Before the reign of this Persian Darius I, those Palestinian adversaries succeeded in having the imperial ruler ban the work of rebuilding the temple of Jehovah by accusing the repatriated “sons of the Exile” of being seditionists.​—Ezra 4:1-22.

¹⁸ The Bible calls the Persian emperor who issued the ban by the name of Artaxerxes, and says: “Now after the copy of the official document of Artaxerxes the king had been read before Rehum and Shimshai the scribe and their colleagues, they went in a hurry to Jerusalem to the Jews and stopped them by force of arms.

This ban imposed by the Persian emperor, Artaxerxes, must have left the Jews in Jerusalem and Judah quite confused, in a quandary. They may have wondered how the ban of this later emperor could countermand the decree of King Cyrus the Great that was issued in 537 B.C.E. as part of the “law of the Medes and the Persians, which is not annulled.” (Daniel 6:8, 12) They did not think to put the matter to a test in the law courts of the Persian Empire, carrying the case even to the Supreme Court of the empire, to the court of last instance, which was with the emperor himself. The coming in of a new emperor, a successor to Artaxerxes, would allow for that.