"Also, Judah, there is a harvest appointed for you, When I restore the fortunes of my people.
The terms were ample. “Who is there among you of all His people? His God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel (He is the God) which is in Jerusalem” Ezra 1:3. The proclamation must have reached “the cities of the Medes,” where the ten tribes were. But they only, “whose spirit God had raised,” returned to their land. Israel remained, of his own free will, behind; and fulfilled unwittingly the prophecy that they should be “wanderers among the nations,” while in Judah “the Lord brought again the captivity of His people,” and gave them “the harvest” which He had “appointed” for them. A Psalmist of that day speaks of the strangeness of the deliverance to them. “When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream” Psalms 126:1, Psalms 126:5. And primarily of that “bringing” back “the captivity of His people,” he uses Hosea’s image of the “harvest.” “They which sow in tears shall reap in joy.” To the eye of the politician, it was an overthrow of empires and convulsion of the world, the herald of further convulsions, by which the new-established empire was in its turn overthrown. In the real, the religious, history of mankind, of far greater moment were those fifty thousand souls, to whom, with Zorobabel of the line of David, Cyrus gave leave to return. In them he fulfilled prophecy, and prepared for that further fulfillment, after his own empire had been long dissolved, and when, from the line of Zorobabel, was that Birth which was promised in Bethlehem of Judah.