HOME | DD

Description
Zerubbabel was the governor of the Achaemenid province of Yehud (Judah) during the late 6th century BCE. He was the grandson of the last king of Judah, Jeconiah, who was cursed by the prophet Jeremiah after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 BCE. This curse supposedly made it so that no one of Jeconiah's lineage could sit on the throne of Israel ever again, but… uh… evidently that didn't last, whoops. When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and allowed its exiled Jewish population to return to Jerusalem, Zerubbabel was given that cursed throne. I suppose technically it doesn't count, as a lot of his contemporaries argued, since really he was only a governor within the wider Achaemenid Empire, not a true king. While this sounds like a win-win, it was actually quite a tenuous position for Zerubbabel to be in. On the one hand, having a person of the Davidic dynasty back in charge of Jerusalem aroused the hopes of the messianic future prophesied and emphasized by apocalyptic scripture. On the other hand, there was still that technicality of not actually being a king hovering around him at all times, putting his legitimacy into question. Still, he couldn't just disregard this technicality lest the aforementioned curse destabilized his credibility in the opposite direction. That and… you know, pissing off the King of Kings who was keeping everything together.

Still, he and the new High Priest of Jerusalem, Joshua, managed to weave their way through these complicated politics. Their greatest act of legitimacy was to begin construction on a new Temple to replace the one the Babylonians had destroyed. The foundations were laid in 537 BCE, but internal problems delayed the project until the second year of Darius the Great (520 BCE), who sponsored the construction himself. Achaemenid rulers were typically quite tolerant of other religious faiths, as they understood that the secret to governing such a large swath of land peacefully was to allow their subjects to keep their cultures. As long as the taxes came to Persepolis and no one rebelled against the shah, it really couldn't matter less what god you worshiped. If sponsoring the construction of a temple to some obscure Hebrew god gave Darius divine authority in the praises of the people, the PR is frankly impossible to pass up. It's unclear if Zerubbabel lived to see the construction finished, as he kinda just drops out of the story from there. Rabbinic tradition has it that at some point he returned to Babylon and died there, while others speculate the Achaemenids turned on him and had him executed, which as far as I can tell is kind of a stretch based on flimsy literary evidence. This is mostly just one of those 19th century headcanons that gets tossed around in an echo chamber, but by all means feel free to prove me wrong. I love me some literary analysis.

Design notes, I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with this one, but I can't quite put my finger on why. I took inspiration primarily from a 19th century depiction of Zerubbabel and Joshua conversing with the prophet Haggai by Jan Reckleben, and a couple of stained glass portraits which I wasn't able to trace what church they came from, sadly. I'm fine with his robes and scale mail, they look sufficiently accurate for the time period and culture. I think it's just my decision to include the limb armor and crown. I don't think they'd be too out of place in Persian Jerusalem, and I tried to make the crown appear more turban-like, but they do really straddle the medieval style, don't they? His sword is also pretty fantastical, and I think the original design in the stained glass windows were trying to emulate a vague "Middle-Eastern-ness", which normally I try to avoid. But I'll be damned if it doesn't look really cool, and hey sometimes that's enough for me to suspend my disbelief. That is exactly the kind of sword I would hope to loot out of some kind of desert dungeon.

Description
Zerubbabel was the governor of the Achaemenid province of Yehud (Judah) during the late 6th century BCE. He was the grandson of the last king of Judah, Jeconiah, who was cursed by the prophet Jeremiah after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 BCE. This curse supposedly made it so that no one of Jeconiah's lineage could sit on the throne of Israel ever again, but… uh… evidently that didn't last, whoops. When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and allowed its exiled Jewish population to return to Jerusalem, Zerubbabel was given that cursed throne. I suppose technically it doesn't count, as a lot of his contemporaries argued, since really he was only a governor within the wider Achaemenid Empire, not a true king. While this sounds like a win-win, it was actually quite a tenuous position for Zerubbabel to be in. On the one hand, having a person of the Davidic dynasty back in charge of Jerusalem aroused the hopes of the messianic future prophesied and emphasized by apocalyptic scripture. On the other hand, there was still that technicality of not actually being a king hovering around him at all times, putting his legitimacy into question. Still, he couldn't just disregard this technicality lest the aforementioned curse destabilized his credibility in the opposite direction. That and… you know, pissing off the King of Kings who was keeping everything together.

Still, he and the new High Priest of Jerusalem, Joshua, managed to weave their way through these complicated politics. Their greatest act of legitimacy was to begin construction on a new Temple to replace the one the Babylonians had destroyed. The foundations were laid in 537 BCE, but internal problems delayed the project until the second year of Darius the Great (520 BCE), who sponsored the construction himself. Achaemenid rulers were typically quite tolerant of other religious faiths, as they understood that the secret to governing such a large swath of land peacefully was to allow their subjects to keep their cultures. As long as the taxes came to Persepolis and no one rebelled against the shah, it really couldn't matter less what god you worshiped. If sponsoring the construction of a temple to some obscure Hebrew god gave Darius divine authority in the praises of the people, the PR is frankly impossible to pass up. It's unclear if Zerubbabel lived to see the construction finished, as he kinda just drops out of the story from there. Rabbinic tradition has it that at some point he returned to Babylon and died there, while others speculate the Achaemenids turned on him and had him executed, which as far as I can tell is kind of a stretch based on flimsy literary evidence. This is mostly just one of those 19th century headcanons that gets tossed around in an echo chamber, but by all means feel free to prove me wrong. I love me some literary analysis.

Design notes, I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with this one, but I can't quite put my finger on why. I took inspiration primarily from a 19th century depiction of Zerubbabel and Joshua conversing with the prophet Haggai by Jan Reckleben, and a couple of stained glass portraits which I wasn't able to trace what church they came from, sadly. I'm fine with his robes and scale mail, they look sufficiently accurate for the time period and culture. I think it's just my decision to include the limb armor and crown. I don't think they'd be too out of place in Persian Jerusalem, and I tried to make the crown appear more turban-like, but they do really straddle the medieval style, don't they? His sword is also pretty fantastical, and I think the original design in the stained glass windows were trying to emulate a vague "Middle-Eastern-ness", which normally I try to avoid. But I'll be damned if it doesn't look really cool, and hey sometimes that's enough for me to suspend my disbelief. That is exactly the kind of sword I would hope to loot out of some kind of desert dungeon.