One Hundred Eighty Thousand Marched on Ezra's Builders

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The Foundation Went Down on Burnt Ground

Ezra came up out of Babylon with Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and Jeshua son of Jehozadak, and the three of them put men back on the site of the house of God.

There was not much to build on. The stones on the mountain had been in a fire and the fire had been thorough, and half a century of weather had gone over the wreckage since. The masons cleared, and sorted what could still bear weight, and set a course, and then another course, and scaffolding started going up in the same air the smoke had gone up in.

It took almost no time at all for somebody to notice.

One Hundred Eighty Thousand Came Down From Samaria

They came to fight, and they came with a hundred and eighty thousand men.

People called them Samaritans, after the city, and the name did more work than it should have, because it made them sound like the leftovers of the northern kingdom coming home. They were not. Assyria had emptied the north and marched the ten tribes off east, and these were Cutheans, moved in afterward to occupy a country somebody else had been cleared out of. They had the region and they had the city's name on them and they had no interest in a rebuilt house on that mountain.

A hundred and eighty thousand is not a number for taking a wall. It is a number for making men on a wall look down and count.

Four Invitations to a Village

The direct approach was not the only one. They also wanted Nehemiah dead, and for that they were patient and polite.

The message came in like an olive branch. Come, let us meet together in one of the villages on the plain. No walls, no witnesses, no guard rotation, one governor and a few servants out on open ground with people who had already mustered an army against him. Nehemiah read the invitation for exactly what it was and sent his answer back down the road: he was doing a great work and could not come down, and why should the work stop while he came down to them.

They sent it again. He said the same thing. They sent it four times.

The men laying stone that season worked with one hand on the trowel and one eye on the road, and the man in charge of them turned down four separate chances to be murdered at lunch.

Two Years of Dust on the Courses

What the army could not do by assault, the paperwork did.

The work on the house of God at Jerusalem stopped, and it stayed stopped until the second year of Darius king of Persia. Two years. The scaffolding stood where it was. Rain came through it twice. Dust settled into the joints of the unfinished courses and then grass got into the dust, and the builders walked past the thing every day on the way to other work and did not touch it, because a stop order out of a Persian chancery is heavier than a hundred and eighty thousand men and does not have to show up in person.

The Vessels Went Grey in a Gold Palace

Meanwhile, a long way east, another king was displaying his money.

Ahasuerus was richer than any king Media or Persia had produced. He had couches of gold and silver carried out and set up in the open streets of the capital so that everyone walking past could see what he was worth. Nothing in his palace was silver. Every vessel on every table was gold.

Into that collection went the service of the Temple in Jerusalem, carried off years earlier and stored as spoil.

When the Temple vessels came into his house, they changed. The gold went out of them. Guests at that banquet were handed cups that had stood in front of the Holy of Holies and were now the color of lead, dull and heavy and wrong among the shining plate. No two vessels on those tables matched anymore, and the ones that had gone grey had gone grey together.

In the second year of Darius the order came down and the site opened again. Somebody picked up a hammer on that mountain, and a long way east a set of grey cups sat on a gold table refusing to shine for anybody.