turned Jews, under Zerubbabel, a descendant of
the kings of Judah, were forty-two thousand three hundred and sixty men--a
great and joyful caravan--but small in number compared with the Israelites
who departed from Egypt with Moses. On their arrival in their native land,
they were joined by great numbers of the common people who had remained.
They bore with them the sacred vessels of the temple, which Cyrus
generously restored. They arrived in the spring of the year B.C. 536, and
immediately made preparations for the restoration of the temple; not under
those circumstances which enabled Solomon to concentrate the wealth of
Western Asia, but under great discouragements and the pressure of poverty.
The temple was built on the old foundation, but was not completed till the
sixth year of Darius Hystaspes, B.C. 515, and then without the ancient
splendor.

(M224) It was dedicated with great joy and magnificence, but the sacrifice
of one hundred bullocks, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs, and twelve
goats, formed a sad contrast to the hecatombs which Solomon had offered.

Nothing else of importance marked the history of the dependent,
impoverished, and humiliated Jews, who had returned to the country of
their ancestors during the reign of Darius Hystaspes.

(M225) It was under his successor, Xerxes, he who commanded the Hellespont
to be scourged--that mad, luxurious, effeminated monarch, who is called in
Scripture Ahasuerus,--that Mordecai figured in the court of Persia, and
Esther was exalted to the throne itself. It was in the seventh year of his
reign that this inglorious king returned, discomfited, from the invasion
of Greece. Abandoning himself to the pleasures of his harem, he marries
the Jewess maiden, who is the instrument, under Providence, of averting
the greatest calamity with which the Jews were ever threatened. Haman, a
descendant of the Amalekitish kings, is the favorite minister and grand
vizier of the Persian monarch. Offended with Mordecai, his rival in
imperial favor, the cousin of the queen, he intrigues for the wholesale
slaughter of the Jews wherever they were to be found, promising the king
ten thousand talents of silver from the confiscation of Jewish property,
and which the king needed, impoverished by his unsuccessful expedition
into Greece. He thus obtains a decree from Ahasuerus for the general
massacre of the Jewish nation, in all the provinces of the empire, of
which Judea was one. The Jews ar