The Persian Period (539–331 B.C.) In the first year of his reign, Cyrus issued a decree allowing the Jews to return home. He released some of the captured temple treasures to them and promised to rebuild the temple at his own expense (Ezra 6:3–5). Most of the Jews remained in the more settled and prosperous surroundings of Cyrus’s kingdom, but a group of forty-two thousand, led by Sheshbazzar, returned to Jerusalem around 537 B.C. (Ezra 1:5–11; 2:64). They began to rebuild the temple, but the work