Return from Babylon
After the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and issued his decree permitting the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, Zerubbabel led the first wave of returning exiles. The biblical narrative numbers this company at 42,360. He served as governor of the province of Yehud, the territory of Judah, under Persian authority, and is consistently named alongside Joshua (also called Jeshua), son of Jozadak, the high priest who returned with him.
The return is dated by the biblical record to the period following Cyrus's decree, between roughly 538 and 520 BC. Zerubbabel's leadership joined civil and religious authority: he as governor of the Davidic line and Joshua as high priest, a pairing that the Orthodox tradition understands as uniting kingly and priestly associations in the restoration of the people.
Rebuilding the Temple
Zerubbabel's most enduring work was the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been destroyed when the Babylonians took the city. He laid the foundation of the Second Temple soon after the return, and the books of Ezra, Haggai, and Zechariah record the encouragement, opposition, and eventual completion of the project. Construction was taken up in earnest in the second year of the reign of Darius, with the prophets Haggai and Zechariah urging the people on.
The prophet Haggai delivered an oracle naming Zerubbabel as the Lord's chosen servant, likened to a signet ring. The prophet Zechariah declared that the work would be accomplished 'not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,' and that the great mountain of obstacles would become a plain before Zerubbabel, who would bring forth the capstone of the Temple. Zechariah's vision of two anointed ones standing by the Lord has been associated with Zerubbabel and Joshua, the governor and the high priest together.
Davidic lineage and the genealogy of Christ
Zerubbabel belonged to the royal house of David. The biblical genealogies generally call him the son of Shealtiel, while the text of 1 Chronicles presents him as the son of Pedaiah, Shealtiel's brother, both descended from King Jeconiah. Through this line he is reckoned among the heirs of the Davidic dynasty.
He appears in both New Testament genealogies of Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew traces the line through Solomon, recording that Shealtiel was the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud. The Gospel of Luke also names Zerubbabel, listing his son as Rhesa and tracing the descent along a different path. This place in the ancestry of Christ is the ground of his veneration in the Orthodox Church.
Orthodox commemoration
The Orthodox Church commemorates the Righteous Zerubbabel among the Holy Forefathers, the Old Testament ancestors of Christ. He is named on the Sunday before the Nativity, the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, when the Church recalls the lineage extending from Adam and Eve through the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the kings, and finally Joseph the Betrothed, all of whom prepared the way for the Incarnation.
In the synaxarion he is described as the one who led the captives back to Jerusalem and laid the foundations of the new Temple. His leadership of the return and his rebuilding of the house of God are read as a figure of the restoration accomplished in Christ, whose own ancestry runs through him.
