The Second Temple Period takes its name from the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt after the Babylonian exile and dedicated around 516 BCE under Persian imperial sponsorship, replacing Solomon's Temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed in 586 BCE. Under Persian rule, the reforms associated with Ezra and Nehemiah reorganized Judean religious life around the Torah as a governing legal text, a foundation that Hellenistic and later Roman rule left largely intact even as political control passed from the Persians to Alexander's successors, first the Ptolemies and then the Seleucids.
Seleucid attempts to suppress Jewish religious practice under Antiochus IV Epiphanes provoked the Maccabean revolt in the 160s BCE, commemorated in the account of the Temple's rededication after its recapture, and led to a century of Hasmonean self-rule before Rome absorbed Judea, first as a client kingdom under Herod the Great, who greatly expanded the Temple complex itself, and then as a directly governed province. The period ends with the First Jewish-Roman War, in which Titus's forces destroyed the Temple in 70 CE after a prolonged siege of Jerusalem, an event that closed the Second Temple era outright and reshaped Judaism around study, prayer and the emerging rabbinic tradition rather than temple sacrifice. E. P. Sanders's Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE to 66 CE, remains a standard scholarly account of the period's religious life on the eve of that destruction.