"Hark, your watchmen lift up their voice, together they sing for joy; for eye to eye they see the return of the Lord to Zion." This is the spirit in which the Jewish exiles, returning from Babylon to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, in the days of Cyrus king of Persia, journeyed across the desert and climbed the steep, rugged Judean hills to their ruined city.

"Break forth together into singing, you waste places of Jerusalem: for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. . . . The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. Depart, depart, go out thence, … you shall not go in haste, you shall not go flight, for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard." (Isa.52.8-12 RSV.) The deliverance from Babylonian captivity was very different from the Exodus out of Egypt. Under Moses, the earlier Israelites had gone out in haste and by flight, first eating the Passover girded as for a journey and with every evidence of urgency. They had gone out against the wishes of Egypt that had held them captive for four generations. But this time things were different. Cyrus king of Persia had issued a decree encouraging them to go, and had given them necessities for the journey and the wherewithal to commence a new life in an empty and desolate land. He had restored to them the holy treasures that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the magnificent Temple and had commanded them to build it again. No wonder they rejoiced. No wonder that, in the words of the Psalmist, singing of this very event, "When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing; then said they among the nations, The Lord has done great things for them. The Lord hath done great things for us; we are glad" (Psa.126.1-3).

It was in this spirit that fifty thousand immigrants came into the land and immediately set about raising the walls of the Temple. Now in the seventh month, the time of the Feast of Tabernacles, they were gathered together in Jerusalem. From all the villages and hamlets of Judea they had come to worship before God at the first ceremonial to be conducted on the sacred site since Nebuzar-Adan had set fire to the Temple, and burned it to the ground, at the time of the Captivity. That had been a time of disaster and sorrow; this was one of hope and expectation. The house of the Lord was to be rebuilt and the ancient ceremonies restored, and Israel would once more bear a name among the nations. That was the faith that burned brightly in every heart.

The little community had two leaders of sterling worth, Zerubbabel the prince and Joshua the High Priest. Zerubbabel was of the kingly line; he traced his natural descent from Nathan the son of David. The royal pedigree from Solomon had become extinct in Jehoiachin and Zedekiah, and the humbler line of Nathan took its place after the Captivity; thus Zerubbabel was its present representative. Through him the line of Christ was to be carried on until Jesus would be born in Bethlehem. Joshua the son of Jehozadek was a High Priest. Nothing is known of his father, who was Israel's High Priest during the Babylonian captivity. His grandfather, Seraiah, High Priest in the days of Zedekiah, was executed by the victorious Babylonians at the capture of the city. Jeremiah's picture of the political intrigues of that period indicate that the priests were entangled with politics and Seraiah suffered a fate that he might have avoided had he been more devoted to his own commission before God. Nebuchadnezzar had a shrewd insight into the honesty of men and there was a difference between the respective treatments he meted out to Seraiah and to Jeremiah, who had kept out of politics and maintained, very faithfully, his witness to God. (Jer.39.11‑14 and 52.24-27). Joshua was of sterling worth. The approving tone of Zechariah 3 shows that he was a man the Lord could use. Under these two men, Zerubbabel and Joshua, Israel could have risen very quickly to a place of honour and power among the nations.

The people failed them. The people, who had come back from Babylon with songs of praise on their lips for so great deliverance, in joy that the Lord had turned again their captivity and done great things for them, began to lose their first fine enthusiasm and to care more for their own farms, gardens and houses than for the house of the Lord. The affairs of daily life loomed as of greater moment than the service of God, and when the adversaries of Judah began to put obstacles in the way of the restoration work, Israel let it go by default.

While Cyrus lived, the work went on, but not at the pace originally planned. The Samaritans, even then bitter enemies of Judah, hindered and frustrated the work. It was not entirely stopped, but neither was it pressed ahead with zeal and expedition. They made one great and grievous mistake. If the Samaritan complaint to Canbyses, the successor of Cyrus, as recorded in Ezra 4, was true, and not a malicious misrepresentation on their part, then the Jews were at that time engaged in building, not only the Temple, but also the walls and foundations of the city. Now it is an important thing to notice that the decree of Cyrus gave no mandate to build the city; it was to build the Temple only. There was a deep truth here for Israel to learn. Their Temple was to rise, undefended, in the midst of a hostile population. The Lord Himself would defend both His Temple and His people. But they would not. They fell after the same example of unbelief that has been seen so often in history, dependence on material means of defence, and carnal weapons, to defend Divine interests. They would not understand that God is able to defend His own.

So the work was stopped. The successors of Cyrus had no such interest in this despised and hated people and its Temple as had Cyrus. The new king withdrew the decree and commanded work to cease. That was a test on the people. They could have defied both the Samaritans and the king's edict, and taken themselves in prayer to God for His leading and His protection, and gone forward in faith that His purposes would be accomplished. They did not and in consequence "then ceased the work of the house of God which is at Jerusalem. So it ceased to the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia." (Ezra 4.24.)

So the whole glorious dream faded and the golden hopes with which the exiles had set out to return to their own land were, in less than a decade, dashed to the ground. At the first breath of opposition the people had wilted and laid down their tools, and turned themselves to the secular pursuits of every day, tilling the land, building houses, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, while the deserted, half-finished house of God stood on Mount Moriah, a crumbling monument to the fickleness of man and the weakness of his faith.

But in the second year of Darius, nineteen years after the exiles had returned from Babylon and ten years after work on the Temple had been completely stopped, something momentous happened. Two young men, Haggai and Zechariah, suddenly came into the public eye and commenced preaching in Jerusalem and Judea. Haggai started first; two months later he was joined by his fellow-prophet Zechariah. These two young men, without material resources, accomplished in the short space of four years what Zerubbabel and Joshua, the material wealth of the thousands in Israel, and the authority of the decree of Cyrus, had failed to do. They achieved the rebuilding and the dedication of the Temple.

If the Zechariah and Iddo of Neh. 12 are the same as the prophet and his forebear of those names mentioned in Zech. 1. 1, which is a very probable thing, then Zechariah must have been a very young man, certainly at most in his early twenties, for Iddo his grandfather would then have returned to Judea in the first year of Cyrus, probably an old man. On this assumption, it is likely that Haggai, about whose antecedents we know nothing, was a young man also. There is a freshness and vigour about both their prophecies that seems to suggest as much. Zerubbabel the prince and Joshua the High Priest would by this time, twenty years after the Return, be getting on in years, at the very least in late middle-age. Neh.12.16 indicates that later on Zechariah held office in the priesthood under Joiakim, the High Priest who succeeded Joshua. The two older men would probably be to some extent dispirited and discouraged at the failure of all their high hopes, the adverse decision of Artaxerxes and the apathy of the people of Israel combining to dissuade them from any considerable activity in the direction of restoring the Temple of God. Then like a thunder-bolt came the message declaimed in the streets and squares of the city, told in the ears of shepherds and peasants in the countryside, brought to the notice of the prince and the High Priest, word that prophets were arisen again in Israel. A message for the times, a message that told with decision and conviction to what cause was due their unhappy condition and the failure of their one-time high ideals and hopes. "Is it a time for you, yourselves to dwell in panelled houses, and this house lie waste?" demanded Haggai. "Now therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, Consider your ways!" Scarcely had the tones of his accusation died upon the air than the equally penetrating voice of his brother-prophet Zechariah commanded attention. " The Lord has been sore displeased with your fathers. Therefore ... thus says the Lord of hosts, Turn to me ... and I will turn to you." Then Haggai again " Go up to the mountain, and bring wood, and build the house and I will take pleasure in it, and I will be glorified, says the Lord."

AOH