The Two Hundred Years
The Longest Lie — Part 2 of 11 eFireTemple.com From 539 BCE to 332 BCE, the Jewish community lived inside the Persian Empire. Not as slaves. Not as refugees. Not as a barely tolerated minority clinging to survival at the margins. As citizens. Two hundred and seven years. Seven generations. Long enough to be born, grow old, and die — and have your great-great-great-grandchildren do the same — all under Persian protection.
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The Longest Lie — Part 2 of 11 eFireTemple.com From 539 BCE to 332 BCE, the Jewish community lived inside the Persian Empire. Not as slaves. Not as refugees. Not as a barely tolerated minority clinging to survival at the margins. As citizens. Two hundred and seven years. Seven generations. Long enough to be born, grow old, and die — and have your great-great-great-grandchildren do the same — all under Persian protection. Long enough to build institutions, develop traditions, train scholars, and raise children who had never known anything but Persian civilization as the background of their lives. This was not a brief contact. This was immersion. The political reality The Persian Empire under the Achaemenid dynasty was the largest empire the world had seen. At its height, it stretched from Egypt to India, from the Danube to the Oxus.
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