The First Return
Ezra 1:1 to 6:22

538 to 515

538 BC Cyrus was king of Persia (Ezra 1:1). He conquered Babylon and made Persia a world empire, confirming what Dani’el had prophesied (Dani’el 5:25-31). Darius was viceroy of Cyrus in Babylon at that time.

Leaders: Sheshbazzar and Zerubbabel

Decree of: Cyrus (538 BC) and Darius (520 BC)

Company: About 50,000

Purpose: Build the Temple

Problem: Samaritan opposition

Compiled by: The Chronicler from the Ezra memoirs
(to see link click Ac Ezra-Nehemiah From a Jewish Perspective: The Ezra Memoirs).

The volatile story of First and Second Kings, a matter of nearly five centuries, had ended tragically with the plunder of Jerusalem (see the commentary on Jeremiah Gb The Destruction of Solomon’s Temple on Tisha B’Av in 586 BC), the fall of the monarchy and the exile to Babylon of all that made Judah politically viable. It was a death to make way for a rebirth. So begins the Ezra-Nehemiah narrative that records the return from exile (see the commentary on Jeremiah GuSeventy Years of Imperial Babylonian Rule) to the Holy City of David and the beginnings of a new birth. As the drama unfolds, above all, and through all, we see the sovereign hand of ADONAI at work.

Forty-seven years after the Babylonians destroyed Yerushalayim and deported many of the Jews to exile in Babylon, Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, who had conquered the Babylonians and ruled most of the then-known world, allowed the Jews to return to their ancient homeland. They returned in waves. Sheshbazzar, the governor of Judea, led the first wave of people and laid the foundations of the House of God in Jerusalem (5:16). Not only did Cyrus permit the rebuilding, he even paid for much of it (Ezra 6:4). Then, years later, Zerubbabel, the Jewish governor (Haggai 1:1), returned with a second wave and actually rebuilt the Temple. The process took some time, some twenty-two years, continuing after Cyrus’s death. Darius confirmed the earlier monarch’s decree permitting the Temple to be rebuilt, despite Samaritan opposition (Ezra 4–6).

Sheshbazzar and Zerubbabel were the leaders of the First Return of settlers. In the eyes of the Persian government, and in any report submitted to it, Sheshbazzar, would be responsible for everything that was done. He was appointed governor by Cyrus (Ezra 5:14), but after transporting the Temple vessels back to Jerusalem, and supervising the laying of the foundations of the House of God (Ezra 5:15-16), he faded from the scene. After that, the people would have looked to Zerubbabel and Jeshua the high priest, their own fellow Jews and descendants of their kings and priests. So in Ezra 3:1-13 the rebuilding was rightly credited to Zerubbabel and Jeshua, whereas in 5:14-16, with equal justification, it is reported to the authorities as the work of Sheshbazzar, whose official responsibility it was, and whose name, rather than theirs, could be verified from the archives (5:17).

The greater part of the book of Ezra, though it bears his name, tells of the pioneers who came back from exile to Jerusalem before him. We shall not meet Ezra until Chapter 7. By then, some eighty years of settling into the Promised Land will have gone by, and he will come as a consolidator and reformer; not a Temple builder like his predecessor Zerubbabel, nor a rebuilder of walls like Nehemiah who came after him.11