deserts, tribes and empires 13
bury the kings of Media, Persia and Parthia even now, and the person to
whose care it is entrusted is a Jewish priest; and this custom is observed
to this very day.’^13
In the first year of the reign of Cyrus, Josephus tells his readers, the
king was inspired by an ancient prophecy which he read in the book of
Isaiah (which had been composed 210 years earlier) to restore the Jew-
ish exiles to their land:
Thus says King Cyrus. Since the Most High God has appointed me king of
the habitable world, I am persuaded that he is the god whom the Israelite
nation worships, for he foretold my name through the prophets and that I
should build his temple in Jerusalem in the land of Judaea.The king summoned to him the most distinguished Jews in Babylon and
gave them leave to go to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple, promising
financial support from his governors in the region of Judaea. Many
Jews preferred to stay in Babylon to avoid losing their possessions. But
some returned to Judaea, only to find the process of reconstruction
hampered by the surrounding nations, and especially by the Cuthaeans
who had been settled in Samaria by the Assyrians when the ten tribes
were deported many years earlier. The Cuthaeans bribed the local
satraps to hinder the Jews in rebuilding their city and temple. Such
opposition was so successful that Cyrus’ son Cambyses, who was ‘nat-
urally wicked’, gave explicit instructions that the Jews should be
forbidden to rebuild their city. But then a revolution in Persia brought
to power a new dynasty, whose first ruler, Darius, had long been a friend
of Zerubbabel, the governor of the Jewish captives in Persia and one
of the king’s bodyguards. Zerubbabel used his influence to remind Dar-
ius that he had once vowed, before he became king, that if he obtained
the throne he would reconstruct the Temple of God in Jerusalem and
restore the Temple vessels which Nebuchadnezzar had taken as spoil to
Babylon.^14
And so the Temple was indeed rebuilt, and became the centre of gov-
ernment for the Jews who had returned to Jerusalem. The last king of
Jerusalem from before the exile had been treated well in the Babylonian
court after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, but royal rule was not restored.
Instead, the Jews had ‘a form of government that was both aristocratic
and oligarchic’, with High Priests at the head of affairs. They had the
firm support of the Persian state except in the time of Artaxerxes, when
machinations in the Persian royal court occasioned by the pique of the
king’s favourite minister Haman brought all the Jews of the empire into