It was then that the work on the house of God, which was in Jerusalem, stopped; and it continued stopped until the second year of the reign of Darius the king of Persia.”​—Ezra 4:23, 24.

19. (a) About how many years did the temple work continue stopped? (b) Why did the ban put the temple builders in a quandary, but who finally pushed the case in the right direction?

¹⁹ The second year of the reign of King Darius I coincided with 520/519 B.C.E., and this meant that the stoppage of the work of building a new temple of Jehovah at Jerusalem lasted for about sixteen years, from the time that the foundation of this temple had been laid by Governor Zerubbabel and High Priest Joshua (or, Jeshua; Jesus, in the Greek Septuagint Version).

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.