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5 At that time two prophets were giving messages from God to the Jews living in Jerusalem and in other cities in Judah, saying that they should continue rebuilding the temple. Those prophets were Haggai and Zechariah, the son of Iddo. They spoke their messages representing the God whom the people of Israel worshiped, the one who ruled them. 2 So Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and Joshua son of Jozadak led many other people to start rebuilding the temple of God in Jerusalem again. God’s prophets Haggai and Zechariah were with them and helping them.
3 But then Tattenai, the governor of the province west of the Euphrates River, and Shethar-Bozenai went to Jerusalem together with some of their officials and said to the people, “Who has permitted you to do all this work to rebuild this temple?” 4 They also asked the Jews to tell them the names of the men who were working on this temple.
5 However, God was taking care of the Jewish leaders, and their enemies did not make them stop building the temple. Instead, the enemies sent King Darius a report and waited for him to send back a decree about it. The decree would either allow the Jewish leaders to finish their work on the temple, or else it would command them to stop their work completely.
6 This is a copy of the report that Tattenai, governor of the province of Beyond-the-River, Shethar-Bozenai, and their associates, who were the officials of the province of Beyond-the-River, sent to King Darius. 7 When they sent the report to him, this is what they wrote in it:
“King Darius, we hope everything is going well for you.
8 We want you to know that we went to the temple of the great God in the province of Judah. The people are building it with huge stones, and they are putting wooden beams in the walls. They are doing this work very carefully, and they are making good progress.
9 So we asked the Jewish leaders, ‘Who has permitted you to rebuild this temple?’ 10 We also asked them for the names of their leaders so that we could write them down and so that we could inform you who their leaders were.
11 This is what they told us in reply. They said, ‘We serve the God who created heaven and earth. We are rebuilding his temple, which a great king of Israel originally completed many years ago. 12 But our ancestors did things that caused God, who is in heaven, to become very angry. So God allowed the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, a Chaldean, to conquer them. His armies destroyed that temple, and they took many of the Israelite people to Babylon.
13 However, during the first year that Cyrus ruled as king of Babylon, he decreed that our people could rebuild the temple for God. 14 There had been a lot of containers made of gold and silver in the temple of God. Nebuchadnezzar took them from the temple in Jerusalem and brought them to a temple for his god in Babylon. Later, King Cyrus removed those containers from that temple in Babylon and gave them to a man named Sheshbazzar, whom he appointed as governor of Judah. 15 King Cyrus told Sheshbazzar to take these containers and put them back in the temple in Jerusalem. He also decreed that the Jews should rebuild the temple at the place where it had been before. 16 So Sheshbazzar came here to Jerusalem and supervised the men who laid the foundation of this temple. And since that time, the people have been working on the temple, but they have not finished it yet.’
17 Therefore, your Majesty, please order your officials to search in the place in Babylon where you keep the royal records. Have them find out whether or not it is true that King Cyrus decreed that the Jews should rebuild this temple of God in Jerusalem. Then please tell us what you would like us to do about this matter.”