Ezra 4:24

Then ceased the work of the house of God which is at Jerusalem. So it ceased unto the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(24) The second year.—The record here returns to Ezra 4:5, with more specific indication of time. The suspension of the general enterprise—called “the work of the house of God which is at Jerusalem”—lasted nearly two years. But it must be remembered that the altar was still the centre of a certain amount of worship.

Benson Commentary

Ezra 4:24. Then ceased the work of the house of God — For they neither could nor might proceed in that work against their king’s prohibition, without a special command from the King of heaven, which, however, they afterward received. But even then they were cold and indifferent about it, and were accordingly reproved by the Prophets Haggai and Zechariah 5:1, compared with Haggai 1:2. So that the work, in a great measure, stood still until the second year of the reign of Darius — This, as was intimated on Ezra 4:6, was Darius the son of Hystaspis, successor of Cambyses; not, as some would have it, Darius Nothus, the son of Artaxerxes Longimanus: for he was not emperor till above one hundred years after Cyrus, and, if he had been the Darius here intended, there must consequently have been about one hundred and thirty years from the beginning of the building of the temple to the finishing of it; which is not credible to any one that considers, 1st, That the same Zerubbabel did both lay the foundation, and finish the work, Zechariah 4:9. 2d, That some of the same persons who saw the finishing of this second house; had seen the glory of the first house, Haggai 2:3.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

4:6-24 It is an old slander, that the prosperity of the church would be hurtful to kings and princes. Nothing can be more false, for true godliness teaches us to honour and obey our sovereign. But where the command of God requires one thing and the law of the land another, we must obey God rather than man, and patiently submit to the consequences. All who love the gospel should avoid all appearance of evil, lest they should encourage the adversaries of the church. The world is ever ready to believe any accusation against the people of God, and refuses to listen to them. The king suffered himself to be imposed upon by these frauds and falsehoods. Princes see and hear with other men's eyes and ears, and judge things as represented to them, which are often done falsely. But God's judgment is just; he sees things as they are.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

It ceased - The stoppage of the building by the Pseudo-Smerdis is in complete harmony with his character. He was a Magus, devoted to the Magian elemental worship, and opposed to belief in a personal god. His religion did not approve of temples; and as he persecuted the Zoroastrian so would he naturally be hostile to the Jewish faith. The building was resumed in the second year of Darius (520 B.C.), and was only interrupted for about two years; since the Pseudo-Smerdis reigned less than one year.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

24. Then ceased the work of the house of God—It was this occurrence that first gave rise to the strong religious antipathy between the Jews and the Samaritans, which was afterwards greatly aggravated by the erection of a rival temple on Mount Gerizim.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

Then ceased the work of the house of God; for they neither could nor might proceed in that work against their king’s prohibition, without a special command from the King of heaven, which they had, Ezra 5:1,2.

Darius king of Persia, to wit, Darius the son of Hystaspes, successor of Cambyses; not, as some would have it, Darius Nothus, the son of Artaxerxes Longimanus, who was not emperor till above one hundred years after Cyrus, and consequently from the beginning of the building of the temple to the finishing of it must be about one hundred and thirty years, which is not credible to any one that considers,

1. That the same Zerubbabel did both lay the foundations and finish the work, Zechariah 4:9.

2. That some of the same persons who saw the finishing of this second house, had seen the glory of the first house, Haggai 2:3.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

Then ceased the work of the house of God, which is at Jerusalem,.... How far they had proceeded is not said, whether any further than laying the foundation of it; though probably, by this time, it might be carried to some little height; however, upon this it was discontinued:

so it ceased unto the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia; not Darius Nothun, as some think, for from the first of Cyrus to the sixth of his reign, when the temple was finished, was upwards of one hundred years; yea, according to some, about one hundred and forty; which would carry the age of Zerubbabel, who both laid the foundation of the temple, and finished it, and the age of those who saw the first temple, to a length that is not probable; but this was Darius Hystaspis, who succeeded Cambyses the son of Cyrus, there being only, between, the short usurpation of Smerdis for seven months.

Geneva Study Bible

Then {n} ceased the work of the house of God which is at Jerusalem. So it ceased unto the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia.

(n) Not altogether for the prophets exhorted them to continue but they used less diligence because of the troubles.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

24. This verse resumes the thread of the narrative, which was dropped at the close of Ezra 4:5. It must be admitted that the words ‘then ceased’ refer most naturally to Ezra 4:23. The Compiler, who failed to observe that the preceding passage belonged to the generation of Ezra, and not to that of Zerubbabel, carries on the narrative in his own words.

so it ceased, &c.] R.V. and it ceased. The first clause expresses the fact of the cessation, the second its duration and continuance.

second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia] b.c. 521.

The Samaritans had succeeded only too well in checking the progress of the work. Cyrus occupied in schemes of conquest had little leisure to attend to such matters. The suspicious temperament of Cambyses inclined him to listen to sinister reports. The disturbed condition of the Empire during his reign and that of Gomates, his successor, gave abundant opportunity for petty tyranny and for the withdrawal of state privileges.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 24. - Then ceased the work... until the second year of the reign of Darius. The interval of compelled inaction was not long. The Pseudo-Smerdis reigned, at the utmost, ten months; after which a revolution occurred, and the throne was occupied by Darius, the son of Hystaspes. If the work was resumed early in this monarch's second year, the entire period of suspension cannot have much exceeded a year and a half. King of Persia. There is probably no intention of distinguishing the Darius of this book from "Darius the Mede" (Daniel 5:31; Daniel 6:1). "King of Persia" is appended to his name merely out of respect and honor, as it is to the names of Cyrus (Daniel 1:1, 2, 8), Artaxerxes I. (Daniel 4:7), and Artaxerxes II. (Daniel 6:14). Such a superfluous attachment to his name of the style and title of a monarch is common throughout the Old Testament, and generally marks a distinct intention to do the individual honour (see Genesis 41:46; 1 Kings 3:1; 1 Kings 9:11, 16; 1 Kings 11:18; 2 Chronicles 36:22, etc.).



Ezra 4:24

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

"Then ceased the work of the house of God at Jerusalem. So it ceased unto the second year of Darius king of Persia." With this statement the narrator returns to the notice in Ezra 4:5, that the adversaries of Judah succeeded in delaying the building of the temple till the reign of King Darius, which he takes up, and now adds the more precise information that it ceased till the second year of King Darius. The intervening section, Ezra 4:6, gives a more detailed account of those accusations against the Jews made by their adversaries to kings Ahashverosh and Artachshasta. If we read Ezra 4:23 and Ezra 4:24 as successive, we get an impression that the discontinuation to build mentioned in Ezra 4:24 was the effect and consequence of the prohibition obtained from King Artachshasta, through the complaints brought against the Jews by his officials on this side the river; the בּאדין of Ezra 4:24 seeming to refer to the אדין of Ezra 4:23. Under this impression, older expositors have without hesitation referred the contents of Ezra 4:6 to the interruption to the building of the temple during the period from Cyrus to Darius, and understood the two names Ahashverosh and Artachshasta as belonging to Cambyses and (Pseudo) Smerdis, the monarchs who reigned between Cyrus and Darius. Grave objections to this view have, however, been raised by Kleinert (in the Beitrgen der Dorpater Prof. d. Theol. 8132, vol. i) and J. W. Schultz (Cyrus der Grosse, in Theol. Stud. u. Krit. 1853, p. 624, etc.), who have sought to prove that none but the Persian kings Xerxes and Artaxerxes can be meant by Ahashverosh and Artachshasta, and that the section Ezra 4:6 relates not to the building of the temple, but to the building of the walls of Jerusalem, and forms an interpolation or episode, in which the historian makes the efforts of the adversaries of Judah to prevent the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem under Xerxes and Artaxerxes follow immediately after his statement of their attempt to hinder the building of the temple, for the sake of presenting at one glance a view of all their machinations against the Jews. This view has been advocated not only by Vaihinger, "On the Elucidation of the History of Israel after the Captivity," in the Theol. Stud. u. Krit. 1857, p. 87, etc., and Bertheau in his Commentary on this passage, but also by Hengstenberg, Christol. iii. p. 143, Auberlen, and others, and opposed by Ewald in the 2nd edition of his Gesch. Israels, iv. p. 118, where he embraces the older explanation of these verses, and A. Koehler on Haggai, p. 20. On reviewing the arguments advanced in favour of the more modern view, we can lay no weight at all upon the circumstance that in Ezra 4:6 the building of the temple is not spoken of. The contents of the letter sent to Ahashverosh (Ezra 4:6) are not stated; in that to Artachshasta (Ezra 4:11) the writers certainly accuse the Jews of building the rebellious and bad city (Jerusalem), of setting up its walls and digging out its foundations (Ezra 4:12); but the whole document is so evidently the result of ardent hatred and malevolent suspicion, that well-founded objections to the truthfulness of these accusations may reasonably be entertained. Such adversaries might, for the sake of more surely attaining their end of obstructing the work of the Jews, easily represent the act of laying the foundations and building the walls of the temple as a rebuilding of the town walls. The answer of the king, too (Ezra 4:17), would naturally treat only of such matters as the accusers had mentioned.

The argument derived from the names of the kings is of far more importance. The name אחשׁורושׁ (in Ezra 4:6) occurs also in the book of Esther, where, as is now universally acknowledged, the Persian king Xerxes is meant; and in Daniel 9:1, as the name of the Median king Kyaxares. In the cuneiform inscriptions the name is in Old-Persian Ksayarsa, in Assyrian Hisiarsi, in which it is easy to recognise both the Hebrew form Ahashverosh, and the Greek forms Ξέρξης and Κυαξάρης. On the other hand, the name Cambyses (Old-Persian Kambudshja) offers no single point of identity; the words are radically different, whilst nothing is known of Cambyses having ever borne a second name or surname similar in sound to the Hebrew Ahashverosh. The name Artachshasta, moreover, both in Esther 7:1-10 and 8, and in the book of Nehemiah, undoubtedly denotes the monarch known as Artaxerxes (Longimanus). It is, indeed, in both these books written ארתּחשׁסתּא with ס, and in the present section, and in Ezra 6:14, ארתּחששׁתּא; but this slight difference of orthography is no argument for difference of person, ארתחשׁשׁתא seeming to be a mode of spelling the word peculiar to the author of the Chaldee section, Ezra 4-6. Two other names, indeed, of Smerdis, the successor of Cambyses, have been handed down to us. According to Xenophon, Cyrop. viii. 7, and Ktesias, Pers. fr. 8-13, he is said to have been called Tanyoxares, and according to Justini hist. i. 9, Oropastes; and Ewald is of opinion that the latter name is properly Ortosastes, which might answer to Artachshasta. It is also not improbable that Smerdis may, as king, have assumed the name of Artachshasta, Ἀρταξέρξης, which Herodotus (vi. 98) explains by μέγας ἀρήΐος. But neither this possibility, nor the opinion of Ewald, that Ortosastes is the correct reading for Oropastes in Just. hist. i. 9, can lay any claim to probability, unless other grounds also exist for the identification of Artachshasta with Smerdis. Such grounds, however, are wanting; while, on the other hand, it is priori improbable that Ps. Smerdis, who reigned but about seven months, should in this short period have pronounced such a decision concerning the matter of building the temple of Jerusalem, as we read in the letter of Artachshasta, Ezra 4:17, even if the adversaries of the Jews should, though residing in Palestine, have laid their complaints before him, immediately after his accession to the throne. When we consider also the great improbability of Ahashverosh being a surname of Cambyses, we feel constrained to embrace the view that the section Ezra 4:6 is an episode inserted by the historian, on the occasion of narrating the interruption to the building of the temple, brought about by the enemies of the Jews, and for the sake of giving a short and comprehensive view of all the hostile acts against the Jewish community on the part of the Samaritans and surrounding nations.

The contents and position of Ezra 4:24 may easily be reconciled with this view, which also refutes as unfounded the assertion of Herzfeld, Gesch. des Volkes Israel, i. p. 303, and Schrader, p. 469, that the author of the book of Ezra himself erroneously refers the document given, Ezra 4:6, to the erection of the temple, instead of to the subsequent building of the walls of Jerusalem. For, to say nothing of the contents of Ezra 4:6, although it may seem natural to refer the בּאדין of Ezra 4:24 to Ezra 4:23, it cannot be affirmed that this reference is either necessary or the only one allowable. The assertion that בּאדין is "always connected with that which immediately precedes," cannot be strengthened by an appeal to Ezra 5:2; Ezra 6:1; Daniel 2:14, Daniel 2:46; Daniel 3:3, and other passages. בּאדין, then ( equals at that time), in contradistinction to אדין, thereupon, only refers a narrative, in a general manner, to the time spoken of in that which precedes it. When, then, it is said, then, or at that time, the work of the house of God ceased (Ezra 4:24), the then can only refer to what was before related concerning the building of the house of God, i.e., to the narrative Ezra 4:1. This reference of Ezra 4:24 to Ezra 4:1 is raised above all doubt, by the fact that the contents of Ezra 4:24 are but a recapitulation of Ezra 4:5; it being said in both, that the cessation from building the temple lasted till the reign, or, as it is more precisely stated in Ezra 4:24, till the second year of the reign, of Darius king of Persia. With this recapitulation of the contents of Ezra 4:5, the narrative, Ezra 4:24, returns to the point which it had reached at Ezra 4:5. What lies between is thereby characterized as an illustrative episode, the relation of which to that which precedes and follows it, is to be perceived and determined solely by its contents. If, then, in this episode, we find not only that the building of the temple is not spoken of, but that letters are given addressed to the Kings Ahashverosh and Artachshasta, who, as all Ezra's contemporaries would know, reigned not before but after Darius, the very introduction of the first letter with the words, "And in the reign of Ahashverosh" (Ezra 4:6), after the preceding statement, "until the reign of Darius king of Persia" (Ezra 4:5), would be sufficient to obviate the misconception that letters addressed to Ahashverosh and Artachshasta related to matters which happened in the period between Cyrus and Darius Hystaspis. Concerning another objection to this view of Ezra 4:6, viz., that it would be strange that King Artaxerxes, who is described to us in Ezra 7 and in Nehemiah as very favourable to the Jews, should have been for a time so prejudiced against them as to forbid the building of the town and walls of Jerusalem, we shall have an opportunity of speaking in our explanations of Nehemiah 1:1-11. - Ezra 4:24, so far, then, as its matter is concerned, belongs to the following chapter, to which it forms an introduction.