what ruler allowed the hebrews to return to jerusalem
Return to Zion The return to Zion (Hebrew: שִׁיבָת צִיּוֹן‎, Shivat Tzion, or שבי ציון‎, Shavei Tzion, lit. Zion returnees) refers to the event in the biblical books of Ezra-Nehemiah in which the Jews returned to the Land of Israel from the Babylonian exile following the decree by the emperor Cyrus the Great, the conqueror of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE, also known as Cyrus's edict. The term was first coined after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.[citation needed]
History of the Jews in Egypt The Book of Genesis and Book of Exodus describe a period of Hebrew servitude in ancient Egypt, during decades of sojourn in Egypt, the escape of well over a million Israelites from the Delta, and the three-month journey through the wilderness to Sinai.[5] The historical evidence does not support this account.[6] Israelites first appear in the archeological record on the Merneptah Stele from between 1208-3 BCE at the end of the Bronze Age. A reasonably Bible-friendly interpretation is that they were a federation of Habiru tribes of the hill-country around the Jordan River. Presumably, this federation consolidated into the kingdom of Israel, and Judah split from that, during the dark age that followed the Bronze. The Bronze Age term "Habiru" was less specific than the Biblical "Hebrew". The term referred simply to Levantine nomads, of any religion or ethnicity. Mesopotamian, Hittite, Canaanite, and Egyptian sources describe them largely as bandits, mercenaries, and slaves. Certainly, there were some Habiru slaves in ancient Egypt, but native Egyptian kingdoms were not heavily slave-based.[6]