Now therefore, if it seems good to the king, let there be search made in the king's treasure house, which is there at Babylon, whether it be so, that a decree was made of Cyrus the king to build this house of God at Jerusalem, and let the king send his pleasure to us concerning this matter.
All Commentaries on Ezra 5:17 Go To Ezra 5
Bede
AD 735
This letter that Tattenai writes to Darius is very different from the one Rehum and Shimsahi wrote to Artaxerxes. That letter was filled with accusation of the people of Jerusalem, this one with praise not only of the people but also of almighty God. Indeed, it begins as follows: “To Darius the king, all peace: Let it be known to the king that we went to the province of Judah, to the house of the great God, which is built with unfinished stone, and the timbers are being laid in the walls; and the work is being carried on with diligence and is making rapid progress in their hands. So we questioned those elders and spoke to them as follows, ‘Who gave you the authority to build this house?’ and so on. In these words we should also note in what sense it is said that God’s house was built from ‘unfinished stone,’ when it is evident that such a great work could only have been built from finished stones. Yet by ‘unfinished stone’ we should understand new stone, which they themselves discovered unhewn but, by shaping it up, made it suitable for the building of the Lord’s house. For even though some of the old stones remained, which, as the lamenting Jeremiah shows, were scattered ‘at the end of every street,’ ” yet no one can doubt that new stones also had to be shaped to complete the work of the temple. The mystery of this matter is undoubtedly plain, since we have seen that God’s church is built not only from those who by repenting regain their senses and return to the life of holiness that they have previously squandered by sinning, but also from those who have recently been called to the faith, arranged by the instruction of teachers as though with the measuring rod of builders and so inserted into the edifice of the Lord’s house in a place appropriate to themselves. Yet the fact that the temple was built from both old and new stones, that is, both from stones that had been finished long previously and from those that had remained unfinished for longer, can also rightly be interpreted as corresponding to the fact that the one church of Christ is assembled from both peoples, namely, Jews and Gentiles—the Jews who long since had been as though finished through knowledge and mindfulness of God’s law, the Gentiles who, being enslaved to idolatry, had not by any industry of spiritual architects or any cultivation of piety divested themselves of the ugliness of a rustic and earthly mind.
