Ezra 4

Tribes of Judah and Benjamin, with Levite priests and associates who operated the Jerusalem Temple, were the main Jewish groups Babylonian invaders had exiled in 586 BC. These tribes made up the southern Jewish nation of Judah. The northern Jewish nation of Israel, with the other tribes, were exiled long before that, in 722 BC, by Assyrian invaders. They became known as the Lost Tribes of Israel. They never seemed to come back in large groups. They apparently became assimilated into other cultures. Many southern Jews, however, returned home after one generation in exile. They had still maintained a sense of distinction as God’s people, though living in shameful punishment.

King Esarhaddon, son of King Sennacherib, ruled the Assyrian Empire from the time his father died in 681 BC until 669 BC. Assyrian invaders erased the northern Jewish nation of Israel from the political map in 722 BC. They deported many survivors and then resettled the land with people from other countries. This kept the Jewish people from raising their nation from the ruins. While the Jews lived in exile in Iraq, outsiders moved into Jewish lands and married some of the Jews left behind. Some developed what Jews would call a twisted version of the Jewish faith and a heavily edited version of the Jewish Bible. They took the name of the land, Samaria, and became known as Samaritans. Samaria was a territory north of Jerusalem. Samaritans revered the city of Shechem, at the head of the valley between their sacred mountains of Gerizim and Ebal. Samaritans did not want the Jews to resurrect their nation, rebuild walled cities, and eventually threaten to take back all their land. So, they tried to stop the work. Nehemiah tells part of that story in the Bible book that took his name. Samaritans plotted to assassinate him, to keep him from rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls (Nehemiah 6:1). They couldn’t get to him.

King Darius the Great reigned from 522-486 BC. The first Jews returned to what was left of Jerusalem around 538 BC. So, by the time Darius came around, locals had harassed the Jews for perhaps 16 years. But it continued much longer. Ezra and Nehemiah faced opposition almost a century after Cyrus let the Jews go home. Ezra returned in 458 BC. Nehemiah, who repaired Jerusalem’s walls, came in about 445 BC.

Xerxes reigned from 486-465 BC. If the story of his marriage to Esther is history instead of fiction (some scholars say it’s a fictional story), Xerxes got the letter complaining about the Jews roughly seven years before he married the Jewish Queen Esther in 479 BC.

Artaxerxes reigned from the time of Xerxes’ assassination in 465 BC until 424 BC.

Aramaic was a language Jews learned during the exile. It may have been the language Jesus spoke most often. It came from Aram, now Syria, but it spread throughout the ancient Middle East. It became an international language. Jews picked up the language when Babylonians from what is now Iraq conquered their Jewish homeland in 586 BC and exiled most of the survivors to Iraq.

Translated into what? Persian, for the king? Or Hebrew, for the writer of Ezra? It’s unclear.

Erech was a city in southern Iraq, today a ruin known as Tall Al-Muqayyar.

Jews probably did nothing more to rebuild the city for roughly 15 years. That’s presuming they stopped work within a couple years after they started it, from perhaps 536-521 BC.