Return from Babylon to Jerusalem,
by grace of Cyrus' decree,
the exiles rebuilt the Temple small
and tried to reclaim their destiny.
But who was Jew was now a question.
The returnees drew tight the line.
The Samaritans were turned away,
the mixed-blood were excluded in time.
Ezra read the Torah aloud
for seven days at the Water Gate.
Nehemiah built the walls again.
The community consolidated late.
The priesthood was now the center,
the high priest as civil head.
Under Persian, then Macedonian rule,
Judea quietly went ahead.
Then Alexander came through the land,
was shown the prophecy of Daniel
according to Josephus' tale,
and spared Jerusalem from peril.
After Alexander came the Seleucids,
the Greek kingdom east in Syria,
who ruled Judea as a province
with some degree of imperial delirium.
Antiochus IV Epiphanes came,
who wanted Greek culture spread,
who sacked Jerusalem, banned the Law,
and set up Zeus above the holy head.
He sacrificed a pig upon
the altar in the Temple's court.
The "abomination of desolation"
was what the Book of Daniel reported.
This was too much. Revolt broke out.
Mattathias the priest refused
to make the Greek sacrifice, and killed
the Jew who volunteered, misused.
His son Judas Maccabeus rose,
the Hammer of the Lord, and led
guerrilla war against the Greeks
until the Temple was reconsecrated.
Hanukkah the festival commemorates
the rededication's eight-day rite,
the oil that burned for eight days straight
when only one day's oil was in sight.
The Hasmonean dynasty rose
from this successful Maccabee war,
combining high priest with king,
which some Jews thought was against the law.
The Essenes withdrew to Qumran
to wait for the end of days.
They wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves,
rediscovered in modern ways.
The Pharisees developed oral law,
the synagogue, the rabbinic mode,
the piety of every household's Torah,
the democratic learning code.
The Sadducees were the priestly class,
who held only the written Law,
denied the resurrection's hope,
and ruled the Temple without awe.
The Zealots wanted armed revolt
against whatever power held sway.
The apocalyptists wrote of ends
when God would break into the fray.
Then Rome arrived. Pompey marched in
in sixty-three before the Common Era,
walked into the Holy of Holies,
astonished that the room was bare.
(For what had he expected? Some golden idol?
The Jews had no image of their god.
Just an empty room where the Ark had been
before Nebuchadnezzar's rod.)
Rome installed Herod the Great,
an Idumean, half-Jewish at best,
who built magnificent palaces,
expanded the Temple, tried to rest.
He rebuilt the Second Temple as
the grandest structure in the East,
Herod's Temple, the one that Jesus
would know, the one the Romans decreased.
But Herod was paranoid, murderous,
killed his own sons, his wife as well,
and the Gospels remember him as
the slaughterer of infants in Bethlehem's dell.
After Herod, the kingdom split,
the Romans ruled through procurators,
and messianic expectation rose
among the poor, the oppressed debtors.
When would the Messiah come?
The Son of David, the anointed one
who would drive out Rome and restore
the kingdom as in days bygone?
Multiple claimants rose and fell.
Theudas. Judas the Galilean.
The Egyptian prophet at Olivet.
Bar Kochba later, the Judean.
Into this ferment John the Baptist came
preaching repentance at the Jordan's edge,
baptizing crowds who felt the end
was near, the kingdom's sudden pledge.
He was a voice crying in the wilderness,
clothed in camel-hair, fed on locusts and honey,
an Essene-adjacent prophet figure
urging the people, "turn now, stop running."
He baptized Jesus of Nazareth,
and later lost his head to Herod
Antipas, the tetrarch, for denouncing
his marriage to his brother's bride.
The kingdom was about to arrive.
Or so it seemed to those who watched.
The Temple stood magnificent still.
The prophets' words were being matched.
Then came a Galilean teacher
who gathered twelve, who spoke in parables,
who healed the sick, and raised the dead,
and spoke of a kingdom invisible.
The next chapter is his.
But here we pause to mark the world
that shaped him: monotheism hardened
in exile; messianism heightened
by Rome's weight, by the Temple's burden.
Judaism was already more
than just the cult of one small nation.
It was a portable faith of text,
of weekly synagogue vocation.
It had rivals, it had debates,
Pharisee against Sadducee,
Essene against Zealot, Hellenized
against the strict traditional trees.
But all agreed: one God, no image,
covenant, Torah, Sabbath, kosher.
And all were waiting for what would come
to change the world and bring it closer.
Stand.