539 BCE – CYRUS THE MESSIAH AND THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD BEGINS

The last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire – King Nabonidus (555-539 BCE) – wandered off the throne of Babylon and into the deserts of northern Arabia for ten years to devote himself to the worship of the Mesopotamian moon-god, and the citizens of Babylonia were not able to hold their renowned New Year’s festival with its recitation of “The Seven Tablets of Creation” (the Enuma Elish), all because their king was not present in Babylon to conduct the ceremonies. So when Cyrus the Persian and his army entered the great city of Babylon in 539 BCE without an arrow fired, Cyrus was greeted as a liberator by the Babylonians, and as the Messiah by many in the Jewish community throughout Babylonia. Cyrus the Great gave the Jews of the fifty-year ‘Babylonian Exile’ the freedom to return to Judah and rebuild their Temple of Yahweh destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II. Some 40,000 returned, but most remained in Babylonia to work under Persian, and later, Greek administrations.(12) Babylon thus became a great center of Jewish culture and learning for a millennia thereafter.(13) Some sections of the Babylonian Jewish community of this period, instead of Judah, chose to emigrate to Persian Egypt, and they created there a thriving and prosperous community.

Back in Judah, the so-called “Samaritans” – a multi-ethnic, tribal mix of peoples who had been brought by the Assyrians into the northern kingdom of Israel to settle on the West Bank of the Jordan in the late 8th century BCE – were despised as a “mongrel race” by the returning ‘Babylonian exiles’ of the late 6th century. The Samaritans offered to help the returning Jews rebuild the Temple, but their offers were vehemently rejected. The Jews considered the Samaritans “enemies of Judah” or “friends of the enemies of the Jews,” and they were forbidden to have any social or religious contact with them, and absolutely forbidden to intermarry.(14) On this ancient issue of Samaritans and other types of verboten people, Rabbi Moshe Leib Diskin once said: “The rabbis of the generation should gather together and issue a writ of excommunication against the Zionists and eject them from the Jewish People, and make decrees against their bread and wine, and to forbid marrying with them, just like our sages did with the Samaritans.”(15)