Ezra: Coming Home, and Who Was Sent Away

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It includes what appears to be Ezra’s own memoir, in the first person in Ezra 7:27–9:15, within the Ezra story of chapters 7 to 10, and copies of official letters, some in Aramaic. In my day Ezra and Nehemiah were one book.

When: It covers 538 BC to about 450 BC. It was put together around 400 BC or later.

Where it fits: It begins where 2 Chronicles ends (2 Chronicles 36:22–23), with Cyrus of Persia freeing the exiles in 538 BC. It follows the rebuilding of the Temple and then, after a long gap, Ezra’s own mission.

Where I quote it: Never.

If you only read three chapters: Ezra 1, Ezra 3 and Ezra 10.

Words to Know

Return — the journey of the exiles back from Babylon to Judah, after Persia conquered Babylon.

Aramaic — the common language of the Persian Empire, and later the language I spoke. Parts of this book are written in it.

Scribe — at first a royal secretary. By Ezra’s time, a man expert in the Law of Moses.

People of the land — in this book, the people who were already living in and around Judah when the exiles returned.

The Book in Brief

Ezra is a history in ten chapters, in two halves. It picks up where 2 Chronicles ends, and parts of it are written in Aramaic.

Chapters 1 to 6 tell of the first return. Cyrus, king of Persia, announces that the God of heaven has told him to build a house in Jerusalem, and he lets any Jews who wish to go home. He gives back the gold and silver vessels Nebuchadnezzar took from the Temple. Chapter 2 lists about forty-two thousand people who go. In chapter 3 they rebuild the altar, keep the feast of booths and lay the Temple’s foundation. The people shout for joy while the old men who remember the first Temple weep. In chapter 4 their neighbors ask to help and are refused, then work against them, writing letters to the Persian kings. The work stops. In chapter 5 the prophets Haggai and Zechariah get the people building again, and a Persian governor writes to King Darius to ask by what right. Darius has the archives searched, and in chapter 6 Cyrus’s decree is found. Darius orders the work to go on. The Temple is finished and dedicated, and the Passover is kept.

Chapters 7 to 10 tell of Ezra, a priest and scribe who knows the Law of Moses. King Artaxerxes sends him from Babylon to Jerusalem with silver, gold and the power to teach the Law, and a new group of exiles goes with him. From the end of chapter 7 (7:27) through chapter 9, Ezra tells the story himself, in the first person. In chapter 9 the leaders report that many Jews, even priests and Levites, have married women from the surrounding peoples. Ezra tears his clothes, sits stunned, and prays in grief. In chapter 10 the people agree to send these wives and their children away. A committee examines the cases for three months. The book ends with a list of the men who had married foreign women.

Ezra picks up exactly where Chronicles leaves off, with the decree of Cyrus, king of Persia, letting the exiles go home to rebuild the Temple (Ezra 1:1–4).

Cyrus did not do this out of love for my people. Persian kings let conquered peoples restore their temples because it kept the provinces quiet and the gods on Persia’s side. A clay cylinder from Babylon records Cyrus boasting about returning gods and peoples to their homes. It does not mention Judah or the Jews.¹

But my prophets saw God’s hand in it. Isaiah even called Cyrus the LORD’s anointed, his messiah (Isaiah 45:1). A foreign king who never worshiped the God of Israel, called by the same word my followers later used for me.

Go deeperWhat the Cyrus Cylinder is, and what it is not

The Cyrus Cylinder is a barrel of baked clay about nine inches (23 cm) long, covered in wedge-shaped writing in Akkadian, the language of Babylon. Hormuzd Rassam, digging for the British Museum, found it at Babylon in 1879.²

It is not a letter to the Jews. It is a building inscription, the kind Mesopotamian kings buried in the foundations of a temple or wall to record what they had done. Cyrus says that Babylon’s god Marduk chose him, that Babylon’s last king, Nabonidus, had offended the gods, and that he entered the city without a fight. He says he sent the gods’ statues back to their shrines in cities such as Ashur, Susa and Der, and let their people go home.²

In the 1970s the last Shah of Iran promoted it as the first charter of human rights. Most historians think that goes too far. It is a king’s boast in a very old tradition, not a declaration of rights for everyone.³

The book of Ezra gives Cyrus’s decree twice, in different forms. In chapter 1, in Hebrew, it is a public announcement that the LORD has told Cyrus to build him a house in Jerusalem. In chapter 6, in Aramaic, it is a note found in the royal archive at Ecbatana, in Media, giving the size of the house and ordering the cost paid from the king’s treasury (Ezra 1:2–4; 6:2–5). The Cylinder cannot confirm either text word for word. What it shows is that Cyrus presented himself, in Babylon at least, as a king who restored gods and peoples.¹

Joy and weeping

The exiles come home and lay the foundation of the new Temple. The priests blow trumpets, the Levites sing, and the people shout.

But the old men who had seen the first Temple before it was burned look at the new foundation and weep aloud. The people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people; for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the noise was heard far away (Ezra 3:12–13).

That is what coming home after a disaster sounds like. Joy and grief so mixed that you cannot tell them apart.

Go deeperThe second Temple, and the one I knew

The new house was smaller and poorer than Solomon’s, and the old men knew it. The prophet Haggai, who spoke to the builders, asked them, Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Isn’t it in your eyes as nothing? (Haggai 2:3).

The builders finished in the sixth year of King Darius, on the third day of the month Adar (Ezra 6:15). That date is usually worked out as March 515 BC, about seventy years after Nebuchadnezzar burned the first Temple.⁴ The Ark of the covenant was gone. The inner room, the Holy of Holies, stood empty. The Mishnah, the collection of Jewish teaching written down around AD 200, says that only a stone stood where the Ark had been. Josephus, a Jewish historian who lived through the Roman war, says the inner room held nothing at all.⁵

That building stood for nearly five hundred years. Around 20 BC King Herod began to rebuild it on a grand scale, and he enlarged the platform it stood on. The Temple I knew was Herod’s. John remembers some of the Jews saying to me in its courts, It took forty-six years to build this temple! (John 2:20). The work was still going on in my lifetime. Josephus says it was finished only in the 60s AD, a few years before the Romans burned it in AD 70.⁶

The help that was refused

When the building starts, people from the surrounding area come and offer to help. Let us build with you; for we seek your God, as you do; and we have been sacrificing to him since the days of Esar Haddon king of Assyria, who brought us up here (Ezra 4:2).

The leaders of the returned exiles refuse. You have nothing to do with us in building a house to our God (Ezra 4:3).

After that, those people become enemies, and they write to the Persian king to stop the work.

Ezra calls them adversaries. They were the people who had been living in the land the whole time, and who said they worshiped the same God. The hostility between Jews and Samaritans in my day had many causes, but this kind of moment is part of where it came from.⁷

The letters in Aramaic

From Ezra 4:8 to 6:18, and again in 7:12–26, the book switches from Hebrew to Aramaic. These are copies of letters to and from the Persian court: complaints, investigations, a search of the royal archives, a decree.

That was the language of the empire’s offices. By my day, Aramaic was the language my people spoke at home. I spoke it. Some of my words are still in your gospels in it: Talitha cumi, which means Girl, I tell you, get up (Mark 5:41).

Go deeperHow a Persian king’s letters reached Jerusalem

Persia ruled lands from Egypt to India, and its offices needed one common written language. They chose Aramaic, which had already spread under the Assyrians and Babylonians. Scholars call the form used in the Persian offices Imperial Aramaic.⁸

We have papyri of the kind Ezra quotes. Jewish soldiers stationed at Elephantine, an island in the Nile on Egypt’s southern border, left behind a large collection of contracts, letters and petitions in Aramaic. One, from 419 BC, is a letter to the Jewish garrison from a man named Hananiah. It tells them how to keep the Passover and the seven days of Unleavened Bread, and it seems to pass on an instruction that came from the Persian king, Darius II. The papyrus is broken, and some of the wording is a scholar’s guess. But it shows a Persian king’s office taking an interest in the religion of a Jewish community, as Artaxerxes’ letter does in Ezra 7:12–26.⁹

That letter tells Ezra to appoint judges and to punish anyone who will not obey the law of your God and the law of the king (Ezra 7:25–26). Some scholars think Persia regularly approved the local laws of its provinces, and that this helped make the Law of Moses binding in Judah. Others think the evidence is too thin to say.¹⁰

Ezra the scribe

The second half of the book introduces Ezra himself, decades after the first return. He is a priest and a scribe, skilled … in the law of Moses (Ezra 7:6). The book says Ezra had set his heart to seek the LORD’s law, and to do it, and to teach (Ezra 7:10).

Seek it, do it, teach it, in that order. That is a good description of what a scribe was supposed to be.

The scribes of my day were Ezra’s heirs. I argued with them often. But notice that I did not argue with Ezra’s order. I argued with scribes who taught it and did not do it. They say, and don’t do (Matthew 23:3).

The foreign wives

Then comes the end of the book, and it is hard.

Ezra learns that many of the returned men, including priests and Levites, have married women from the surrounding peoples. He tears his clothes and pulls hair from his head and beard, and sits stunned until evening (Ezra 9:3–4).

The people gather in the rain in front of the Temple, trembling, and agree to put away all the wives, and those who are born of them (Ezra 10:3, 9–12). A committee works for three months, going through the cases one by one. The book ends with a list of the men who had married foreign women, and its last line reads, All these had taken foreign wives; and some of them had wives by whom they had children (Ezra 10:44).¹¹

That is how the book ends. Women and children sent away.

You should understand why Ezra was afraid. His community was tiny, and it had just survived an exile that nearly erased it. He believed that mixing with the surrounding peoples and their gods was exactly what had destroyed Israel the first time. He thought he was saving his people.

You should also know that my scriptures did not leave his answer standing alone. The book of Ruth tells of a Moabite woman who married into Israel and became King David’s great-grandmother. Isaiah says that foreigners who join themselves to the LORD will be brought to God’s holy mountain, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples (Isaiah 56:6–7).

Who belongs

I did not speak about Ezra. But I was asked, again and again, who belongs.

When the Pharisees asked about divorce, I said, What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate (Mark 10:9).

And once, in the region of Tyre, a foreign woman begged me to heal her daughter. I told her it was not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. She answered me, Yes, Lord. Yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs. And I healed her daughter (Mark 7:24–30).

I will not pretend I did not say what I said to her. She argued with me, and she was right. That is in your gospels too.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Ezra 3:10–13.

You will find: a crowd so full of joy and grief that no one could tell the two sounds apart.

Then read Ezra 10:1–5 and 10:44, and then Isaiah 56:3–7. Two answers in my scriptures to the same question.

The Short Version

• Ezra tells of the return from Babylon and the rebuilding of the Temple, under Persian rule.
• Isaiah called Cyrus, a foreign king, the LORD’s anointed.
• The returned exiles refused help from the people already in the land, part of the long story behind Jews and Samaritans.
• Parts of the book are in Aramaic, the language I spoke.
• The book ends with foreign wives and their children sent away. Ruth and Isaiah answer it differently.