II.  The Chronicler’s Conception of the Restoration.  Fortunately the Chronicler did not depend entirely upon traditions current in his day, or upon his own conceptions of the early history, but quoted freely from earlier sources.  As a result a large portion of the prophetic history of Samuel and Kings is reproduced verbatim in I and ii Chronicles.  For the Persian period, regarding which he is our chief authority, he apparently quoted from three or four documents.  In Ezra 4:7-23 is found a brief description in Aramaic of the opposition of Judah’s neighbors to the rebuilding of the walls, probably in the days of Nehemiah.  In Ezra 5 and 6 there is another long quotation from an Aramaic document that describes a similar attempt to put a stop to the rebuilding of the temple in the days of Haggai and Zechariah.  The Chronicler evidently believed that the second temple was rebuilt, not by the people of the land to whom Haggai and Zechariah spoke, but by Jewish exiles who on the accession of Cyrus had returned in great numbers from Babylon.  He assumed that Judah had been depopulated during the Babylonian exile, and that the only people left in Palestine were the heathen and the hated Samaritans.  He also pictures the return of the exiles, not as that of a handful of courageous patriots, but of a vast company laden with rich gifts and guarded by Persian soldiers.

A careful examination of Ezra 2, which purports to contain the list of The 42,360 exiles who returned immediately after 538 B.C., quickly demonstrates that, like its duplicate in Nehemiah 7:6-69, its historical basis, if it has any outside the fertile imagination of the Chronicler, is a census of the Judean community.  This census was taken, not at the beginning, but rather at the end of the Persian period.  Thus in the list of the leaders appear the names not only of Joshua and Zerubbabel, but also of Nehemiah and Ezra (Azariah).  Certain leaders, such as Mordecai and Bigvai, bear Persian names which clearly imply that they lived far down in the Persian period.  The family of the high priest Joshua already numbers nine hundred and ninety-three.  In this census are also included the inhabitants of many towns outside Jerusalem, as, for example, Jericho, Gibeon, and Bethlehem.  Moreover, certain towns are mentioned, such as Lud and Ono, which were not added to the Judean community until the latter part of the Persian period.  In view of these facts and the unmistakable implications in the sermons of Haggai and Zechariah that in their day there had been no general return of their kinsmen from Babylon, the prevailing popular interpretation of this period of Israel’s history is clearly untenable and misleading.  If there was a general return of exiles from Babylon, it certainly did not come until after the walls had been rebuilt under the inspiring leadership of Nehemiah.  The Jews to whom Haggai and Zechariah preached, and who rebuilt the second temple, were the people of the land who had survived the destruction of Jerusalem, or else had returned from their temporary refuge on the borders of the land of Egypt.