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