The Second Temple Completed

The event

For more than fifteen years after the foundation was laid, opposition and discouragement left the Jerusalem Temple half-built while the returned exiles focused instead on their own homes. In 520 BC, in the second year of Darius I, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah began preaching urgent, specific challenges to Governor Zerubbabel and High Priest Joshua, promising that the LORD's presence and blessing were tied to finishing the work — and that this Temple's latter glory would in fact exceed the former.

Work resumed at once. When the regional Persian governor Tattenai questioned the project's legality, Darius ordered a search of the royal archives, found Cyrus's original decree on record, and not only reaffirmed it but ordered the project funded from the royal treasury and threatened severe penalty on anyone who interfered — Persian bureaucracy, in effect, defending God's Temple.

The Temple was completed in the sixth year of Darius, 516 BC — some seventy years, almost to the anniversary, after Solomon's Temple had been burned. The community dedicated it with substantial sacrifices and celebrated Passover soon after, "for the LORD had made them joyful." Modest compared to Solomon's original, this Second Temple would nonetheless stand — later renovated on a grand scale by Herod — as the Temple that Zechariah, Malachi, and eventually Jesus Himself would walk into.

Dating

Ezra 6:15 dates the completion to the third of Adar in Darius I's sixth year — a date firmly fixed against Persian chronology. Because Adar falls at the end of the Babylonian calendar year, that day converts to March 12, 515 BC on our calendar, so references cite either 516 BC (the regnal year 516/515, the figure that pairs with a seventy-year span from the 586 BC destruction) or 515 BC (the precise converted date). The one-year difference is purely a matter of calendar conversion, not a historical dispute.

Scripture references

• Ezra 6:13-18
• Haggai 2:3-9
• Zechariah 4:8-10