The Return from Babylon In the Beginning “Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the
Chaldees’ excellency, Nebuchadnezzar had not only built Babylon, with the beauty of its spectacular hanging gardens, into the showplace of the middle east, but had expanded its territory from the borders of India to the edge of Egypt. This Babylonian empire dominated greater Mesopotamia for 70 years. Then a growing insurgency of the Medes and Persians, under the leadership of Cyrus and Darius, attacked the heart of this great kingdom and, diverting the waters of the mighty Euphrates and entering under the walls through the dry riverbed, overthrew the city and the empire in a single night. Among the captives held by Babylon were thousands of Israelites captured by invading armies over a half-century earlier. Cyrus, the head of the new ruling powers, issued an edict permitting the return of these exiles to their ancient homeland of Israel. It is this return that forms the theme for this issue of the Herald. The opening article, The Rise and Fall of Babylon, sets the stage by describing the geo-political situation of the sixth centuries. Two Jewish prophets predicted and encouraged the people of Israel to return, restore their ancient temple and rebuild the cities. The messages of these two prophets, Zechariah and Haggai, are treated in the next two articles. In The First Return from Exile, a reprint from our journal of some 82 years ago, the author discusses the initial reaction to the edict of Cyrus and the consequent beginning of the return to the Jewish homeland. Returning, their first work was the rebuild their temple, a modest structure compared to the glorious temple of Solomon destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar’s army. This rebuilding work, depicted in the third chapter of Ezra, is the subject of a verse-by-verse study in the treatise entitled Rebuilding the Temple. The key actors in the reconstruction project of the city of Jerusalem were Ezra in the priestly function and Nehemiah fulfilling the administrative role. Their backgrounds and activities are the subject of People With a Purpose. The final article, Fleeing Mystic Babylon, suggests a parallel between these events of the sixth century before Christ and a similar flight from a religious oppression by true Christians at the return of the Messiah, a parallel drawn largely from the writings of Jeremiah and the book of Revelation. It is our desire, in preparing this issue, to not only review an interesting segment of past history, but to be encouraged by its New Testament application to flee mystic Babylon as “the he-goats before the flock” (Jeremiah 50:8). |