will punish faithlessness and betrayal. Israel can't be led astray by the beliefs and practices of her neighbors, and so a strict policy of separation has to be enforced if Israel is going to finally be cured of the desire for idols. And again, it's interesting that in the Jewish tradition is that the flirtation with idolatry, which had plagued Israel in the first temple period, ceased to exist in the second temple period. So again, this is another area in which Jews earn for themselves a reputation and antiquity. They have a reputation for their strict monotheism, their scrupulous avoidance of foreign gods. They will not bow down to another God. There is this people that doesn't enter Mary. They don't work one day a week, and they won't bow down to our kings or to other gods. There is this people in writing in this period. But Ezra and Nehemiah, backed by Persian imperial authority, helped to create and preserve, create and preserve, not just preserve, create and preserve a national and religious identity for Jews at a precarious time. Their reforms were not universally welcomed. Already, even in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which give a very sympathetic account of their work, obviously, we can see rumblings and discontent, etc. There are other works that are going to express opposition to the separatism of Ezra and Nehemiah. Isaiah 56 verses 1-7, an interesting passage that states quite explicitly, that foreigners who have joined themselves to God are welcome. They are welcome in the temple. They are welcome even to minister before God. There is a good deal of historical evidence for the assimilation of foreigners within the Jewish community going on all the time. Non-Jews became Jews. They married Jews. We know of one family, the Tobayed family, quite influential. They were originally an Ammonite family. Now, that is a group that is explicitly prohibited from entering the congregation in Deuteronomy. But this is a family that adopted Jewish identity, became fully assimilated. Clearly, there's great difference of opinion on this matter. In the last two lectures, we're going to be focusing a lot on the diversity of approaches to the whole question of Israelite Jewish identity and relationship to the Gentile world. So, although under Ezra, the Torah became the official and authoritative norm for Israel, although under Ezra, Judaism took the decisive step towards becoming a religion of Scripture based on the scriptural text, this did not in itself result in a single uniform set of practices or beliefs. Adopting the Torah as a communal norm simply meant that practices and beliefs were deemed to be authentic to the Jewry, that they accorded with the sense of Scripture. An interpretation of Scripture varied dramatically so that widely divergent groups now, in the Persian period and as we move into the Hellenistic period, widely divergent groups will claim biblical warrant for their specific practices and beliefs. So, in short, Ezra may have unified Israel around a common text, but he didn't unify them around a common interpretation of that text. Alright, when we come back, we'll be looking at about four more books, all of which set up very interesting and different views on some of these basic questions.


This is the last day of this college. And I know that for the next life, everyone has thought about something. Indian parents, rich or poor, dream of a college education for their children. And it is true that even though we are a very poor country, many more Indian families are sending their kids to college now. The government's data tells us that there were about 41 million students enrolled in higher education institutions in 2020-21. That is about 20% of young people between their age group of 18-24 which are mostly the college and university going years. That is an impressive number for a country where we know that the buying classes are not even 5% of the population. So why is college education so important? Because people believe it opens doors to a better life, to fame and fortune. But does going to college give you a better chance of getting a job? Yes it does. If we take people in the working age population of 15 years or more, out of these people who have a college or a higher degree, 51% of them have a job. Of the remaining, those who studied less, only 36% have work. Clearly if you have a college degree or higher, you have a better chance than the rest of getting work. You might say 51% is not really that great a number. Well you have to remember that many of those with college degrees might still be enrolled in university trying to get higher degrees. So someone who has a college degree might be doing a master's degree right now or even a PhD and they might not be looking for a job. Then there are women who have college and university degrees who don't work, they don't look for work because as we know in India, women's participation in the labour force is abysmally low. In fact CMI gives us data on how many people in the working age population are actively looking for work or will work if they get it. That is the number of people who want to work. CMI calls this the greater labour force. We have data for the first 4 months of 2023 and this is what it looks like. The number of people with graduate or postgraduate degrees is about 99 million. Out of these, a little over 63 million make up the greater labour force. There are people who are either actively seeking work or will work if they get a job. That is they want to work. Now here's the rough. Only about 51 million people with college or university degrees actually had any work in the first 4 months of this year. More than 12 and a half million graduates and post graduates or 22% of those who want work are unemployed. CMI calls this the greater unemployment rate or the unemployment rate amongst not only those who are actively seeking work but also those who will work if they get it. This is a much more accurate unemployment rate in a country like ours where a lot of people stop looking for work for employment after spending years not getting any work. As I said, this greater unemployment rate amongst graduates and post graduates is a whopping 22%. That is double what it is amongst those who have less education. Now you might say that I'm contradicting myself. I said earlier that people with graduate and postgraduate degrees have a much better chance of getting work but at the same time I'm now saying that those with college and university degrees have a higher unemployment rate. How can both be true? But before I give you the answer, just do me a favour. Take 2 seconds and press the subscribe button at the bottom of your screen and also click on the bell icon so that you get to know as soon as our next video drops. Okay, back to the question. How can a college degree give you a better chance of getting a job but at the same time how is it possible for the unemployment rate to be higher amongst those with college degrees? Both are true. That is because the labour force participation rate amongst those with less education is much lower than that of graduates and post graduates. As I said earlier, 66% of those who have college and university degrees want work whereas only 40% of those with lesser education either actively look for work or are willing to work if they get it and the unemployment rate is calculated only amongst those who want work not amongst those who are not working. But that 22% unemployment rate amongst graduates and post graduates that's a dangerous number and it has been steadily rising. In 2017-18, the greater unemployment rate amongst those with college or university degrees was about 14%. That rose to about 15.5% in 2018-19. It rose even further to more than 16.5% the dairy next year then during COVID, the unemployment rate amongst graduates and post graduates exploded to nearly 25% understandable. It recovered slightly the next year, fell further to a shade below 20% in 2022-23 but has now gone back to 22% in the first 4 months of this year. That is more than the average unemployment rate in the US between 1930-1935 right after the Great Depression which was the worst unemployment phase in US history. This is an explosive situation which has only been getting worse. All the stock of our demographic dividend is meaningless if getting higher education doesn't guarantee you a job but sadly no one seems to care. Neither the government nor the media nor the very people who are affected by unemployment. I'll leave you with that thought. If you have liked this video, please show it by pressing the like button and by sharing this video amongst your friends and family and also with that WhatsApp uncle who sends you forwards every day about how great India's economy is doing. Until next time, goodbye.


And now, for your U.S. Army Europe spotlight. It's not that we, the United States Army Europe, have all the good ideas. We can learn from one another, and that's the environment that we're trying to create to make our armies better for our soldiers.