539 BCE- King Cyrus of the Persian empire conquers Mesopotamia, and consolidates his victory by freeing the exiled peoples to return home.  One year later, the Jews are allowed to return to Judea, which then becomes part of the Persian Empire.  Almost sixty years of exile have finally come to an end.  But things are not the same.

    The people who return from the exile are different from those who left sixty years ago.  One single religious writing, uniting J, P, and D, will be formed.  The Pentateuch.  The Deuteronomistic history books of Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings are also added onto the Pentateuch, creating the first Jewish holy scripture that can clearly be seen as a proto-type of the modern version from out history.

    During the exile, sacrifices and ceremonies at the Temple had been impossible.  Jews began to gather for worship, the ability to read and study the religious traditions became important, and the base for the Jewish emphasis on literacy and learning was born.  The transformation of the Jewish faith after the Exile was striking.  But the tradition of the centralization of the religion around the Temple could not be ignored.  With the permission to rebuild the Temple from the Edict of Cyrus, and was finished within five years in 531 BCE.

    The Second Temple allowed for the Aaronid priests to once more rule supreme.  From the period of King Hezekiah onward, the Aaronid priests had enjoyed their supreme position and post-Exile would be no different.  Aside from living under a Persian governor, things in practice are not too different from pre-Exile.  But in general the faith has grown pessimistic.  The Hebrews did not follow God's law and were punished for it.  Make sure it doesn't happen again.  It is around this time that the ideology of Satan as a punisher of humanity begins to rise.

    Almost a century after the exile, in 445 BCE, a Jewish court official named Nehemiah asked the Persian Emperor to make Judah a separate Persian province and to appoint him its governor.  An able diplomat, Nehemiah not only obtained permission to rebuild Jerusalem's walls, but also instituted a program to complete the work before political resistance from Judean peasants, neighboring cities, and other groups got it halted. He rebuilt the walls in an amazing fifty-two days.

    In addition to the Second Temple, the Jewish faith was cleaned out and reformed by the prophet Ezra.  Not only do most historians see him as the unifier of the J, P and D texts, it is thought that he or his followers wrote or edited the books Ezra and Nehemiah to show the history and development of the people after the exile.  With the end of the time period of Ezra and Nehemiah the Jewish people fell into a period of silence.  Without religious reforms or kings to write about, they fade into history for a short while.  Until the conquests of Alexander the Great.

Various Notes on different Books-

    Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings-  In this history, written by the same person who wrote Deuteronomy, but a person different from D in our history.  Unlike our history, D was an Aaronid priest, following a tradition far closer to J and P with its focus on sacrifice and priestly law.  1 & 2 Chronicles were written by an Aaronid priest from our history, and so the Deuteronomistic history books in this alternate history resemble Chronicles.

    1 & 2 Chronicles- For reasons mentioned above, the Aaronid version of history is already represented and there is no reason to write 1 & 2 Chronicles.

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