Summary: Bible - Book of Ezra

The GIST

Ezra, a book of the Bible, tells how a defeated people came home. Its subject is the Return to Zion at the end of the Babylonian captivity: first the exiles who went back to Jerusalem under Cyrus the Great and rebuilt the Temple, then, in a later reign, the mission of the priest and scribe Ezra, who arrived to teach the law of Moses and found a community he judged to have lost its way. It has ten chapters, written in Hebrew with a set of royal letters and decrees in Aramaic, and it once formed a single book with Nehemiah. Together the two close the historical story the Hebrew Bible tells.

The book has a shape it repeats. The God of Israel moves a Persian king, the king sends a Jewish leader on a mission, the leader meets resistance and finishes anyway, and the people gather to mark what has been done. Who wrote it is not settled. Older scholarship asked whether Ezra himself was the author; most scholars now see many stages of editing. What the book leaves with a reader is a picture of faith rebuilt out of ruins by people with no king of their own, with an altar, a house of God and a law.

What It Says

The proclamation of Cyrus (chapter 1). The opening line sets the tone for everything after it: "the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia". In his first year the king announces in writing that the God of heaven has charged him to build a house at Jerusalem, and that any of God's people may go: "let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD God of Israel". Neighbours are to help with silver, gold, goods and animals. The heads of the families of Judah and Benjamin, the priests and the Levites rise to go. Cyrus also brings out the Temple vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had carried off and placed in the house of his own gods. His treasurer Mithredath counts them out to Sheshbazzar, "the prince of Judah": five thousand four hundred vessels of gold and silver in all.

The register of those who returned (chapter 2). A long list follows of those who came back with Zerubbabel and Jeshua, family by family and town by town, then the priests, the Levites, the singers, the porters and the temple servants called Nethinims. Some could not prove their descent, and certain priestly families whose names were not found in the registers were barred from the priesthood until a priest could decide the matter. The total is given as "forty and two thousand three hundred and threescore", besides more than seven thousand servants and two hundred singing men and women, with their horses, mules, camels and asses. On arrival some of the family heads give freely toward the building.

The altar and the foundation (chapter 3). In the seventh month the people gather "as one man" in Jerusalem. Jeshua the son of Jozadak and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel build the altar first, before anything else, "for fear was upon them because of the people of those countries", and the morning and evening offerings begin again. They keep the feast of tabernacles. Masons and carpenters are paid, and cedar is ordered from Lebanon by way of the sea to Joppa, under Cyrus's grant. In the second year the foundation of the Temple is laid. Priests stand with trumpets and Levites with cymbals, and they sing that the LORD is good, "for his mercy endureth for ever toward Israel". Then comes the book's most moving moment. The old men who had seen the first house "wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy", and the two sounds could not be told apart.

Opposition (chapter 4). The "adversaries of Judah and Benjamin" come with an offer: "Let us build with you: for we seek your God, as ye do". Zerubbabel, Jeshua and the family heads refuse: "Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God". From then on the people of the land wear the builders down and hire counsellors against them, through the days of Cyrus and on to the reign of Darius. The chapter then gathers complaints from later reigns: an accusation in the time of Ahasuerus, and a letter to Artaxerxes from Rehum the chancellor and Shimshai the scribe. They call Jerusalem "the rebellious and the bad city" and warn that if its walls go up the king will lose toll, tribute and custom. The king has the records searched, finds that the city has a history of revolt, and orders the building stopped. Rehum and Shimshai hurry to Jerusalem and halt it "by force and power". Work on the house of God lies still until the second year of Darius.

The Temple finished (chapters 5 and 6). Two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah the son of Iddo, speak to the Jews in the name of the God of Israel, and Zerubbabel and Jeshua start building again. The governor Tatnai arrives with a question: "Who hath commanded you to build this house, and to make up this wall?" The work is not stopped while he writes to Darius, because "the eye of their God was upon the elders of the Jews". His letter reports the elders' answer in full. They are servants of the God of heaven and earth, rebuilding a house that a great king of Israel built long ago; their fathers angered God and were given into Nebuchadnezzar's hand; and Cyrus decreed that the house be rebuilt. Tatnai asks that the royal archives be searched.

Darius orders the search, and a roll is found at Achmetha, in the palace in the province of the Medes, recording Cyrus's decree, with the building's measurements and the order that the cost be met from the king's house. Darius's reply is blunt: "Let the work of this house of God alone". More than that, the expenses are to be paid from the royal tribute, and animals, wheat, salt, wine and oil supplied daily for the offerings, so that the priests may "pray for the life of the king, and of his sons". Anyone who alters the decree faces a savage penalty. The elders build and prosper, and the house is finished "on the third day of the month Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king". The dedication is kept with joy: a hundred bullocks, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs, and twelve he goats as a sin offering, one for each tribe of Israel. The returned exiles then keep the passover and the feast of unleavened bread.

Ezra's commission and journey (chapters 7 and 8). "Now after these things, in the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia", a new figure enters, his line traced back to Aaron the chief priest. "This Ezra went up from Babylon; and he was a ready scribe in the law of Moses". His character is given in one verse: "For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments." He leaves Babylon on the first day of the first month and reaches Jerusalem on the first day of the fifth, in the king's seventh year. The king's letter lets any Israelite who wishes go with him, sends silver and gold for the Temple, orders the treasurers beyond the river to supply what he asks, frees the Temple's ministers from tax, and tells Ezra to "set magistrates and judges" and to teach those who do not know God's laws.

From here Ezra speaks in his own voice. He blesses God for putting this in the king's heart and gathers his company at the river that runs to Ahava, where they camp three days. Finding no Levites among them, he sends leading men to Iddo at Casiphia, and they return with Levites and two hundred and twenty Nethinims. Then he proclaims a fast. He has told the king that God's hand is on all who seek him, and so: "I was ashamed to require of the king a band of soldiers and horsemen to help us against the enemy in the way". He weighs out the silver, gold and vessels to twelve chief priests, telling them, "Ye are holy unto the LORD; the vessels are holy also". The caravan arrives safely, the treasure is weighed again in the house of God on the fourth day, and offerings are made.

The crisis over marriages (chapters 9 and 10). The princes then bring Ezra a report: the people, priests and Levites included, have taken wives from the peoples of the lands, and the leaders have been foremost in it. Ezra tears his garment and mantle, pulls hair from his head and beard, and sits stunned until the evening sacrifice. Then he falls on his knees and prays, counting himself among the guilty: "O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God". God has left them "a remnant to escape" and shown them mercy before the kings of Persia, and they have broken his commandments again.

A great crowd gathers, weeping. Shechaniah the son of Jehiel speaks: "yet now there is hope in Israel concerning this thing". He proposes a covenant to put away the foreign wives and their children and tells Ezra, "be of good courage, and do it." All the men of Judah and Benjamin are summoned to Jerusalem within three days, on pain of losing their property and their place in the congregation. On the twentieth day of the ninth month they sit in the street of the house of God, "trembling because of this matter, and for the great rain". They agree to Ezra's demand but ask for time, since it is not "a work of one day or two". The text names a few who took a different part. The cases are heard from the first day of the tenth month to the first day of the first, and the book closes with the list of the men concerned, priests first, ending: "All these had taken strange wives: and some of them had wives by whom they had children."

Why It Matters

Ezra and Nehemiah were a single book, called Ezra, until late medieval Latin Bibles began to separate them, a division that reached Hebrew Bibles only with the first printed rabbinic Bible of 1516 to 1517. Read together they are arranged by theology more than by calendar: the Temple first, then the purifying of the community under Ezra, then the city walls under Nehemiah. Scholars say this concern for pattern explains many of the difficulties in using the books as history.

Those difficulties are real, and the scholarship is divided. The order in which Ezra and Nehemiah worked is disputed; if the king was Artaxerxes I, Ezra arrived in 458 BC. The seven Persian documents quoted in the book are accepted as genuine by some scholars, in part by most, and rejected by others. There is no consensus on Ezra's own mission, for want of evidence outside the Bible. One scholar places the final composition in the late Persian period. The book also survives in a second Greek form, 1 Esdras, which adds a story called the Tale of the Three Guardsmen and which Jerome counted as apocryphal.

Who Should Read It

Readers drawn to stories of return and rebuilding, and anyone who wants to understand the world of the Second Temple. It is short, its scenes at the foundation and in the rain are vivid, and its hard ending rewards a slow reading alongside Nehemiah.