However, another empire was gathering influence down in the river town of Babylon about 55 miles south of modern Baghdad between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Babylon was ruled by King Nebuchadnezzar II who became a Jewish proselyte after losing his mind for seven years.

Nebuchadnezzar ruled Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C. and he conquered Jerusalem in 597, taking into captivity the craftsmen, smiths, warriors, and intellectuals. Daniel (a young man of purpose, prayer, and prophecy) and Ezekiel were among the captives. Daniel played a major role in Nebuchadnezzar’s administration and Ezekiel was a prophet who compared his friend to Noah and Job!

In 586, Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem again and the captain of his bodyguards ordered that Solomon’s Temple, the royal palace, and all homes in the city of Jerusalem be torched. The surviving inhabitants of the city (a total of about 50,000) were taken captive to Babylon. Jerusalem was totally destroyed! It should be noted that about 100,000 Jews still occupied Judah while Jerusalem’s leaders, intellectuals, and craftsmen were sent into exile for 70 years.

Babylon defeated, destroyed, and demoralized Jerusalem and surrounding cities; but payday was coming for Babylon in a few years.

It was 539 B.C., that mighty Babylon fell to the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great who diverted the Euphrates River that flowed through the city. Upstream from the city, he channeled the river into a large basin, thereby permitting his army to wade waist deep down the riverbed into the city. The Babylonians could have easily frustrated Cyrus but they were having a drunken party given by King Belshazzar. He and his officers thought that there was no way any army could capture the impregnable city on the Euphrates. That night proved that drinkers are not the best thinkers.

When Cyrus the Persian defeated Babylon, he killed Belshazzar, grandson of Nebuchadnezzar. Cyrus is perhaps most widely known for allowing the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple in 538. Following Babylon’s defeat, Darius the Mede was appointed by Cyrus to rule Babylon as recorded in Daniel 6. The prophet Daniel, past 80-years-old, had his lions’ den experience during the rule of Darius.

When Cyrus permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem, he even returned the sacred, golden vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had taken in his conquest of the city and he helped finance the rebuilding of the Temple! It was finished in 515. Zerubbable led 42,360 Jewish exiles back home; very few out of an estimated one million that then lived in the former Babylonian Empire! What a trek south through 500 miles of desert! But they were going home after 70 years.

Darius the Great ruled Persia from 521-486 and his is son, Xerxes I, ruled from 485-465 and was killed by a bodyguard. Xerxes I is the Bible’s King Ahasuerus who ruled Persia and chose Esther as his queen in 473 B.C., after Queen Vashti refused his command to parade her beauty to a large host of drunken men. She knew that drunks are often skunks, however the king was angry and embarrassed at her refusal. After all, he controlled a world empire yet he could not control his own wife! He didn’t like his buddies and underlings snickering at his impotence. So he chose Esther as his queen, but did not know that she was a Jew.

Haman was a Persian official who hated Jews, especially Queen Esther’s uncle who was a minor government official. Haman devised a plan to kill all the Jews in the empire but when Esther discovered the plan, she risked her life by asking the king’s help without his permission. She bravely said, “If I perish, I perish.” Ahasuerus granted her access and discovered Haman was not a worthy official and had him hanged upon the very gallows that he had built for Esther’s uncle who had angered Haman by refusing to bow to him.

The King’s Jew-killing order had already been sent to all the provinces authorizing the Jews to be slaughtered on a specific day and Persian law did not permit any changes in their laws. However, the king permitted another law that gave information to the Jews so they could defend themselves on their day of slaughter.

So the Jewish nation was saved (again) in 473 B.C. because a Jewish queen had courage, character, and convictions. Jews today celebrate this miraculous deliverance at the Feast of Purim.

Artaxerxes, the son of Ahasuerus, ruled from 465 to 424 B.C. Under his rule, Ezra returned to Jerusalem with exiles in 458. Nehemiah led another group in 445 and succeeded in building walls that protected the Second Temple and the returned Jews who were now home. Artaxerxes provided the timber to build the walls!

The Jews were back in their land faithfully serving the one true God, having constructed the Second Temple and rebuilt the city walls. Meanwhile, the Greeks in Athens had built their Parthenon, a pagan temple to Athena.

Jewish History should send a message to even the dullest of tyrants: Don’t mess with Israel, the apple of God’s eye.

In the following years, Christians were persecuted and butchered throughout the Roman Empire, especially in Rome itself. But wild men in Rome (one of them being a state-certified nut) hated Jews as well. As happened often in their history, Jews in Judah were dominated by Rome and gave the Roman authorities more problems than the other provinces. They rebelled in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., resulting in over a million Jews slain, the Second Temple and all homes destroyed, and the remaining living scattered.

About 60 years later, the Roman Empire scattered the Jewish people all over the known world–again, following the rebellion of Bar Kakhba (declared by some to be the Messiah) in 132-135. A. D. There was enormous bloodshed on both sides. Bar Kakhba led 100,000 men and he expected God to intervene on their behalf. Rome’s best general Julius Severusled commanded his troops consisting of half the Roman Army, and three times the troops used by Titus in 70 A.D.! Rome never doubted the outcome, although it cost them dearly.
In that war (known as the last of the Jewish-Roman Wars), 585,000 Jews were killed, and 50 fortified towns and 985 villages razed. The Romans “went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils” according to the Jerusalem Talmud. (A slight exaggeration!) All Jews and Christians (even though Christians did not support the revolt) were barred from Jerusalem, and were spread over the land, especially in Galilee.

The Jews revolted when they discovered Emperor Hadrian’s decision to build a pagan temple to Jupiter although he had promised to build a Jewish Temple upon the foundations of the Second Temple. Hadrian antagonized the Jews further by changing the cities’ name and “Ploughing up the Temple.” Then Hadrian abolished the rite of circumcision considering it a mutilation. Hadrian forgot the first rule of diplomacy: use religion, don’t fight it. Hadrian was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Hadrian continued to make stupid decisions by deciding that Judaism was the cause of all his troubles and outlawed the Torah and the Hebrew calendar. Then he butchered Hebrew scholars, a tactic that all tyrants have always used: kill all the intellectuals. He installed two statues upon the Temple Mount, one of himself and one of Jupiter. His coup de grâce was to rename the nation after their ancient enemies–the Philistines: Judea was now “Palaestina.” That is where the modern “Palestinians” get their “credentials,” to be called, “Palestinians.” They did not rightly get the name from living thousands of years in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The Jews, without a Temple and with many of their scholars exterminated and others exiled from their land, spread all over the known world building synagogues for their teaching and worship. The majority of the Jewish population of Judea was killed, exiled, or sold into slavery. Others had settled in various parts of Judah.

How does a nation survive 2000 years of persecutions, prosecutions, and pogroms? Jews are very familiar with boycotts and banishments. They know firsthand about gossip, ghettos, and the grave. There is no human explanation how they became such a successful nation. They are indestructible because of God’s plan, provision, protection, and preservation. It does help to know the right Person.

Israel–the Jews–don’t always do the right thing as shown in their criminal attack upon the USS Liberty when it was attacked in international waters. Israeli forces on June 8, 1967, killed 34 Americans and wounded another 174. The Israelis knew it was an American ship and nine hours after that information was received, they proceeded with their attack as the American flag waved over the top of the mast. The cover-up persists to this day.

I do not slavishly defend everything Israel does. In fact, I hold them accountable as I do all nations. It would be dishonest not to do so. They have over-reacted at times and some of their first years, they did some very wrong things–such as bombing the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946, killing 92 British, Arabs, and Jews and wounding 46 others. There had been many false bomb threats called in and when the real warning call was made, the British officials and hotel staff rebuffed it. A British official retorted, “We don’t take orders from Jews.”

Before Jew-haters crank up their computers (before turning on their brains) to correct me, I admit that some of the world’s more repulsive, repugnant, and reprehensible people have been and are Jews. Some of the most despised, deranged, dangerous people on earth have been Jews. There, that should satisfy the haters. Of course, my statement is true, but that only proves that we are a fallen race consisting of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Lenin (rumored to be Jewish), Sigmund Freud, Adolf Eichmann, Bernard Madoff, George Soros, are among the “ugly” in my opinion.

Of all Nobel Prize winners, at least 20% were Jews, although Jews make up less than .2% of the world’s population! Moreover, America’s greatest comedians were and are Jewish. Americans have laughed at Jewish comedians for a hundred years, but the mistreatment of Jews for thousands of years is not funny.

And I can assure you that God is not laughing.

With passing of time, powerful nations demonstrated hatred toward the little embryonic Jewish nation along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Powerful nations such as Egypt, Nineveh, and Syria were followed by a new threat that appeared on the stage of history: Babylon. The Amorite king, Hammurabi (ruled 1792-1750) first created the short-lived Babylonian Empire about 1792 B.C. but it quickly faded after his death. The only thing remembered about the empire is the famous Code of Hammurabi.

Bible critics suggest that the Hebrew prophet Moses got his laws from Hammurabi, and if so, so what. Even a pagan king can have some great ideas; however, Moses had something Hammurabi did not have: information from Jehovah! Of course, the earlier an event in history, the less reliable is the date. Moreover, all experts admit that the Mosaic Law was far more gentle and humane than Hammurabi’s.

Until about 600 B.C., Babylon was ruled by various powers in the region. Then, the empire became almost unstoppable. About this time, Zoroaster was teaching in Persia, Buddha was born in India in 563 (and later abandoned his wife and son) and the Roman Republic was founded in 509 B.C.

The Babylonians conquered and destroyed Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire after it had been weakened repeatedly by civil war. The Jews in Jerusalem were swiftly backsliding into all kinds of wickedness and were finally attacked by Nebuchadnezzar II, the head honcho of the Babylonian Empire. In 586 B.C., he returned to Jerusalem and took the best, the brightest, and the bravest Jews into a 70-year Babylonian Captivity leaving only the poorest of the poor to occupy the defeated, destroyed, desolated, and almost deserted city.

In captivity, 500 miles from Jerusalem, the Jews sat beside the Euphrates River, hung their harps on a willow limb and cried, “We wept, when we remembered Zion.” The recently defeated Jews had been marched from Jerusalem to Babylon and often promised, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.” However, with time they came to enjoy the “good life” and adjusted to the captivity. In Jeremiah 29:4-9, the prophet had told them to “make the best of it” and accommodate themselves to the conditions of a protracted exile without being assimilated with the pagan Babylonians. Of course, Jeremiah knew what followed the end of their captivity.

Herodotus, a Greek historian born about 450 BC, wrote, “Babylon surpasses in splendor any city in the known world.” He described the city as a huge square 14 miles on all four sides. It had 100 gates of bronze that were still standing when Herodotus was there about 400 B.C. He claimed the outer walls were 56 miles in length, 80 feet thick and 320 feet high! Wide enough, he said, to allow two four-horse chariots to pass each other. The city also had inner walls which were “not so thick as the first, but hardly less strong.” The walls went 35 feet underground thereby frustrating any tunneling under them. There was a large water-filled moat just outside the outer wall. It was impossible to conquer Babylon but Cyrus did the impossible.

Babylon fell to the Persian Empire under the rule of Cyrus in 539 B.C. The Persian Empire stretched from Ethiopia to India connected by more than 3,000 miles of well-built roads. The most famous road was the Royal Road built by King Darius that stretched about 1,600 miles from Sardis in Turkey to Susa, capital of Persia. Herodotus wrote of this road, “There are royal stations (every 3.4 miles) and excellent inns, and the whole road is through an inhabited and safe country.” Maybe the first Interstate!

Persia was also famous for its efficient postal system, the world’s first, prototype to our Pony Express. At the royal stations there were fresh horses for relay riders to carry the mail from one end to the other. Common travelers made the 1,600 mile trip in 90 days but the “Persian Express” did it is less than a week! About like U.S. mail from coast to coast–today.

Herodotus described the Persian mail system and it functioned exactly as the Pony Express did in America. The famous historian said of those Persian riders, “These are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.” Evidently, Americans took the Persians’ slogan as well.

Cyrus was very generous with all religions, especially the Jews. He understood that religion is “glue” that holds a state together. Within a year he gave permission for the Jews to return to their homeland and even helped finance the journey and the rebuilding of their city and Temple. Mighty Babylon was on a downhill slide and by the time of Strabo (at the end of the 1st century B.C.), the site was in ruins and by 500 A.D. the whole area was a swamp. In recent years, the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein (who envisioned himself as another Nebuchadnezzar) sought to rebuild Babylon; however, he was hindered because his “friends and associates” hanged him by his neck–until dead. Babylon is in the same condition–dead and buried. Many say it will be rebuilt.

When Captain Titus attacked Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the city fell and the Second Temple was destroyed, beginning the period of the Second Exile. The Jews would be scattered throughout the world. In the land God gave to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the Jews would have little influence for the next 1900 years. However during most of this Second Exile there have always been some Jews living in Jerusalem.

Such has been the Jewish story but they were never destroyed. Some Jews were assimilated but not as a nation. Enough of them stayed true to biblical principles such as worshiping Jehovah, abhorring pagan gods, keeping the Law, observing the Sabbath, circumcision of their sons, etc., to always be a separate nation wherever they were living. They are a strong, separate, and sovereign nation today much to the chagrin of Muslim Jew-haters who want to “drive Israel into the Sea.” Pharaoh tried that and he ended up in the Red Sea.

May all tyrants end that way!