The story of the Babylonian captivity cannot be trusted. It was written by Jerusalem's leaders long afterward to explain how they came to hold power and to justify their claim that they were descendants of the ancient worthies. The ostensible story is one of sweeping exile, then sweeping return, accompanied by a nearly magical restoration of authority. The exact text of destroyed scriptures was magically recovered after decades of oblivion. Just how much destruction accompanied Assyrian suppression of the revolts in the lands where Yahweh was worshipped we cannot yet be sure. Who left to go into exile in Babylon is far from clear.

The restoration after the captivity, under Cyrus in 537, was not a victory for the Judaeans, but rather a new, insidious domination. The Persians preferred not outright subjugation and oppression, which the Assyrians had occasionally practiced, but domination in place, and so they allowed people who had been living in Babylon for fifty years (therefore adults, the grandchildren of the original captives, therefore people who had been acclimated to their new society) to go to Judaea to seize control and rule at the expense of the people they found there. The support of Persian soldiers and the determination of Persian authority to make its own settlers—dare one say pawns?—dominant are unmistakable.

Only children of Abraham

But the settlers sent from Persia were not the only children of Abraham in those lands. In the long history that follows, the Jews who didn't go away became known as the Samaritans, from the zone north of Jerusalem where they lived (and where a few remain to this day). Needless to say, they do not accept the story of the Persian-supported returnees or the legitimacy of the rule they imposed.

The real history of Jewry begins from that moment in 537 when Cyrus sent his own selection of the chosen people back to Jerusalem—or, perhaps better, from the moment twenty years later when the temple that had been razed in 587 was restored. These subjects first of Persia, then of the successors of Alexander, and eventually of Rome loved to tell stories about themselves as an autonomous, proud nation, descending from the doughty past when they were a chosen people living by themselves in their own special land. But those stories were being told by people increasingly cosmopolitan, international, civilized, prosperous, and, frankly, happy with their lot as subjects of great kings elsewhere.

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