Six centuries before Jesus was born, the Jews went through an experience which nearly destroyed them as a nation but in the end had an import effect on their religion and way of life. The Babylonian conquest Judah with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and the captivity and exile of thousands of Jews left the country devastated for much the sixth century B.C. Most of the Jews who were forced to leave Judah never returned accepting that they had no alternative but to live as best they could in Babylonia, and also Egypt where some had fled. In time these settlements of exiles became permanent Jewish communities When Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylonia and decreed in 539 B.C that the Jews who wanted to return to Judah could do so, many of t descendants of the exiles did return. They went back with great hope determined to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple and re-establish their way of life and religion. In the Old Testament, Isaiah 40-55 contains some of the great hopes which sustained the exiles who believed that God would restore them to their homeland, but the books of Nehemiah and Ezra show something of the great difficulties which the Jews who returned had to face. Judaea remained under Persian control, as Province, but the Persians were tolerant rulers and allowed the Jews to reorganize their national life and religion with little interference.

During the exile, the prophet Ezekiel wrote his vision of the restored Temple (Ezekiel 40-46). Along with the restoration of the Temple, its priesthood and its worship, Ezekiel looked towards the total reorganization of the religious-political life of his people. After the return from the exile, Ezra and Nehemiah set out to make a reality of Ezekiel' vision, with the life of the people centered around the Temple and observance of the Law.

The Jews no longer had kings and in time the most important person came to be the High Priest of the Temple. Never again did idol worship recur. At a time in history when religion was .generally polytheistic, the Jewish religion was explicitly monotheistic and rejected any use of idols in worship. From the time of Ezra, obedience to the written Law was the explicit basis of Jewish life. Ezra forbade mixed marriages, as part of the reform of national life and religion.

The rebuilt Temple became the centre of Jewish worship, the place of sacrifice, but there was a new development in the establishment of local synagogues which were meeting places for prayer, teaching and worship of a simple kind. The religious education of the youth was given in the synagogues. The written scrolls, not only of the Law, but also of the prophetic teachings, the traditions of Israel's history and the other writings which are in the Old Testament, were regarded with great reverence. Although politically insignificant, the Jewish people, whether living in Judaea or in one of the distant communities in another land, developed a great sense of being a special people, bound together by ancient traditions, common ancestry and their religion.