539 BC to 332 BC
The Persian return
Persia takes Babylon and reverses its policy, sending exiled peoples home to rebuild their temples. Judah returns as a small province, rebuilding under imperial permission rather than independence.
539 to 332 BC
The world at this moment
What everyone else was doing while this part of the story was happening.
Persia
The largest empire the world had yet seen, from the Indus to the Aegean, run through provinces, a royal road, and a postal system. Its policy on conquered peoples was to send them home and fund their temples, in exchange for loyalty and prayers for the king. The Cyrus Cylinder states the policy in Cyrus's own words, and Ezra opens with the same policy applied to Judah.
Judah
A small, poor province called Yehud, a fraction of the old kingdom, with a rebuilt temple that made the people who remembered the first one weep. No king, and no prospect of one. Leadership passes to priests and scribes, which shapes everything afterward.
Greece
Persia and Greece collide at Marathon and Salamis, Persia loses, and Athens spends the following decades on the Parthenon, tragedy, and Socrates. Herodotus writes the first history in order to explain that war. Then Plato and Aristotle, whose vocabulary the church will still be using at Nicaea eight centuries later.
Further afield
Rome throws out its kings and becomes a republic. In India and China this is the age of the Buddha's early followers and of Confucian teaching taking hold. More of what the world still thinks with was invented in this era than in almost any other.
Ordinary life
Aramaic as the common language of the empire, and of the returned community. Coined money arrives, which is new. The books of the Hebrew Bible are being collected and edited into something close to their final shape, and public reading of the law becomes the centre of communal life.
What you would be reading
10 books sit here. Open any of them and every card in the margin will describe itself at this moment.
Who was alive
11 of the people written up in the Hall of Witnesses belong to this stretch of the story.
The Persian king whose policy was to send captive peoples home with their gods and their temple goods. For Judah that meant the end of exile. Isaiah names him as the LORD's shepherd and anointed, and a clay cylinder in the British Museum records his general policy in his own words.
A Jewish orphan raised by her cousin, taken into the Persian king's harem, and crowned queen. When Haman's plot threatened her people she risked an unsummoned approach to the throne, on the reasoning that she may have come to her position for exactly such a time.
A Jewish official at Susa who raised Esther, refused to bow to Haman, and uncovered an assassination plot that went unrewarded until the king could not sleep and had the records read to him.
The king's favorite, who took Mordecai's refusal to bow as grounds for exterminating every Jew in the empire, and was hanged on the gallows he had built for his enemy.
Cupbearer to the Persian king, who heard that Jerusalem's walls were still rubble and asked for leave to rebuild them. He organized the work by household, kept a weapon at hand against sabotage, and finished the wall in fifty-two days.
A scribe who set his heart to study the law, to do it, and to teach it. He led a second group of exiles home and read the law aloud to the assembled people, with others explaining it so everyone could understand.
The Persian king of the book of Esther, usually identified with Xerxes I. He is presented as impulsive and easily managed, signing away a whole people on a courtier's word and later reversing himself just as quickly.
Summoned to display her beauty before a hall of drunken men, she refused, and was deposed by royal decree so that no other wife in the empire would get ideas. Her refusal is what opens the position Esther is taken into.
The register of those who returned from Babylon, given twice at length in Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 and a third time in 1 Esdras. Roughly fifty thousand people, listed by family, by town, and by temple office.
The men who rebuilt Jerusalem's wall in fifty-two days, and the officials who tried to stop them. Sanballat governed Samaria, Tobiah was an Ammonite official with relatives inside the city, and Geshem was an Arab chief; the three of them worked by ridicule, then threat, then invitation to a meeting Nehemiah refused to attend.
The governor and the high priest who led the first returning exiles, laid the foundation of the second temple, and finished it under the preaching of Haggai and Zechariah.
The world as it stood
30 entries describe themselves differently at this moment than at any other. These are the same notes that appear in the margin while you read.
The land
Cities, regions, rivers, and kingdoms, as they stood.
A modest provincial town rebuilding under Persian permission, with a second temple finished in 516 BC and walls that stayed rubble until Nehemiah. Much smaller and poorer than before, and the old men who remembered the first temple wept when they saw the new foundation.
Its people are listed among those who came back and helped rebuild Jerusalem's wall, which is the sort of detail Nehemiah 3 preserves and nobody expects.
Taken by Cyrus in 539 BC, and thereafter a Persian administrative center rather than an imperial capital. The exiles are free to go home, though many stay, and a Jewish community remains in Mesopotamia for well over a thousand years.
The world power, and unusually good for Judah. Cyrus lets the exiles return and funds the rebuilding; later kings authorize Ezra's mission and Nehemiah's walls. The whole post-exilic community exists by imperial permission.
One of the four royal capitals, where the king wintered. The whole book of Esther happens in and around its citadel, and Nehemiah was serving there when the news came about Jerusalem's walls.
A small temple province called Yehud, a fraction of the old kingdom, governed under Persian appointment and paying imperial tax. The coins struck there carry the name in Aramaic.
Tobiah the Ammonite is one of the officials who tries to stop Nehemiah rebuilding the wall, showing the old rivalry still alive centuries later.
The peoples
A nation's name outlives its power, often by centuries.
Tobiah the Ammonite is one of the men working hardest to stop Nehemiah rebuilding the wall, and he had relatives and allies inside Jerusalem, which is why the opposition is so hard to shake off.
Haman is called an Agagite, which points back to the Amalekite king Saul spared. The book of Esther expects its readers to catch that and to hear an old story finishing.
Conquered by Cyrus in 539 BC and demoted from an empire to a province. Babylon the city survives and stays important; Babylon the power does not.
The empire, and the era takes its name from them. Their policy of returning captive peoples and restoring local temples is why Judah went home, and the Cyrus Cylinder records that policy in Cyrus' own words for Babylon.
Their language wins even though their kingdoms lost. Aramaic is the administrative tongue of the Persian empire, which is why parts of Ezra and Daniel are written in it.
Actively opposing the rebuilding of Jerusalem, which Ezra and Nehemiah both record. Their own temple on Mount Gerizim is built in this period.
Distant and barely relevant, mentioned by the prophets as a far country that buys slaves. Daniel's visions look ahead to them.
A recognized people within the empire, with a rebuilt temple and a legal charter, as the book of Esther and the decrees in Ezra both assume.
The question sharpens. Ezra and Nehemiah press for separation to keep a small community from dissolving, while Ruth and Jonah sit in the same scriptures pointing hard the other way. The tension is in the text, not imposed on it.
Return in small numbers and become the teaching class of the restored community, reading and explaining the law to people who by now spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew.
The tribes
Where each stood, and which of them can still be traced.
Return with the exiles in noticeably small numbers, and Ezra has to send back for more. They rebuild the service of the second temple and take on the teaching and singing that the community's life now runs on.
Worship and institution
The temple in Ezra is not the temple in Kings, and neither is the one Jesus taught in.
Nehemiah finds traders setting up outside Jerusalem on the sabbath, shuts the city gates against them, and threatens to lay hands on anyone who camps outside waiting for morning.
Kept by the returned community as soon as the second temple is finished. A Jewish garrison far away at Elephantine in Egypt left letters arguing about how to observe it correctly, which is a rare glimpse of ordinary practice outside the biblical record.
Nehemiah describes Ezra reading the law aloud from a wooden platform while others moved among the people explaining it. That is the essential shape of a synagogue service, several centuries before there is a word for the building.
Ezra is introduced as a scribe skilled in the law of Moses, and the title now means an authority on the text rather than a man who writes for a living.
With no king, the high priest becomes head of the community as well as of the cult, dealing directly with the Persian governor. The office begins carrying political weight it was never designed to hold.
Taxation is imperial, paid in silver and in kind. Nehemiah records families mortgaging their fields and selling their children into service to meet the king's tax, and treats it as an emergency.
Language for a resurrection out of it appears, most clearly in Daniel, where many who sleep in the dust of the earth awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame.
Applied to Cyrus, a foreign king who never worshipped the God of Israel, in Isaiah 45. It is startling and deliberate: the anointed one is whoever God uses.
Saying it begins to be avoided out of reverence, and readers substitute Adonai, my Lord. This is why English Bibles print LORD in small capitals: they are marking the name and following the substitution in the same stroke.
Rebuilt and finished around 516 BC, on the old site and at a fraction of the old glory. Ezra records that men old enough to remember the first one wept aloud when the foundation of the second was laid, while others shouted for joy, and nobody could tell the two sounds apart.
The gods of the nations
What was actually on offer, and how strong the pull was just then.
Gone as a live temptation. The failures the post-exilic prophets name are intermarriage, sabbath-breaking, withheld tithes, and neglect of the temple. Nobody is accused of serving Baal any more. Whatever else the exile did, it ended that.
Isaiah pictures Bel and Nebo being loaded onto pack animals as the city falls, a heavy burden for tired beasts. The whole point of the image is that these are gods that have to be carried rather than gods who carry.
And then
Alexander crosses into Asia and the Persian empire falls in a handful of years, and the Near East begins speaking Greek.