Persia Frees the Exiles; A Smaller Temple Rises on the Ruined Mount

Yirmiyahu had promised seventy years, and the exiles in Babylon had been counting. Only a handful of them still remembered the Temple firsthand — children when the smoke went up, now old. Most had grown up beside the canals of Babylon, learned the local language, kept Shabbat behind closed doors, and told their own children about a House they themselves had never entered.

Persia conquered Babylon, and the new emperor Koresh — Cyrus — issued the decree. Any Jew who wished to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the House of God was free to go, and the Temple vessels that Nevuchadnetzar had carried east would be sent back with them.

Some 42,360 people made the journey. Zerubavel, a descendant of King David, led them together with Yehoshua the High Priest. They rebuilt the altar first, right in the ashes, so that the daily offering could resume while the House itself was still a plan. Their Samaritan neighbors sabotaged the work for years. A Persian court order halted it entirely for a while. A later Persian king finally renewed the permission, and the Second Temple slowly rose.

The book of Ezra records the day the foundation was laid. The young priests blew the trumpets. The Levi'im crashed the cymbals. The people shouted with a great shout. And the old men — the ones who had actually seen Shlomo's House as children — sat on the ground and wept out loud, so loudly that people in the fields could hear the noise but could not tell whether it was celebration or grief. It was both.

Ezra the Scribe came later with a second wave to teach Torah to a people who had begun to forget. Nechemiah came with a third and rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in fifty-two days — a sword in one hand, a trowel in the other, working through constant threats. The daily offering was back. But five things from the First Temple never returned. The Ark with the tablets inside it. The fire from the sky. The visible Presence in the innermost room. The Urim ve-Tumim, the breastplate that gave answers. And prophecy — after the last three prophets, Chaggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, no open prophet ever spoke in Israel again.

This is the House that would stand for four hundred and twenty years, and that would one day burn on the ninth of Av. Without knowing it was built at all, one cannot understand what falls in the year 70.