King James Version · The Persian return
Ezra 1
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Now in the first year of king of , that the word of might be fulfilled, stirred up of king of , that he made a proclamation throughout all , and put it also in writing, saying, Thus saith king of , of hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at , which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? his be with him, and let him go up to , which is in Judah, and build the of Israel, (he is the ,) which is in . And whosoever remaineth in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with , beside the freewill for the house of that is in . Then rose up the chief of the fathers of Judah and , and the priests, and the , with all them whose had , to go up to build the which is in . And all they that were about them strengthened their hands with vessels of silver, with gold, with goods, and with , and with precious things, beside all that was willingly offered. Also the king brought forth the vessels of the , which had brought forth out of , and had put them in the house of his gods; Even those did king of bring forth by the hand of the treasurer, and numbered them unto , the prince of Judah. And this is the number of them: thirty chargers of gold, a thousand chargers of silver, nine and twenty knives, 10Thirty basons of gold, silver basons of a second sort four hundred and ten, and other vessels a thousand. All the vessels of gold and of silver were five thousand and four hundred. All these did bring up with them of that were brought up from unto .
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · The Persian return, 539 BC to 332 BC ›
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.
- 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.