1In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to accomplish the word of Yahweh by the mouth of Jeremiah, Yahweh stirred the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia and he sent a message to all of his kingdom and also put the message in writing:

²“Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: Yahweh, the God of the heavens, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth. And he himself has appointed me to build a house for him in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. ³Whoever among you who is from all of his people, may his God be with him and may he go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and may he build the house of Yahweh, the God of Israel. He is the God who is in Jerusalem. ⁴And let every survivor, from wherever he resides^a be assisted by the men of that place with silver and gold, with possessions and domestic animals, and with the freewill offering for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.”

⁵So the heads of the families^b for Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites—to all whose spirit God had stirred—prepared to go up and build the house of Yahweh which is in Jerusalem. ⁶And all of their neighbors helped them^c with objects of silver, gold, possessions, domestic animals, and with valuable gifts—besides all of the freewill offering. ⁷And Cyrus the king brought out the objects of the house of Yahweh that Nebuchadnezzar had brought from Jerusalem and placed in the house of his gods. ⁸Cyrus the king of Persia let them go out by the hand of Mithredath the treasurer, and he counted them out to Sheshbazzar the prince of Judah. ⁹Now these were the inventories: thirty gold metal dishes, one thousand silver metal dishes, twenty-nine vessels, ¹⁰thirty bowls of gold, four hundred and ten matching silver metal bowls, and one thousand other objects. ¹¹All of the objects of gold and silver metal were five thousand four hundred. All this Sheshbazzar brought up along with the exiles from Babylonia to Jerusalem.

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Footnotes

aLiterally “resides as a foreigner”
bLiterally “fathers”
cLiterally “helped with their hands”