World English Bible · The Persian return
Zechariah 5
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Then again I lifted up my eyes and saw, and behold, a flying . He said to me, "What do you see?" I answered, "I see a flying ; its length is twenty , and its width ten ." Then he said to me, "This is the that goes out over the surface of the whole land, for everyone who steals according to it on the one side; and everyone who swears falsely according to it on the other side. I will cause it to go out," of Armies, "and it will enter into the house of the thief, and into the house of him who swears falsely by my name; and it will in the middle of his house, and will destroy it with its timber and its stones." Then who talked with me came forward and said to me, "Lift up now your eyes and see what this is that is appearing." I said, "What is it?" He said, "This is the ephah basket that is appearing." He said moreover, "This is their appearance in all the land— and behold, a lead cover weighing one was lifted up—and there was a woman sitting in the middle of the ephah basket." He said, "This is Wickedness;" and he threw her down into the middle of the ephah basket; and he threw the lead weight on its . Then I lifted up my eyes and saw, and behold, there were two women; and the wind was in their . Now they had like the of a stork, and they lifted up the ephah basket between earth and . 10Then I said to who talked with me, "Where are these carrying the ephah basket?" He said to me, "To build her a house in the land of . When it is prepared, she will be set there in her own place."
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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.