Then the prophets, Haggai the prophet, and Zechariah the son of Iddo, prophesied unto the Jews that were in Judah and Jerusalem in the name of the God of Israel, even unto them.
All Commentaries on Ezra 5:1 Go To Ezra 5
Bede
AD 735
Through the words he proclaimed and the letters he dispatched throughout his whole kingdom, Cyrus indeed permitted, or rather commanded concerning the whole people of Israel (which consisted of twelve tribes) that those whom God was with should go up to Jerusalem to build the Lord's house. Nevertheless, it was not the whole people who wished to go up but only some of those to whom Jerusalem itself and the Lord's temple had formerly belonged, namely those from Judah and Benjamin and the priestly and levitical tribe. For the remaining ten tribes had already been estranged from the Lord's temple and the practice of devotion while under King Jeroboam, and as a due reward for such great disobedience, they had been captured by the kings of the Assyrians and transported beyond the mountains of the Medes, and, so they say, none of them were ever allowed to return to the homeland. Moreover, the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, which possessed Jerusalem and the surrounding regions of Judea, together with the priests and Lévites to whom the ministry of the temple pertained, though they themselves had imitated the sins of the ten tribes, nonetheless never forsook their dwelling in the city of Jerusalem and the sacred rituals of the temple. Hence they were the last to be captured by the Chaldeans and the first to be permitted to return home once the Persians began to rule - and deservedly so, seeing that our Lord descended from the tribe of Judah and his mother Mary was joined by kinship to the tribe of Levi, which is why Elizabeth, the wife of the priest Zechariah, is called her cousin by the angel. The tribe of Benjamin had also joined itself to them in observant faith especially because the city of Jerusalem itself was in its lot and so it merited to be the sharer of the mercy bestowed upon them.
