REBUILDING JERUSALEM

Much of Jerusalem was a pile of rubble

When Cyrus, king of Persia, came to the throne he reversed the policies of his predecessors.

He issued an edict permitting the Judean exiles in Babylon to return to their native land and reconstruct their Temple. He even restored the sacred vessels and furniture that had been looted from the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar years ago.

There must have been jubilation, and high hopes. Several tens of thousands of Judahites in Babylon made the four months'  journey of 800-900 miles back to their homeland - though many others remained the the civilized east.

The Babylonians had left Jerusalem alone. There were no settlers from other lands, or interlopers, in the city. But it was a ruin, a pile of rubble. The returning exiles, fresh from the sophisticated cities of Babylonia, must have come down to earth with a thud.

 A ruined city - not unlike Jerusalem as it would have been when the exiles returned. But curiously enough, this is Babylon as it was when first excavated by Robert Koldewey at the beginning of the 20th century. The photograph shows the famous Processional Way, with remains of the Ishtar Gate in the middle distance.

 The reconstructed Ishtar Gate from Babylon, now held in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The exiles returned from a splendid, sophisticated Babylon
to the ruins of Jerusalem.

Most of them had been born in exile and grown up in Babylonia. Jerusalem must have seemed alien, impoverished, bleak.

When the prophet Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem he kept his identity hidden, remaining incognito for three days so that he could move around freely. Then he went out alone one night to ride around the walls.

He described the old fortifications of the city 'with their gaps and burned-out gates'. He complained that he could not even find  a path for his horse (Nehemiah 2:3).

Next day he approached the city elders, urging them to act. He was able to inspire and harry them into building new walls for the city in a record fifty-two days - an extraordinary feat.

The people of Jerusalem deferred building a new Temple for almost twenty years. They had to establish themselves in their new land first - building a new Temple was an expensive undertaking. 

 But eventually they began work: 

'And all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised Yahweh, because the foundation of the house of Yahweh was laid.
But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers' houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the people's weeping.' (Ezra 3:11-13)

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