The return to Jerusalem is a fascinating chapter in the story of the Bible. It begins with the proclamation of Cyrus, a gentile king, and we are told that it was impossible to distinguish the sounds of joyful shouting from the old men weeping with disappointment at the sight of the rebuilt temple. The mention of Zerubbabel is intriguing, he is seeming last link to the line of David that God had promised never to forsake.

Throughout the Exile, and the return, amidst warnings to Israel to repent, the prophets also began to proclaim that God was about to do something new – something that would reveal the glory of God to the whole world.

Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is a dramatic image of what God was going to do with his people – out of the death of sin, God’s Spirit would fill humanity, and give new life. This is an echo of Genesis, but now described at a national level.

The book of Chronicles has told the story of Israel’s decline into Exile. But it ends with a strange hope, Cyrus, the King of Persia, to fulfill the word spoken to Jeremiah, sets the people of Israel free to return home and re-build the Temple.

The cry, how long O Lord, echoes throughout Israel’s time of Exile.

After the return, the people began to rebuild Jerusalem, but the Temple remained razed. Haggai called the people to honour God by building the Temple as a first step towards the healing of the land. The book of Haggai is partly a comfort to the Jews that God is still present with them, and that because of what he will do, their best days are not behind them.

Just as at they had done before at Sinai and Zion, the people of God gather to repent and renew the covenant. Here however, the congregation is standing in the very real shadow of the memory of God’s judgment of Exile.

Despite returning physically to the land, Israel realized that they remained in state of spiritual exile. God still had much to do to redeem his people, and through them, his world. The prophet Isaiah used the language of the Abrahamic covenant to describe how a remnant will return from exile.

Isaiah also described a true Servant, sent by God to fulfill all that God’s servants the priests, judges, kings and prophets had failed to accomplish – the salvation of the people. From this point on, whenever Israel asked the question, how will we be saved, the image of the Servant was central to their imaginative picture.

Similarly, the Exile had exposed that the earlier covenants had failed to reform the hearts of the people of God. Jeremiah promises that one day God will create a new covenant with his people, one where the Law would be internal, and the knowledge of God would be universal. God would fix the problem of Israel’s wandering heart.

Even in the middle of the sin of Israel that led to the Exile, there were small pockets of faithfulness, like the family of Jonadab.

Finally, the prophets spoke of a coming event that would eclipse the Exodus, Zion, and even the Creation itself. A double-edged day of judgment and re-creation, you can almost feel the prophets reaching for ways to describe something inexpressible. God will return to Israel and bring both judgment and hope.

Jewish tradition holds that when the Temple was rebuilt after the Exile, the old men who knew the stories of Solomon’s Temple wept because it was such a poor comparison (see also Ezra 3:12). Most importantly, God’s Spirit did not fill the Temple as had happened under Solomon. The Kings who ruled Israel were not descendants of David, but were puppet rulers of Persia, Greece and Rome. The Land was not nearly as fertile as it had been, and the promise of the Covenant to Abraham appeared to have failed. The Jews longed for God to restore Jerusalem to her former greatness as the royal capital of an independent, powerful and wealthy nation, the envy of the world.

Israel was longing for a leader like Moses who would bring them out of slavery to the Empires that oppressed them in a new Exodus. Isaiah presented a picture of this hoped-for person as the servant of the Lord, a glorious, suffering figure who would be the saviour of his people.

“The day of the Lord” is a phrase that encompassed many ideas, but the central idea was that there would come a time when God would come down to Earth, as he had done in the days of Noah, and would judge Israel’s enemies and restore the land. The Prophets are full of warnings for the surrounding nations as well as for Israel that this day would come, and the Jews came to expect that this would mean the overthrow of the various Empires and nations that oppressed them, even after the return to Canaan.