Return from Exile: Cyrus's Decree and the Second Temple

The return from exile was the movement of Judean exiles from Babylonia back to Jerusalem after the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC. According to the book of Ezra, Cyrus issued a decree in 538 BC permitting them to go home and rebuild their Temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed about fifty years earlier. The rebuilt Second Temple, completed around 515 BC, and the later reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah laid the foundations of Judaism as it developed over the following centuries.

Background: exile in Babylonia

In 597 BC and again after the siege of Jerusalem in 587/586 BC, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II deported part of Judah’s population, especially its royal family, priests, officials and craftsmen. The exiles were settled in communities in southern Mesopotamia, many of them near the city of Nippur.

Exile did not mean slavery in the modern sense. Families could farm, build houses and keep their own customs. Yet the loss of the Temple, the monarchy and the land prompted a deep rethinking of religious tradition, reflected in prophetic books such as Ezekiel and the later chapters of Isaiah.

Cyrus the Great and the fall of Babylon

Cyrus II of Persia rose from ruling a small kingdom in south-western Iran to creating the largest empire the world had yet seen. In October 539 BC his forces entered Babylon, as described in the article on the fall of Babylon to Cyrus. The last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, was captured.

Persian rule relied heavily on local elites and local religions. Rather than imposing a single faith, Cyrus presented himself to each people as a legitimate ruler chosen by their own gods. The second part of the book of Isaiah even calls him the Lord’s “anointed”, the only foreign king given that title in the Hebrew Bible.

The decree of 538 BC

The book of Ezra preserves two versions of Cyrus’s permission. The first, in Hebrew (Ezra 1), is a proclamation inviting any of the Lord’s people to go up to Jerusalem and rebuild the house of the God of Israel. The second, in Aramaic (Ezra 6), is a short administrative memorandum said to have been found later in the royal archive at Ecbatana. It orders the Temple to be rebuilt at royal expense and the gold and silver vessels taken by Nebuchadnezzar to be returned.

Historians generally accept that some form of royal permission existed, although the wording of the Hebrew proclamation may have been shaped by later Jewish writers. The Aramaic memorandum looks more like a genuine Persian document, but its authenticity is also debated.

The Cyrus Cylinder in context

The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay cylinder inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform, was found at Babylon in 1879 and is now in the British Museum. It praises Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon and states that he returned the images of gods to their sanctuaries and gathered their former inhabitants to resettle them.

The text refers only to cities in Mesopotamia and the regions around it. It does not mention Judah or the Jews. It is therefore best read as evidence of a broader Persian policy of restoring local cults, which makes the biblical account of permission plausible, not as a direct record of the Judean return.

The first returns and the rebuilding of the Temple

According to Ezra, the first group was led by Sheshbazzar, described as a prince of Judah, who brought back the Temple vessels. Later, leadership passed to Zerubbabel, a grandson of the exiled king Jehoiachin and governor of Judah, and to the high priest Joshua (also spelled Jeshua). The list in Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 counts 42,360 returnees plus 7,337 servants, but many scholars think it combines several waves spread over decades.

The returnees built an altar and laid the Temple foundations, but work soon stalled. The book of Ezra blames opposition from neighbouring peoples; poverty and a small population were probably also factors. Archaeology suggests that Jerusalem in the Persian period was a modest town, much smaller than before 587 BC.

Tension also arose between the returnees and people who had never left the land, including inhabitants of the region of Samaria to the north. The book of Ezra presents the returning exiles as the true community of Israel and describes their refusal of help from these neighbours. Historians see in this conflict the early roots of the later division between Jews and Samaritans.

In 520 BC, the second year of Darius I, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah urged the community to resume building. Tattenai, the Persian governor of the province “Beyond the River”, asked who had authorised the work, and according to Ezra a search of the archives confirmed Cyrus’s decree. The Second Temple was completed in the spring of about 515 BC and dedicated with sacrifices and a celebration of Passover.

Ezra and Nehemiah

Judah now formed a small Persian province called Yehud, which later issued its own silver coins marked with that name. In the fifth century BC two figures from the Babylonian Jewish community reshaped its life.

Ezra, a priest and scribe, arrived in the seventh year of a king Artaxerxes, carrying a royal letter authorising him to teach and enforce the law of Moses. If the king was Artaxerxes I, the date is 458 BC; a minority of scholars prefer Artaxerxes II and 398 BC. Nehemiah 8 describes Ezra reading the law aloud to the people from a wooden platform. He also demanded the dissolution of marriages between Judean men and foreign women, a policy that remains controversial.

Nehemiah, cupbearer to Artaxerxes I, was appointed governor and arrived in 445 BC. Despite opposition from Sanballat, governor of Samaria, and other regional leaders, he organised the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls, completed according to his memoir in 52 days. Papyri from the Jewish garrison at Elephantine in Egypt, written in 407 BC, mention the sons of Sanballat, confirming that he was a real historical figure.

Consequences

The return did not reverse the exile entirely. Many Jews remained in Babylonia, where business documents from the Murashu family archive at Nippur and the Al-Yahudu tablets record them in the fifth century BC. Others lived in Egypt. From this point onward Jewish history had both a homeland centre in Jerusalem and a large diaspora.

Within Judah, leadership increasingly passed to priests and scribes rather than kings. The Torah gained authority as a written law for the whole community, and many scholars think that major parts of the Hebrew Bible were edited in their present form during the Persian period. The Second Temple stood, with later rebuilding by Herod the Great, until the Romans destroyed it in AD 70.

Timeline

• 587/586 BC: Babylonians destroy Jerusalem and the First Temple.
• 539 BC, October: Cyrus the Great takes Babylon.
• 538 BC: Cyrus’s decree permits the return and the rebuilding of the Temple.
• 520 BC: Haggai and Zechariah urge the rebuilding to restart under Darius I.
• c. 515 BC, March: The Second Temple is completed.
• 458 BC (or 398 BC): Ezra arrives in Jerusalem with a royal mandate.
• 445 BC: Nehemiah becomes governor and rebuilds the city walls.
• c. 433/432 BC: Nehemiah goes back to the Persian court, later returning to Jerusalem for a second term.

Why it matters

The return from exile allowed a small community to rebuild its temple and institutions under Persian protection. Out of this period came the Second Temple, the authority of a written Torah and the pattern of a Jewish homeland linked to a wider diaspora. Cyrus’s reputation as a tolerant ruler, which later writers in Europe and the Middle East admired, owes much to the biblical memory of these events.