Page "History of ancient Israel and Judah" Paragraph 28

Yehud's population over the entire period was probably never more than about 30, 000, and that of Jerusalem no more than about 1, 500, most of them connected in some way to the Temple.

According to the biblical history, one of the first acts of Cyrus, the Persian conqueror of Babylon, was to commission the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, a task which they are said to have completed c. 515.

Yet it was probably only in the middle of the next century, at the earliest, that Jerusalem again became the capital of Judah.

The Persians may have experimented initially with ruling Yehud as a Dividic client-kingdom under descendants of Jehoiachin, but by the mid – 5th century BCE Yehud had become in practice a theocracy, ruled by hereditary High Priests and a Persian-appointed governor, frequently Jewish, charged with keeping order and seeing that tribute was paid.

According to the biblical history Ezra and Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem in the middle of the 5th century BCE, the first empowered by the Persian king to enforce the Torah, the second with the status of governor and a royal mission to restore the walls of the city.

The biblical history mentions tension between the returnees and those who had remained in Yehud, the former rebuffing the attempt of the " peoples of the land " to participate in the rebuilding of the Temple ; this attitude was based partly on the exclusivism which the exiles had developed while in Babylon and, probably, partly on disputes over property.

The careers of Ezra and Nehemiah in the 5th century BCE were thus a kind of religious colonisation in reverse, an attempt by one of the many Jewish factions in Babylon to create a self-segregated, ritually pure society inspired by the prophesies of Ezekiel and his followers.