This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Cyrus the Great of Persia captured Babylon in 539 BCE, and the following year he ended the exile, permitting the Jews who had been displaced to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple there. The biblical account attributes the return to a specific decree naming Judah by name.
The Cyrus Cylinder, the closest surviving contemporary document to the event, tells a broader story: a Persian policy of restoring displaced peoples and their cults generally, rather than a decree naming Judah specifically. Modern scholars remain divided on whether a document as precise as the one the biblical Book of Ezra describes ever existed in that exact form, though a general Persian restoration policy that covered Judah among other peoples is not itself seriously in doubt on either reading of the evidence.
What this changed for Judaism's spread was the reversal of exile: a return to Zion and the rebuilding of the Temple, made possible by an empire's broader policy of restoration rather than, on the Cylinder's own account, by any decree naming Judah specifically. Whether by a named decree or a general Persian practice, the return under Cyrus restored a Jewish presence in Jerusalem and gave the Temple a second life after its destruction.