(536—516 B.C.)
Cyrus the Great took Babylon and the Babylonian Empire in 539. Upon the eve of his conquest the Second Isaiah had hailed him as the Liberator of the people of God and the builder of their Temple. The Return of the Exiles and the Restoration both of Temple and City were predicted by the Second Isaiah for the immediate future; and a Jewish historian, the Compiler of the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, who lived about 300 B.C., has taken up the story of how these events came to pass from the very first year of Cyrus onward. Before discussing the dates and proper order of these events, it will be well to have this Chronicler’s narrative before us. It lies in the first and following chapters of our Book of Ezra.
According to this, Cyrus, soon after his conquest of Babylon, gave permission to the Jewish exiles to return to Palestine, and between forty and fifty thousand[546] did so return, bearing the vessels of Jehovah’s house which the Chaldeans had taken away in 586. These Cyrus delivered to Sheshbazzar, prince of Judah[547] (who is further described in an Aramaic document incorporated by the Compiler of the Book of Ezra as “Peḥah,” or provincial governor,[548] and as laying the foundation of the Temple[549]), and there is also mentioned in command of the people a Tirshatha, probably the Persian Tarsâta,[550] which also means provincial governor. Upon their arrival at Jerusalem, the date of which will be immediately discussed, the people are said to be under Jeshu’a ben Jōṣadak[551] and Zerubbabel ben She’altî’el,[552] who had already been mentioned as the head of the returning exiles,[553] and who is called by his contemporary Haggai Peḥah, or governor, of Judah.[554] Are we to understand by Sheshbazzar and Zerubbabel one and the same person? Most critics have answered in the affirmative, believing that Sheshbazzar is but the Babylonian or Persian name by which the Jew Zerubbabel was known at court;[555] and this view is supported by the facts that Zerubbabel was of the house of David and is called Peḥah by Haggai, and by the argument that the command given by the Tirshatha to the Jews to abstain from eating the most holy things[556] could only have been given by a native Jew.[557] But others, arguing that Ezra v. 1, compared with vv. 14 and 16, implies that Zerubbabel and Sheshbazzar were two different persons, take the former to have been the most prominent of the Jews themselves, but the latter an official, Persian or Babylonian, appointed by Cyrus to carry out such business in connection with the Return as could only be discharged by an imperial officer.[558] This is, on the whole, the more probable theory.
If it is right, Sheshbazzar, who superintended the Return, had disappeared from Jerusalem by 521, when Haggai commenced to prophesy, and had been succeeded as Peḥah, or governor, by Zerubbabel. But in that case the Compiler has been in error in calling Sheshbazzar a prince of Judah.[559]
The next point to fix is what the Compiler considers to have been the date of the Return. He names no year, but he recounts that the same people, whom he has just described as receiving the command of Cyrus to return, did immediately leave Babylon,[560] and he says that they arrived at Jerusalem in the seventh month, but again without stating a year.[561] In any case, he obviously intends to imply that the Return followed immediately on reception of the permission to return, and that this was given by Cyrus very soon after his occupation of Babylon in 539—8. We may take it that the Compiler understood the year to be that we know as 537 B.C. He adds that, on the arrival of the caravans from Babylon, the Jews set up the altar on its old site and restored the morning and evening sacrifices; that they kept also the Feast of Tabernacles, and thereafter all the rest of the feasts of Jehovah; and further, that they engaged masons and carpenters for building the Temple, and Phœnicians to bring them cedar-wood from Lebanon.[562]
Another section from the Compiler’s hand states that the returned Jews set to work upon the Temple in the second month of the second year of their Return, presumably 536 B.C., laying the foundation-stone with due pomp, and amid the excitement of the whole people.[563] Whereupon certain adversaries, by whom the Compiler means Samaritans, demanded a share in the building of the Temple, and when Jeshua and Zerubbabel refused this, the people of the land frustrated the building of the Temple even until the reign of Darius, 521 ff.
This—the second year of Darius—is the point to which contemporary documents, the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah, assign the beginning of new measures to build the Temple. Of these the Compiler of the Book of Ezra says in the meantime nothing, but after barely mentioning the reign of Darius leaps at once[564] to further Samaritan obstructions—though not of the building of the Temple (be it noted), but of the building of the city walls—in the reigns of Ahasuerus, that is Xerxes, presumably Xerxes I., the successor of Darius, 485—464, and of his successor Artaxerxes I., 464—424;[565] the account of the latter of which he gives not in his own language but in that of an Aramaic document, Ezra iv. 8 ff. And this document, after recounting how Artaxerxes empowered the Samaritans to stop the building of the walls of Jerusalem, records[566] that the building ceased till the second year of the reign of Darius, when the prophets Haggai and Zechariah stirred up Zerubbabel and Jeshua to rebuild, not the city walls, be it observed, but the Temple, and with the permission of Darius this building was at last completed in his sixth year.[567] That is to say, this Aramaic document brings us back, with the frustrated building of the walls under Xerxes I. and Artaxerxes I. (485—424), to the same date under their predecessor Darius I., viz. 520, to which the Compiler had brought down the frustrated building of the Temple! The most reasonable explanation of this confusion, not only of chronology, but of two distinct processes—the erection of the Temple and the fortification of the city—is that the Compiler was misled by his desire to give as strong an impression as possible of the Samaritan obstructions by placing them all together. Attempts to harmonise the order of his narrative with the ascertained sequence of the Persian reigns have failed.[568]
Such then is the character of the compilation known to us as the Book of Ezra. If we add that in its present form it cannot be of earlier date than 300 B.C., or two hundred and thirty-six years after the Return, and that the Aramaic document which it incorporates is probably not earlier than 430, or one hundred years after the Return, while the List of Exiles which it gives (in chap. ii.) also contains elements that cannot be earlier than 430, we shall not wonder that grave doubts should have been raised concerning its trustworthiness as a narrative.
These doubts affect, with one exception, all the great facts which it professes to record. The exception is the building of the Temple between the second and sixth years of Darius I., 520—516, which we have already seen to be past doubt.[569] But all that the Book of Ezra relates before this has been called in question, and it has been successively alleged: (1) that there was no such attempt as the book describes to build the Temple before 520, (2) that there was no Return of Exiles at all under Cyrus, and that the Temple was not built by Jews who had come from Babylon, but by Jews who had never left Judah.
These conclusions, if justified, would have the most important bearing upon our interpretation of Haggai and Zechariah. It is therefore necessary to examine them with care. They were reached by critics in the order just stated, but as the second is the more sweeping and to some extent involves the other, we may take it first.