Return from Exile

In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia — 538 BC, the year after he had taken Babylon — the LORD "stirred up the spirit of Cyrus" (Ezra 1:1) to issue a decree allowing the captive peoples of the empire to return home and rebuild their temples. Ezra 1 preserves the text in Hebrew; a fuller Aramaic version appears in Ezra 6:3–5. The same policy is independently recorded on the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay barrel inscription now in the British Museum. About 50,000 Jews returned under Sheshbazzar and his nephew Zerubbabel of the Davidic line, together with the high priest Joshua (Jeshua). They restored the altar of burnt offering in the autumn of 537 and laid the foundation of the second Temple in 536, weeping at the small scale of the new house and yet shouting for joy (Ezra 3:11–13). The fulfilment is doubly remarkable: Jeremiah had foretold "seventy years" for the exile (Jer 25:11; 29:10) and the seventy years from 605 (the first deportation of Daniel) to 535 fit; and Isaiah had named Cyrus by name a century and a half earlier, calling him the LORD’s "shepherd" and "anointed" (Isa 44:28; 45:1).