Written by Ezra (Traditionally attributed)
Introduction
Ezra opens with the words that closed 2 Chronicles — the decree of Cyrus king of Persia — and continues the story directly from there. The first six chapters cover the initial return under Zerubbabel around 538 BC: about fifty thousand Jews leaving Babylon, arriving in a ruined Jerusalem, rebuilding the altar in the seventh month, and beginning work on the foundation of the second temple. The work stalls almost immediately under local opposition and discouragement. Sixteen years pass before the prophets Haggai and Zechariah stir the people to resume building, and the temple is finally completed in 516 BC — exactly seventy years after its destruction, just as Jeremiah had prophesied. The first half of Ezra is the answer to whether God’s promise of restoration was real. It was. The house stands again on the original foundation.
“For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the Lord, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.” — Ezra 7:10
The second half of the book jumps almost eighty years forward to Ezra himself, a priest and scribe descended from Aaron through Phinehas, who arrives in Jerusalem in 458 BC with a commission from the Persian king Artaxerxes to teach the law and reorder the community according to it. What Ezra finds when he arrives is a community physically restored but spiritually compromised — many of the returnees, including priests and Levites, have intermarried with the surrounding peoples and adopted their practices, the very thing that caused the exile in the first place. Ezra’s response is not policy. It is grief. He tears his garments, pulls hair from his head and beard, sits appalled until the evening sacrifice, and then prays one of the great corporate confessions in the Old Testament — naming the sin of his people as his own, refusing to distance himself from them even though he personally had not committed it.
What follows is the controversial chapter ten — the dissolution of the mixed marriages — which has troubled readers for centuries and should. The text reports what happened without moralizing about it, and the reader is left to weigh it: a community on the edge of losing its identity for the second time, trying to preserve what it had been given another chance to be. Ezra’s heart, the verse the book gives us as his definition, is the key to understanding the whole movement: he had set his heart to study the Law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel. Study, do, teach — in that order. The man who would rebuild a community spiritually first internalized the standard he was going to ask others to meet. The book is not primarily about the temple, though the temple is its center of gravity. It is about a man and a moment when the Word of God was placed back at the center of a people’s life, and what that placement actually cost.
Chapters in Ezra
- Chapter 1 – Cyrus’s Decree and the Return Begins
- Chapter 2 – The Exiles Who Returned
- Chapter 3 – Rebuilding the Altar and Laying the Temple Foundation
- Chapter 4 – Resistance to Rebuilding
- Chapter 5 – The Work Resumes
- Chapter 6 – Decree Reconfirmed, Temple Completed
- Chapter 7 – Ezra Arrives with God’s Favor
- Chapter 8 – The Journey Begins with Faith
- Chapter 9 – A Broken Prayer
- Chapter 10 – Repentance in Action