As we learned in our devotion yesterday, Cyrus of Persia’s shocking defeat of the Babylonians in 539 BCE led to an incredible reversal of the Israelites’ fortunes. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation to Babylon, there was little reason for those in exile to believe that they would ever see home again. Instead, the bold hopes of the prophets proved to be prescient — the people not only returned home, but they were also given Cyrus’s blessing to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem!

The early years of the “Second Temple” period were ones of great optimism, but as the construction dragged on and as the return to their homeland proved less triumphant than initially expected, we see two schools of thought begin to emerge. One view, represented most clearly through the books of Ezra and Nehemiah but also present in Obadiah and Joel, was that this return to the land represented an opportunity for Israel to focus on national and religious purity, even to the point of xenophobia and shutting out the nations around them. Another view, found in Jonah and prophets like Zechariah, pushed for a more expansive understanding of who God is — that God cares not only for Israel, but all people and thus “Zion” (an idealized, future-focused synonym for Jerusalem) should be a place where all the nations would one day worship God.

Dwelling in the tension between what Israel should do with this second chance that Cyrus of Persia had afforded them, along with what their relationship with their neighbors should be, is a vital part of how we contextualize each of the books we’ll cover this week. Each one was trying to be faithful to what they believed God was asking of them — yet their voices are not unified, and their visions are at times distinct.

From my perspective, there is comfort in their disagreement: we today are far from the only people in history to struggle to understand what God is asking of us! Yet as time goes on, we’ll continue to see those hopes for God’s idealized future continue to evolve and grow — a topic we’ll cover further as we begin to wrap up this series!

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