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Return to Zion
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The return to Zion (Hebrew: שִׁיבָת צִיּוֹן or שבי ציון, Shivat Tzion or Shavei Tzion, lit. 'Zion returnees') is an event recorded in Ezra–Nehemiah of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah—subjugated by the Neo-Babylonian Empire—were freed from the Babylonian captivity following the Persian conquest of Babylon. In 539 BCE, the Persian king Cyrus the Great issued the Edict of Cyrus allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem and the Land of Judah, which was made a self-governing Jewish province under the new Persian Empire.
The Persian period marks the onset of the Second Temple period in Jewish history. Zerubabel, appointed as governor of Judah by the Persian king, oversaw the construction of the Second Temple. Later, prominent leaders like Nehemiah and Ezra emerged. Nehemiah's activities dated to the third quarter of the fifth century BCE, while the precise period of Ezra's activity remains a subject of debate. Their efforts to rebuild the social and spiritual life of the Jewish returnees in their ancestral homeland are chronicled in the biblical books named after them. These texts also document the interactions of the Jews with neighboring figures, including Sanballat the Horonite, likely the governor of Samaria, Tobiah the Ammonite, who likely owned lands in Ammon, and Geshem the Arabian, king of the Qedarites, all of whom opposed Nehemiah's efforts to rebuild Jerusalem.[1]
One of the significant achievements of the Persian period was the canonization of the Torah, a topic of enduring scholarly interest due to its profound impact on Western civilization. Traditionally attributed to Ezra, who presented the "Torah of Moses" to the people of Judah, possibly around 398 BCE, this process of creating a unified book of rules played an important role in fostering the distinctive identity of the Jews during this period.[1]
Babylonian texts, archaeological evidence, and population estimates suggest that only a small group of exiles, likely around 4,000, returned to Judah over several decades, contrary to the figure of 42,360 listed in Ezra 2.[2]
- ^ a b Faust, Avraham; Katz, Hayah, eds. (2019). "9. התקופה הפרסית". מבוא לארכיאולוגיה של ארץ-ישראל: משלהי תקופת האבן ועד כיבושי אלכסנדר [Archaeology of the Land of Israel: From the Neolithic to Alexander the Great] (in Hebrew). Vol. II. למדא: ספרי האוניברסיטה הפתוחה. pp. 329–331. ISBN 978-965-06-1603-8.
- ^ Schipper, Bernd U. (2019). A Concise History of Ancient Israel: From the Beginnings Through the Hellenistic Era. Translated by Lesley, Michael. Eisenbrauns. p. 75. ISBN 978-1-57506-732-2.
Given the situation depicted in the Babylonian texts, it is perhaps unsurprising that most likely only a small group of exiles returned to Judah. Even if the list of returnees in Ezra 2 does contain some historical truth, the number of returnees it gives, 42,360, is wholly unrealistic. In the early Persian period the province of Yehud probably had only 12,000 inhabitants (Finkelstein), or perhaps at the most 30,000 (Lipschits). At the same time, the archaeological record rules out the possibility of a mass return. Neither Jerusalem nor Yehud shows evidence of a spike in settlement growth in the early Persian period. A more realistic number of returnees would be around 4,000 people coming back to Yehud over several decades.
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