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12 illustrations across all 10 chapters
Cyrus II Cyrus II, king of Persia (559–530 BC), founded the great Persian Empire. His father was king of Persia, a small nation that was subject to Media, and his mother was the daughter of the king of the Medes.
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The Medes and Persians The Medes (around 850–549 BC) The early Medes left no written records. According to an inscription from Shalmaneser III of Assyria (858–824 BC), the Medes had settled around Ecbatana, their capital (modern Hamadan, Iran), by the mid-800s BC.
Ezra Ezra was a priest and scribe of the high-priestly line of Zadok (Ezra 7:1-5, 11-12; cp. Neh 8:2, 9). He was a leader in Judah following the Jews’ return from exile.
In 1945, a handful of French Jews returned to Strasbourg after liberation. Their grand synagogue on Rue Kageneck — once among the finest in Europe...
Maclaren penetrates their strategy: the mingled people—descendants of ancient northern kingdom remnants and successive waves of Assyrian and Babylonian colonists—recognized that the Jews, though numerically smaller, possessed legitimate claim to the land under Cyrus's decree.
When the Temple of Jerusalem was completed after twenty-three years of struggle, opposition, and bureaucratic entanglement, the narrative does not first credit the masons' hands or the Persian king's decree.
These were new settlers, their survival dependent upon immediately cultivating their property and erecting shelter.
In September 1710, the congregation of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, gathered not inside their new building but around it. The walls stood only...
In 1958, the congregation of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem gathered not in their grand sanctuary but in the basement of a half-finished building on...
In a small furniture shop outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a Mennonite craftsman named Eli Stoltzfus spent fifty-two years building Windsor chairs. Visitors to his workshop often...
In a woodshop in Waco, Texas, a furniture maker named Harold Benton spent sixty years building three-legged stools. He told every apprentice the same thing:...
In the hill country outside Cremona, Italy, a young Antonio Stradivari apprenticed under Nicolò Amati in the 1660s. What set Stradivari apart from dozens of...