The Dedication of the Second Temple

On the third of Adar in the sixth year of Darius the work was completed. The dedication was celebrated with a hundred bulls, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs and twelve he-goats as a sin offering — one for each tribe of Israel, though mainly Judah, Benjamin and the Levites had returned. Priests and Levites were assigned to their watches as written in the book of Moses, and weeks later, on the fourteenth of Nisan, the Passover offering was brought in Jerusalem for the first time in seventy-four years.

It was not a triumph. Already at the laying of the foundation, Ezra records, shouts of joy mixed with weeping: elders who had seen the First Temple wept aloud, and 'the people could not distinguish the sound of joy from the sound of weeping.' The Second Temple was poorer. The sages list five things absent from it: the Ark with the Tablets, heavenly fire on the altar, the visible Divine Presence, prophecy, and the Urim ve-Tumim.

Still, from these years begins an era of 420 years (the sages count from 3408, when the building resumed, to the destruction in 3828) in which Jewish life reassembles around Jerusalem, Torah and the Temple.