The Liberator Who Freed the Exiles and Talked Himself a Fool

In the first year of his reign over Babylon, Cyrus stood in his throne room and gave away an empire's mercy with his mouth. The exiles of Judah had wept by foreign rivers for seventy years. Now a Persian king opened his treasury, lifted his voice, and the scribes bent over their parchment to catch every word, because every word of a king becomes law before it cools in the air.

The Wise Beginning

He began as well as a king can begin. "So said Cyrus king of Persia," the proclamation ran, "the Lord, God of the heavens, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and He has commanded me to build Him a house in Jerusalem." A heathen monarch on the throne of three empires bowed his head to the God of a broken people and named himself that God's builder. The runners took the letters. The horsemen carried them to every province beyond the river. Wood and stone, wheat and oil and wine, livestock for the altar fires, all of it pledged from royal stores to a sanctuary that did not yet stand.

Among the exiles the word spread like water finding a crack. About forty thousand rose to go, the priest Ezra at their head, with Jeshua and Eliakim and the chiefs of Judah and Benjamin. Mothers wrapped bread for the road. Old men who had been carried out of Jerusalem as children counted the years on their fingers and wept. The God of the heavens had moved a king, and the road home stood open.

The Word That Curdled

Then the king kept talking.

One phrase too many slipped out of him. "He is the God who is in Jerusalem," Cyrus said, and the sentence shrank as he spoke it. The God of all the kingdoms of the earth, the God who had handed him three crowns, became in that breath the God of a single city, a local power penned inside one set of walls. The lips that had opened the gates of mercy began, very quietly, to swallow the man who owned them.

He did not stop. "Any of you from all His people," he declared, "may his God be with him," and now the heavens held many gods, one for each nation, the God of Jerusalem merely one lord among a crowded sky. The grace bled out of the decree word by word. And then the king did the small administrative cruelty that undoes generosity entirely. Whoever among the exiles had already crossed the great river could continue. Whoever had not yet crossed could not go. He drew a line through the middle of a people and called it policy. Families split at the riverbank. The redemption he had announced with one breath he fenced off with the next.

The Foundation and the Poison Letter

Still, the first of them reached Jerusalem. They cleared the rubble of the old courts and laid the foundation of the house of God, and when the first stones settled into place a sound went up from the crowd that no one could afterward describe, half a shout of joy and half the wailing of men old enough to remember what had stood there before.

The work drew enemies the way a lamp draws moths in the dark. Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite, and Geshem the Arabian dipped a pen in venom and wrote to the kings of Media and Persia. A rebuilt Jerusalem, they warned, would breed rebellion. These Jews had always been strong, always dangerous. Nebuchadnezzar had carried them off for exactly this reason, and now a Persian king was handing them back their fortress. The letter traveled the same roads the king's mercy had traveled, only faster, and where it arrived the building stopped.

How the Decree Was Strangled

The proclamation that began in the throne room had become a hostage to lesser men. Ahasuerus took the throne, and at the beginning of his reign accusers wrote against the residents of Judah and Jerusalem again. He did not merely slow the work. He canceled it. The order to build, once carried out by horsemen to the ends of the empire, was answered now by an order to stop, and the foundation sat exposed to the weather, half a house, a promise rotting in the open air.

When the people of Jerusalem saw the work die, they screamed a single word into the streets. "Woe." It was the sound a city makes when the door it had been promised slams in its face. The God of the heavens had moved one king to open the gate, and a second king had walked over and shut it, and between the two of them stood the exiles, some across the river, some stranded on the wrong bank, all of them watching their sanctuary stall in the dust.

What the Diminished Sanctuary Lacked

The house did rise at last, in another reign, after God had broken the wicked from their thrones and a later king let the builders work without interference. The altar smoked again. The courts filled again. And still it was not what it had been. Five glories of the first sanctuary never returned to the second. The Ark of the Covenant was gone. The holy fire that had fallen from heaven was gone. The Shekhinah, the divine presence that had filled the inner room like weather, did not come. The spirit of prophecy fell silent. The Urim and Thummim, the priestly oracle, never spoke again.

The Second Temple stood, and it stood diminished, a true house with five holes in its heart, and the first crack in it had opened on the day a generous king could not keep his mouth from one phrase too many. He had been handed the part of God's instrument. He gave the speech, and then he gave the speech that ruined the speech, and the grace he carried in drained out the same lips that brought it. A wise man's words bring favor. A fool's lips swallow the fool.