Jerusalem: The Biography

Soon after, the King of Persia issued a decree that must have astonished the Jews: The Lord God hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he hath charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem. Who is there among you of all his people? Let him go up to Jerusalem and build the house of the Lord God of Israel.’

Not only was he sending the Judaean exiles home, and guaranteeing their rights and laws – the first ruler ever to do so – but he returned Jerusalem to them and offered to rebuild the Temple. Cyrus appointed Sheshbazzar, son of the last king, to govern Jerusalem, returning to him the Temple vessels. No wonder a Judaean prophet hailed Cyrus as the Messiah. ‘He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.’

Sheshbazzar led 42,360 exiles back to Jerusalem in the province of Yehud – Judah.^† The city was a wasteland after the magnificence of Babylon, but ‘Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion.’ wrote Isaiah, ‘put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city … Shake thyself from the dust … O captive daughter of Zion.’ However, the plans of Cyrus and the returning exiles were obstructed by the locals who had remained in Judaea and particularly Samaria.

Just nine years after the return from exile, Cyrus, still in his prime, was killed in battle in Central Asia. It was said that his victorious enemy dropped his head into a blood-filled wineskin to satiate his greedy thirst for the lands of others. His heir redeemed his body and buried him in a golden sarcophagus at Pasargadae (in southern Iran) where his tomb still stands. ‘He eclipsed all other monarchs, before him and since,’ wrote the Greek soldier Xenophon. Jerusalem had lost her protector.²²

DARIUS AND ZERUBBABEL: THE NEW TEMPLE

The fate of Cyrus’ empire, already larger than anything that had gone before, was decided close to Jerusalem. Cyrus’ son Cambyses II – Kambujiya – succeeded to the throne and in 525 marched through Gaza and across Sinai to conquer Egypt. Far away in Persia, his brother rebelled. On his way home to save his throne, Cambyses died mysteriously near Gaza; there, seven noble conspirators met on horseback to plan the seizure of the empire. They had not decided who would be their candidate, so they agreed that ‘the one whose horse was first to neigh after dawn should have the throne’. The horse of Darius, a young scion of one of the noble clans and Cambyses’ lance-bearer, was the first to neigh. Herodotus claimed that Darius cheated by ordering his groom to dip his fingers into a mare’s vulva: he then gave Darius’ horse a thrilling whiff at the vital moment. Thus Herodotus gleefully attributed the rise of an eastern despot to a venereal sleight of hand.

Aided by his six co-conspirators, Darius galloped eastwards, and succeeded in reconquering the entire Persian empire, suppressing rebellions in virtually every province. But the civil war ‘ceased the work of the house of God in Jerusalem unto the second year of the reign of Darius’. In about 520, Prince Zerubbabel, grandson of the last king of Judah, and his priest, Joshua, son of the last priest of the old Temple, set off from Babylonia to rescue Jerusalem.

Zerubbabel rededicated the altar on the Temple Mount, hiring artisans and buying Phoenician cedarwood to rebuild the Temple. Excited by the rising edifice, encouraged by the disorder in the empire, the Jews could not help but entertain messianic dreams of a new kingdom. ‘In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, I will take thee, O Zerubbabel, my servant … and make thee as a signet’, wrote the prophet Haggai, citing the Davidic signet-ring lost by Zerubbabel’s grandfather. Jewish leaders arrived from Babylon with gold and silver, hailing Zerubbabel (which means ‘Seed of Babylon’) as the ‘Shoot’ that ‘shall assume majesty and rule upon his throne’.

The local people, who lived around the city and to the north in Samaria, now wanted to join in with this sacred task and offered Zerubbabel their help, but the returning Exiles practised a new Judaism. They regarded these locals as half-heathens, disdaining them as the Am Ha-Aretz, ‘the people of the land’. Alarmed by the revival in Jerusalem or bribed by the locals, the Persian governor stopped the building.