The Jewish captivity.--Jeremiah and the book of Chronicles.--Incursions of Nebuchadnezzar.--Denunciations of Jeremiah.--Predictions of Jeremiah.--Exasperation of the priests and people.--Defense of Jeremiah.--He is liberated.--Symbolic method of teaching.--The wooden yoke and the iron yoke.--The title deeds of Jeremiah's estate.--The deeds deposited.--Baruch writes Jeremiah's prophecies.--He reads them to the people.--Baruch summoned before the council.--The roll sent to the king.--The roll destroyed.--Jeremiah attempts to leave the city.--The king sends for Jeremiah.--He is imprisoned.--Jeremiah cast into a dungeon.--The king orders him to be taken up.--Jerusalem besieged by the Babylonians.--Capture of the king.--Captivity of the Jews.--The prophet Daniel.--Cyrus takes possession of Babylon, and allows the Jews to return.--Assembling of the Jews.--The number that returned.--Arrival of the caravan at Jerusalem.--Building the Temple.--Emotions of the old men.--Rejoicings of the young men. The period of the invasion of Babylonia by Cyrus, and the taking of the city, was during the time while the Jews were in captivity there. Cyrus was their deliverer. It results from this circumstance that the name of Cyrus is connected with sacred history more than that of any other great conqueror of ancient times. It was a common custom in the early ages of the world for powerful sovereigns to take the people of a conquered country captive, and make them slaves. They employed them, to some extent, as personal household servants, but more generally as agricultural laborers, to till the lands. An account of the captivity of the Jews in Babylon is given briefly in the closing chapters of the second book of Chronicles, though many of the attendant circumstances are more fully detailed in the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a prophet who lived in the time of the captivity. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, made repeated incursions into the land of Judea, sometimes carrying away the reigning monarch, sometimes deposing him and appointing another sovereign in his stead, sometimes assessing a tax or tribute upon the land, and sometimes plundering the city, and carrying away all the gold and silver that he could find. Thus the kings and the people were kept in a continual state of anxiety and terror for many years, exposed incessantly to the inroads of this nation of robbers and plunderers, that had, so unfortunately for them, found their way across their frontiers. King Zedekiah was the last of this oppressed and unhappy line of Jewish kings.