An Old Man Weeping at the Foundation of a Smaller House

Seventy years. Yirmiyahu had said seventy years, and the exiles in Babylon had been counting. A very few of them — the ones who had been small children when the smoke went up — could still remember the Temple. Most had never seen it. They had grown up beside the canals of Babylon, learned the language, kept Shabbat behind closed doors, and told their children about a House they themselves had never walked into.

Then Persia conquered Babylon, and the new emperor, Koresh (Cyrus), made an announcement. Any Jew who wanted to go home to Jerusalem and rebuild the House of Hashem was free to go. And the Temple objects that Nevuchadnetzar had stolen were to be returned with them.

About 42,360 people went. Zerubavel led them, a descendant of King David, together with Yehoshua the High Priest. They rebuilt the altar first, right in the ashes, so that the daily offering could start again while the House itself was still just an idea. Their Samaritan neighbors sabotaged the work for years. A Persian court order stopped it entirely for a while. Then a later Persian king gave permission again, and the Second Temple slowly went up.

The book of Ezra describes the day they laid the foundation. The young priests blew the trumpets. The Levi'im crashed the cymbals. The people shouted with a great shout. And the old men — the old men who had actually seen Shlomo's House as children — sat on the ground and cried out loud. They cried so loudly that people far away in the fields could hear the noise but couldn't tell if it was happy shouting or sad shouting. It was both.

Later, Ezra the Scribe came with a second wave to teach Torah to a people who had begun to forget. Then Nechemiah came with a third wave 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 came back. The Aron with the tablets inside it. The fire from the sky. The visible Presence in the innermost room. The special breastplate that spoke back with 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 will stand for four hundred and twenty years and will one day burn on the ninth of Av. Without knowing it was built at all, you can't understand what falls in the year 70.