Canter Bridge

It seems nothing can be done in the Persian-administered province of Beyond-the-River without the signature of a far-off king. Letters go back and forth in the project of securing Persian support for this or that version of a future for what had been Judah before Nebuchadnezzer’s tolerance for its nonconformist people ebbed.

When the returning Jewish captives of Babylon meet with determined resistance on the part of the ‘people of the land’, the whole rebuilding project is put on ice for considerable time. Then Zerubbabel and Jeshua, no shrinking violets, take matters in hand. Not for them is the prospect of a stagnant Jewish ghetto where history’s victims gather to survive while larger chessmen move about them. Cyrus’ signature is on a document, dammit. It’s merely a matter of validating the pagan king’s remarkable sponsorship of the Return project and forcing the right bureaucrats to do the right thing instead of the easy one.

A gritty this-worldliness takes the stage and unblocks the administrative constipation that had checked these former Babylonian captives midway between hope and realization. A king and his minders are reminded, perhaps awkwardly, of what has gone down. Petty wreckers are stared down by shrewd political appropriation of the imperial opportunities at hand. Soon a second Persian king’s endorsement scrawls itself onto unchangeable writ:

‘May the God who has established his name there overthrow any king or people that shall put forth a hand to alter this, or to destroy this house of God in Jerusalem. I, Darius, make a decree; let it be done with all diligence.’ Then, according to the word sent by King Darius, Tattenai, the governor of the province Beyond the River, Shethar-bozenai, and their associates did with all diligence what King Darius had ordered. So the elders of the Jews built and prospered, through the prophesying of the prophet Haggai and Zechariah son of Iddo. They finished their building by command of the God of Israel and by decree of Cyrus, Darius, and King Artaxerxes of Persia; and this house was finished on the third day of the month of Adar, in the sixth year of the reign of King Darius. The people of Israel, the priests and the Levites, and the rest of the returned exiles, celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy. They offered at the dedication of this house of God one hundred bulls, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs, and as a sin offering for all Israel, twelve male goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel. Then they set the priests in their divisions and the Levites in their courses for the service of God at Jerusalem, as it is written in the book of Moses. On the fourteenth day of the first month the returned exiles kept the passover.

Bible readers sometimes imagine a pious dualism between this world’s machinery and the unsullied spirituality of another’s. Ezra-Nehemiah knows no such nonsense. Hope is political in its concretization. Kings are malleable, sometimes, and make useful partners when they are.