Zerubbabel Won the Riddle Contest and Asked for Jerusalem

The King Who Could Not Sleep

Darius woke in the night after a great feast and could not return to sleep. He called his three bodyguards and offered them a contest. Each would argue for what is strongest in the world. The best answer would receive a purple robe, gold cups, a gold chariot, and the right to sit beside the king at court. One of the three guards was Zerubbabel, governor of the Jewish exiles and grandson of the last Judean king.

Zerubbabel was not a court philosopher. He was an exile with an agenda. He had not come to the contest to win a chariot. He had come because winning the chariot was the door through which he intended to walk toward something larger.

Wine, Kings, and Women Made Their Case

The first guard argued for wine. Wine makes kings forget themselves and poor men imagine themselves rich. It makes enemies embrace each other and companions turn violent. It arms men against their own families, makes the fearful brave, and makes the wise say things they will regret when morning comes. If strength means taking hold of a human being from the inside and moving him without his consent, wine does it every evening to everyone who drinks.

The second guard argued for kings. A king speaks and armies march. A king gestures and cities fall. Mountains are cut down at a king's word. Rivers are diverted. Whole populations are moved from one end of the earth to the other because a single man decided to require it. The individual is nothing before the king's will, and the will of kings shapes the world the way a potter shapes clay, slowly but completely.

Zerubbabel rose last. He took both arguments apart. Yes, wine moves men, but it wears off. Yes, kings command armies, but kings themselves are commanded by the women they love. He had seen a king remove his own crown and lay it on a woman's head. He had seen a king slap his own face in front of his entire court because the woman he loved expected it. Women, he said, are stronger than wine and stronger than kings.

But then he stopped, because he had not finished.

Truth Outlasts All of Them

Women are strong, Zerubbabel said, but truth is stronger still. Wine passes. Kingdoms fall. Women grow old and lose their power over the men who once could not refuse them. Truth does not pass. Truth does not fall. Truth does not age. Everything built on something other than truth eventually collapses back into the thing it was hiding. Everything built on truth endures after the wine, the king, and the beloved have all been forgotten.

The audience agreed before Darius could speak. The crowd called out together: great is truth and it prevails.

Darius offered the prize. Zerubbabel received the purple robe and the gold cups and the right to sit beside the throne. Then he asked for his actual prize.

The Request Behind the Argument

He asked Darius to fulfill the vow that Cyrus had made: return the Temple vessels to Jerusalem, release the exiles to go home, and permit the rebuilding of the city that Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed.

Daniel had grown old by then. He came before the king one last time and asked to go home to his native city to worship in peace, and he endorsed Zerubbabel as the one who should take his place in the imperial court. Zerubbabel had come from the assembly of the exiles. He had the lineage, the rank, and now the king's favor freshly won by a midnight argument about truth.

Darius agreed. He issued the decree. The vessels were returned. The exiles were released. The city that had been rubble since Babylon's armies finished with it began, slowly and painfully, to become Jerusalem again.

Zerubbabel had entered the riddle contest with a question about what is strongest in the world and used the answer to make the strongest possible claim on an emperor's generosity. Truth, he had argued, outlasts everything. The Temple he was going home to rebuild would stand as proof of that argument for as long as it stood.