The Second Temple Is Completed
March 515 BC, estimated dateEstimated date
After years of delay the returned exiles, urged on by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah and backed by a decree of Darius, finish rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. It is dedicated in the spring of 515 BC.
The exiles who returned under Zerubbabel and the priest Jeshua the High Priest set up the altar in Jerusalem and began to offer sacrifices. In the second year they laid the foundation of the temple. The people shouted for joy, and old men who had seen the first house wept aloud (Ezra 3).
Then the work stopped. People already settled in the land, who said they had worshipped Israel’s God since Assyrian times, asked to share in the building and were refused. They opposed it for the rest of the reign of Cyrus, and nothing more was built until the second year of Darius I (Ezra 4:1–5, 24).
In that year two prophets spoke. Haggai asked the people why they lived in panelled houses while the house of God lay in ruins, and blamed their poor harvests on the neglect. Twenty-three days later Zerubbabel, Jeshua and the people were at work on the temple (Haggai 1). Zechariah began to prophesy two months after Haggai. In his visions the Lord returns to Jerusalem and the high priest is clothed in clean garments, and Zerubbabel, who laid the foundation, is promised that he will finish the house, “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit” (Zechariah 1:1, 16) (Zechariah 3:1–5) (Zechariah 4:6–10).
The Persian governor of the province Beyond the River, Tattenai, came to ask who had authorised the building and wrote to the king. A search of the archives turned up a memorandum of Cyrus’s decree at Ecbatana. Darius ordered Tattenai to leave the work alone and to pay its costs, and the cost of the daily sacrifices, out of the royal revenue of the province (Ezra 5:3–6:12).
The house was finished on the third day of the month Adar in the sixth year of Darius. It was dedicated with sacrifices, the priests and Levites were set in their divisions, and the returned exiles kept the Passover the following month (Ezra 6:15–22).
Haggai admitted that the new building looked like nothing beside the old one and promised that its later glory would be greater (Haggai 2:3–9). This second temple was the centre of Jewish worship for nearly six centuries. It is the temple that Herod later rebuilt on a larger scale, in whose courts the Gospels set much of the teaching of Jesus (Luke 19:47; John 18:20), and that the Romans destroyed in AD 70.
How this is dated
Estimated date. A scholarly estimate from primary evidence, with a margin of years.
Ezra dates the completion to the third day of Adar in the sixth year of Darius (Ezra 6:15). Darius became king in the autumn of 522 BC, as his own inscription records (Behistun Inscription i.13). By Babylonian reckoning his first full year began in the spring of 521 BC, so the sixth year ran from spring 516 to spring 515 BC, and Adar, its last month, began in March 515. The tables of R. A. Parker and W. H. Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C.–A.D. 75 (1956), give 12 March 515 BC. Some works give 516 BC, the year in which that regnal year began.
Two later accounts differ in detail. The Greek book of 1 Esdras has the twenty-third of Adar (1 Esdras 7:5), and Josephus puts the dedication in the ninth year of Darius (Josephus, Antiquities 11.106–107). The resumption of the work is dated to the day by Haggai, in the sixth month of Darius’s second year, 520 BC (Haggai 1:1, 14–15).
Ezra 4:6–23 looks ahead to complaints made under the later kings Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes before the narrative returns, at 4:24, to the reign of Darius.
Primary sources
Scripture
Jewish Antiquities
- Josephus, Antiquities 11.106–107lexundria.com
In context
Grows out of
- 538 BC, estimated date
Leads to
- 458 BC, estimated date
- 410 BC to 407 BC, firm date
- 167 BC, estimated date