Lesson
The Return from Exile
Cyrus decrees the rebuilding in his first year. The temple is finished in Darius's sixth year, 515 BC. Ezra and Nehemiah come under Artaxerxes, if the first of that name, in 458 and 445.
October 7, 2026
In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, the LORD stirs him, and he makes a proclamation. The LORD, the God of heaven, has given him all the kingdoms of the earth and has charged him to build a house at Jerusalem. Whoever is among His people, let him go up. The heads of the families rise. Cyrus brings out the vessels Nebuchadnezzar had put in his own temple. Sheshbazzar is named to carry them. Zerubbabel and Jeshua build the altar in the seventh month and keep the Feast of Booths, before the foundation of the temple is even laid.
When the builders lay the foundation, the old men who had seen the first house weep, and many shout, and the sound is one sound so that a listener cannot tell weeping from joy. The peoples of the land offer to help and are refused, because Cyrus charged the returned exiles, not them. Then the neighbors hire counselors to frustrate the work, all the days of Cyrus and into the reign of Darius. A letter to a later king even gets the work stopped for a time. The chronology of that letter is one of the harder paragraphs in Ezra, and honest readers notice it. The main line of the building does not depend on forcing every name in chapter 4 into one decade.
Haggai, Zechariah, and a finished house
In the second year of Darius, the sixth month, the word of the LORD comes by Haggai. The people say the time has not come to rebuild. They live in paneled houses. His house lies in ruins. They obey. Work starts on the twenty-fourth day of the sixth month. Zechariah's night visions come in the same season, the eighth month of that second year, and on into the fourth year. Tattenai the governor writes to Darius to check whether Cyrus really decreed this. A search in the archives finds the memorandum. Darius orders the work to continue, paid from the royal revenue. The house is finished on the third day of the month Adar, in the sixth year of Darius. They keep and the Feast of Unleavened Bread with joy, because the LORD had made them joyful and had turned the heart of the king of Assyria to them. The narrator can call a Persian king the king of Assyria. He is talking about the empire that holds the old seat of power, not making a mistake about a man's nationality.
Darius I began to reign in 522 BC. His sixth year, and Adar at the end of that year, is the spring of 515. This is one of the sure dates. The book names the day. Persia's years are known.
The law, and the wall
A long gap follows in the narrative. In the seventh year of Artaxerxes, Ezra the scribe comes from Babylon, the law of God in his hand, with a letter that lets him spend temple money and appoint judges. If this Artaxerxes is the first, who reigned from 465, the year is 458. He finds the returned people married into the peoples of the land, he tears his garment, he prays, and the people agree to put the marriages away. The scene is severe. It is about the holy people not dissolving the line the promise runs through, in a generation that had just been sent home for that kind of dissolving. It is not a slogan for every later marriage.
In the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, in Nisan, Nehemiah is cupbearer in Susa. His brother says the wall of Jerusalem is broken and the gates burned. Nehemiah weeps, fasts, and prays. The king notices his face and asks. Nehemiah prays a the length of a breath and asks to go. The king sends him. If this is Artaxerxes I, the year is 445. He inspects the wall at night. Families build section by section. Sanballat mocks. The builders work with a tool in one hand, and half of them hold spears. The wall is finished in fifty-two days, on the twenty-fifth of Elul. Ezra reads the law from dawn until midday. The people weep. They are told the day is holy, and the joy of the LORD is their strength. They keep Booths as it had not been kept since the days of Joshua.
Malachi speaks into a temple that is standing and a priesthood that is bored, sniffing at the offerings and calling the table of the LORD contemptible. He promises a messenger who will prepare the way, and the Lord who will come to His temple. He names no king. Putting him near Nehemiah, about 430, is an estimate. He is the last prophetic book before the long quiet. The quiet is the next lesson, and it is not the same thing as God leaving.
The Cyrus Cylinder shows that Cyrus sent conquered peoples and their gods home after Babylon fell. It does not name Jerusalem or the LORD. It fits the kind of decree Ezra 1 records ().
This lesson's home is Timeline.