Zerubbabel

Zerubbabel led the return from Babylon and rebuilt the Temple, and then disappears from the record without explanation. He was a grandson of Jehoiachin, the king of Judah taken to Babylon in 597 BC, which made him the Davidic heir - and his name means something like seed of Babylon, so he was born in the exile. Cyrus took Babylon in 539 and permitted the return, and he was appointed governor of the province of Yehud under Persian authority, arriving with the high priest Jeshua and a party the sources number in the tens of thousands. The rebuilding stalled for years against local opposition and lack of money, and the prophets Haggai and Zechariah were sent to shame the returnees into finishing it. The Second Temple was completed about 516 BC, seventy years after the first was destroyed, and the old men who remembered the first wept when they saw the foundations of the second. The prophecies about him are the strange part. Zechariah calls him the Branch and speaks of a crown, and Haggai says God will make him a signet ring - language about a restored Davidic kingship rather than a Persian governorship. Nothing further is recorded of him at all. Whether Persia removed a governor who was being talked about that way, or he simply died, has been argued for two thousand years. Judah was governed by high priests rather than kings from then on, and the Davidic line passes out of history as a political fact and into expectation - which is where both Matthew and Luke pick it up, both running their genealogies of Jesus through him.

• Nationality: Judahite
• Roles: head_of_state