Coming Home

Seventy years is a long time. Most of the people who packed up their houses in Babylon and started the walk home had been born there. They had never once seen Jerusalem. They knew it the way you know a story somebody tells you: a hill, a wall, a house with gold on it, a song their grandmothers used to sing with their eyes shut. Not everyone went. It was the leaders of the families of Judah and Benjamin who got up, and the priests, and the Levites — every one whose spirit God stirred up to go and build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. The people around them, the ones staying behind, put things into their hands for the road: silver and gold, tools and goods, cattle, presents, and gifts of their own choosing for the house of God. And the dishes went with them. Cyrus had his treasurer count them out one at a time into the hands of Sheshbazzar, the leader of Judah — thirty gold basins, a thousand silver basins, thirty gold bowls, two hundred silver ones, and a thousand more besides. Five thousand four hundred pieces of gold and silver, all of them going up out of the exile, all of them going home.

Somebody wrote down who came. The list is nothing but names and numbers: family by family, town by town. The sons of Parosh, two thousand one hundred and seventy-two. The men of Bethlehem, a hundred and twenty-three. The men of Anathoth, a hundred and twenty-eight. The men of Jericho, three hundred and forty-five. Then the priests, and the Levites, and the singers, and the gatekeepers, and the temple servants. Forty-two thousand three hundred and sixty people all together. Two hundred singing men and singing women. Seven hundred and thirty-six horses, two hundred and forty-five mules, four hundred and thirty-five camels, and six thousand seven hundred and twenty donkeys. Somebody sat down and counted the donkeys. A few families walked up with everybody else and then could not find themselves on the list at all. They knew they were Israelites; they could not say which father’s house they belonged to, and when the record was searched for, it was not there. The ones among them who wanted to serve as priests were not allowed to, and were told they must not eat the holiest of the food — not for ever, but until a priest should stand up again with the stones that give light and the stones that are complete, and could ask God about it properly. Then they went home with the rest. When they got to Jerusalem, some of the heads of the families gave to the work out of whatever they had: gold and silver into the treasury, and a hundred tunics for the priests to wear. Then the priests and the Levites and the singers and the gatekeepers and the rest of the people scattered out to their own towns, and lived in them.

Three young men of King Darius’ bodyguard were on watch one night, and to pass the time each of them wrote down what he thought was the strongest thing in the world, and they hid the papers under the sleeping king’s pillow. The first wrote: wine is strongest. The second wrote: the king is strongest. The third wrote: women are strongest — but strongest of all is truth. In the morning the king read them out to his whole court and made the three of them stand up and argue it, and the third one won. He was Zerubbabel. And when Darius told him to ask for anything he liked, he did not ask for gold; he asked the king to keep the promise he had made about rebuilding Jerusalem. And the whole court shouted that truth is great, and truth wins.

The seventh month came, and they all left their towns again and came back to Jerusalem, and stood there together as if they were one man. The first thing they built was not the house. It was the altar. Jeshua son of Jozadak stood up with his brothers the priests, and Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel with his, and they set the altar of the God of Israel up on its own old base, the way it is written in the law of Moses. They were frightened while they did it, because the peoples living round about did not want them there. They built it anyway. And they put a burnt offering on it in the morning, and another one in the evening, and they kept doing that. They kept the Feast of Tents, with the offerings counted out day by day, so many on each day, exactly as it was laid down; and after that the offerings for the new moons and the holy feasts, and for anybody who wanted to bring the Lord a gift of his own. There was still no house. The place where it had stood was bare ground with rubbish on it. But there was fire on that altar in the morning and fire on it again at night. Then they got ready to build. They paid the stonecutters and the carpenters in money. They paid the men of Sidon and the men of Tyre in food and drink and oil, and those men went up into Lebanon and cut cedar and brought it down and floated it along the sea to Joppa — because Cyrus king of the Persians had said that they might.

In the second year after they came home, in the second month, they began. Zerubbabel and Jeshua and the priests and the Levites and every single person who had come up out of the captivity worked on it, and the Levites who were twenty years old and over were put in charge of the workmen. And they laid the foundation of the house of the Lord. When the last great stone was down, the priests came out in their robes with trumpets in their hands, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, came out with cymbals, standing in the places David king of Israel had given them hundreds of years before. And they sang to one another, one side answering the other: “For he is good, for his mercy to Israel is forever.” And all the people gave a great shout of praise to the Lord, because the house of the Lord had a foundation again.

But not everybody was shouting. There were old men in that crowd. Priests, Levites, heads of families — men old enough to have seen the first house standing on this same hill, the one Solomon built, before it was pulled down and burned. They looked at the line of stones lying there in front of them. They looked at how small it was. And they cried. They did not cry quietly. They wailed out loud, at the top of their voices, standing in the middle of everybody else who was cheering at the top of theirs. And the two sounds went up together and got mixed, and after that nobody could tell which was which. People a long way outside the city heard it and could not say whether Jerusalem was crying or singing. It was doing both, in the same place, at the same time, about the same thing.

News travels. The people living round about heard that the ones who had come back from exile were building a house for the Lord, the God of Israel, and they came to Zerubbabel and the heads of the families and said, “Let us build it with you. We look for your God just as you do, and we have been bringing him sacrifices ever since Esarhaddon king of Assyria brought us here.” And Zerubbabel and Jeshua and the rest of the leaders of Israel said no. They said, “It is not for you and us to build a house for our God together. We will build it for the Lord our God ourselves, the way Cyrus king of the Persians told us to.” It was said politely, and it was still no. And from that day the people of the land set out to stop the work. They frightened the people of Judah until their hands went weak on the tools. They paid men to work against them and spoil their plans. They kept it up all the rest of the days of Cyrus, and after Cyrus, and on and on, right up to the reign of a king named Darius.

And then they wrote a letter. Rehum, who was the king’s deputy in those parts, and Shimshai the scribe, wrote to the king of Persia about Jerusalem, and this is the kind of thing that was in it: “To the king: from your servants, the men who live west of the great River. Let the king know that the Jews who came up from you have arrived in Jerusalem, and they are building that rebellious and wicked city. Its foundations are raised up. Now let the king know this too: if that city is built and its walls are finished, there will be no tribute for you. They will pay nothing. And that does harm to kings.” “Let a search be made in the book of your fathers’ records. You will find it, and you will know it: this is a rebellious city, one that has done harm to kings and to countries from ancient times, and that is exactly why it was laid waste. If that city is built and its walls are finished, you will have no peace.” The king had the records searched, and the records said what the letter had promised they would say. There had been strong kings in Jerusalem once, ruling the whole country west of the River and taking tribute out of it, and the city had lifted itself up against kings before. So he wrote back: “Give the order. Stop those men. That city is not to be built any more. And see that you are not slack about this, or the harm will grow.” The letter was read out in front of Rehum and Shimshai and the rest of them, and they did not waste an hour of the day. They went up to Jerusalem in a hurry with horses and armed men, and they made the building stop.

And it stopped. The tools went down. The workmen went home to their towns. The cedar that had come all the way from Lebanon lay stacked where it had been left. The foundation stayed exactly where it was, one course of great stones laid out on the hill in the shape of a house, with nothing on top of them and nothing coming. The altar was still there, and morning and evening the fire was lit on it. But the house of God stood begun and not built, year after year after year, until the second year of the reign of Darius king of the Persians.