The Reversal of Fortune

In the book of Esther, God has preserved these people under two different captors in Babylon in captivity. And now he has moved the heart of Cyrus the great to let people go. The author of Ezra thought the more noble thing was to re-colonize land that is your hereditary home from ages past. For most of us who are in this conversation, whether Christians or people who are now maybe on the fringes of Christianity, we're just not culturally going to resonate with this idea of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament properly.