Now, etc.] The book of Ezra begins with the last words of 2 Ch; Ezra 1:1-2 and the first half of Ezra 1:3 occurring in 2 Chronicles 36:22; 2 Chronicles 36:23. The three books, Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, were probably at first continuous, in this order; but subsequently the arrangement in the Hebrew Bible was altered to Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles, Ezra being placed first in order to form a sequel to the history contained in Kings. 2 Chronicles was then made to conclude with the same words that form the beginning of Ezra.
In the first year of Cyrus] i.e. of Cyrus' rule over Babylon, 538 b.c.
The word of the Lord.. Jeremiah] see Jeremiah 29:10; Jeremiah 25:11-13 cp. also Ezekiel 11:7; Ezekiel 37:12. The period of the Captivity was described by Jeremiah as 70 years and by Ezekiel as 40 (Ezra 4:6). Its actual duration, reckoned from the Fall of Jerusalem in 586, was about 50 years, but the interval between the destruction of the Temple and its restoration in 516 (Ezra 6:15) was almost exactly 70. The accordance of the event with predictions uttered so long before witnesses to the remarkable faculty of prevision possessed by the Hebrew prophets, inasmuch as there was nothing (so far as can be judged) within the political horizon at the time when the predictions were made to create such an expectation.
The Lord stirred up, etc.] Josephus states that the divine will respecting the Jews was made known to Cyrus by the prophecies of Isaiah (see Isaiah 44:28; Isaiah 45:1-4, where Cyrus is styled 'the Lord's servant' and the Lord's anointed'). Be this as it may, God's purposes were fulfilled, whatever may have been the motives by which the Persian king was consciously actuated. From the inscriptions it appears that Nabunahid (Nabonidus), the last king of Babylon, had caused great discontent by removing to his capital the gods of various cities, and that Cyrus sent them back to their respective sanctuaries; and the restoration of the sacred vessels (Ezra 1:7) of the Jews, whose God was not represented by any image, was doubtless part of the same policy. The permission given to the Jews themselves to return to Jerusalem to reconstruct the Temple there conciliated a number of people who might otherwise have been a source of danger to the empire. The old idea that Cyrus as a Zoroastrian had sympathy with the religion of the Jews is disproved by evidence from the monuments.