Shooting From the Hip

I got a late start tonight, so this will have to be brief. I can look some of this stuff up later if you want, but tonight I'll be shooting from the hip again.

I think you have the Persians mixed up with the Babylonians. The way I remember it is that, after Solomon's death, the kingdom split into two parts, Israel and Judah, because they couldn't agree on Solomon's successor. Then the Assyrians conquered Israel and trashed the Temple, carrying off the Ark of the Covenant, which was never seen again until Indiana Jones dug it up in the 20th Century, but that's a whole nother story. Some time later, The Babylonians conquered the Assyrians. Israel came with the territory, and the Babylonians subsequently knocked off Judah to make it unanimous. They then rounded up all the Jews that had any kind of leadership potential and carried them back to Babylon in captivity, where they languished for something like 50 or 60 years. It is believed by some historians that most of the Old Testament was put together during this period, being assembled from scraps of parchment and stories told around the campfire. Then Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered the Babylonians and set the captives and their descendants free. He encouraged them to go home and rebuild the Temple, and may have even coughed up some cash to subsidize the project. Some Jews may have went back to Persia with Cyrus, but they were probably ambassadors or something like that, certainly not captives.

Cyrus was like that. He was a kick ass conqueror to be sure, but he was frequently hailed as a liberator by the people he conquered. Coming from Persia, he must have been a Zoroastrian but, by then, the religion had evolved so much that Zarathustra must have been turning over in his grave. Cyrus undoubtedly had a lot to do with that because he never suppressed the religions of his conquered people. Indeed, he believed that all religions, including his own, had some value and encouraged people to take pages out of each other's books. Because of Cyrus and his ilk, there is no such thing as a pure religion, a pure language, a pure culture, or a pure race even unto this very day.