In today's reading about the completion of the temple, Ezra in a couple of places mentions kings that don't seem to belong. In 6:14b he says, "They finished building the temple according to the command of the God of Israel and the decrees of Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes, kings of Persia." In 6:22 he says, "For seven days they celebrated with joy the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because the LORD had filled them with joy by changing the attitude of the king of Assyria, so that he assisted them in the work on the house of God, the God of Israel."
In the first case, according to commentaries, although the temple was completed before the time of Artaxerxes, Ezra lived during the reign of this king and gives him credit for his continued benevolence toward the culture of the Jewish people.
In the second case, the People's Bible says that Ezra sees "all the world empires as succeeding phases of the same experience" to emphasize "that although Israel's experience with the world empires began with the bitterness of the Assyrian deportations and the Babylonian destruction of the temple, God grace had changed bitterness to joy."
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