Cyrus and the Return of the Jews

After taking Babylon in 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great allowed Jews deported by Nebuchadnezzar to return to Judah and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, according to the biblical Book of Ezra. The Second Temple was finished in 515 BCE, under Darius I. For this the Hebrew Bible honours Cyrus as no other foreign king: the Book of Isaiah calls him the Lord’s “anointed”, the word that became “messiah”.

From Jerusalem to Babylon

In 597 BCE the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II captured Jerusalem and deported the king of Judah and thousands of the elite to Babylonia. A revolt ten years later ended in 587/586 BCE with the city burned and the temple of Solomon destroyed. More deportations followed. The exiles were settled in Babylonia, many of them in farming villages along the canals near Nippur.

That exile, remembered in Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon”), was still in its second generation when Cyrus defeated Nabonidus. The fall of Babylon, told on Cyrus Takes Babylon (539 BCE), put Judah and its deportees under a new master.

The decree in the Book of Ezra

The Bible preserves Cyrus’s permission in two different forms, and the difference matters to historians.

The Hebrew proclamation (Ezra 1:1–4)

The first version is a royal proclamation in Hebrew, dated to “the first year of Cyrus king of Persia”. Cyrus declares that the God of heaven has given him all the kingdoms of the earth and charged him to build a house for him in Jerusalem. Any of his people may go up to Judah, and their neighbours are to help them with silver, gold, goods and animals. The same words close the Second Book of Chronicles (36:22–23), so in the traditional Jewish order of books, the Hebrew Bible ends with Cyrus’s decree.

The Aramaic memorandum (Ezra 6:3–5)

The second version is set years later. When local officials questioned the rebuilding under Darius I, a search was made in the royal archives and a scroll was found in the fortress at Ecbatana (Hamadan). Written in Aramaic, the working language of the empire, it is a dry administrative note: the temple is to be rebuilt as a place of sacrifice, with given measurements and building materials, its costs paid from the royal treasury, and the gold and silver vessels Nebuchadnezzar had taken are to be returned.

Ezra 1:7–11 adds that Cyrus had the vessels brought out by his treasurer Mithredath and counted over to Sheshbazzar, “the prince of Judah”. The scene inspired Gustave Doré’s engraving above.

Is the edict genuine?

Scholars disagree about the Hebrew proclamation more than about the Aramaic memorandum.

The Hebrew text sounds very Israelite: Cyrus speaks of the God of Israel almost as a believer would. Some scholars see it as a later Jewish composition that turned a Persian permission into a religious manifesto. Others note that Persian kings did address local gods in local terms. In Babylon, the Cyrus Cylinder has Cyrus praising Marduk in the language of Babylonian piety, so a text praising the God of Israel for a Judean audience would follow the same pattern.

The Aramaic memorandum, with its archive setting, specific details and bureaucratic tone, is accepted as authentic, or at least based on a real document, by many historians. Elias Bickerman made the classic argument for its authenticity in 1946. Sceptics point out that the text could still have been shaped by the editors of Ezra, who wrote generations later.

The Cyrus Cylinder does not mention the Jews or Jerusalem. What it does describe, the return of gods and displaced communities to their sanctuaries in Mesopotamia, is a policy of the same kind, which is why most historians accept that some permission for Judah was granted, even if its wording in Ezra cannot be taken as a transcript.

The return and the Second Temple

The return was not a single mass migration. Ezra 2 lists 42,360 people plus servants and singers, but this list probably combines several waves over many years. Archaeology shows that Persian-period Judah, the small province called Yehud, was thinly populated and that Jerusalem remained a modest town for a long time.

According to Ezra, work on the temple foundations began soon after the return but stopped because of opposition from neighbouring peoples. It resumed in the second year of Darius I (520 BCE), encouraged by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, under the governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Jeshua. The temple was completed on the third of Adar in Darius’s sixth year, in early 515 BCE. This Second Temple, later rebuilt on a grand scale by Herod, stood until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE.

The Jews who stayed in Babylonia

Many exiles chose not to leave. Cuneiform tablets from a village called Al-Yahudu, “Judah-town”, and nearby settlements, about two hundred texts dating from 572 to 477 BCE, record Judean families renting land, paying taxes and raising children with Hebrew names under Babylonian and then Persian rule. Later archives from Nippur, in the fifth century BCE, also include many Jewish names. Babylonia remained a major centre of Jewish life for more than fifteen centuries, and Jewish communities in Iran itself trace their roots to these Achaemenid-era settlements, a history told on The Jews of Iran.

Cyrus in Jewish tradition

The highest praise comes in the second part of the Book of Isaiah, written by a prophet of the exile around the time of Cyrus’s conquests. God calls Cyrus “my shepherd” (Isaiah 44:28) and “his anointed” (45:1), Hebrew mashiach, and promises to go before him and open doors for him. No other non-Israelite in the Hebrew Bible is given that title. The Book of Daniel, too, dates Daniel’s later visions to the reign of Cyrus.

The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the first century CE, adds that Cyrus issued his decree after reading Isaiah’s prophecy about himself. That detail is a later legend, but it shows how firmly Cyrus had become part of Jewish sacred history. Later rabbinic writings are more mixed in their judgement of him, but his name remained one of honour among Jews of Iran and beyond.

The Persian role in Judah did not end with Cyrus. Ezra and Nehemiah, sent from the Persian court, reorganised the community in the following century, under Artaxerxes I. For an overview of Cyrus’s reign as a whole, see the site’s article on Cyrus the Great.