Ezra 1: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Cyrus, king of Persia, in his first year issues a written proclamation across his empire saying that the LORD has given him all the kingdoms of the earth and has told him to build a house for God in Jerusalem. He invites God's people to go up and rebuild it, and directs their neighbors to support them with silver, gold, goods, and animals, along with freewill offerings. Family leaders of Judah and Benjamin, priests, and Levites whose spirits God had stirred prepare to go. Cyrus also returns the temple vessels Nebuchadnezzar had taken, counting out 5,400 gold and silver items to Sheshbazzar, who brings them from Babylon to Jerusalem.

Claim by Claim

1. 1:1
   • It was the first year of Cyrus king of Persia.
   • The word of the LORD spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah was to be fulfilled.
   • The LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia.
   • Cyrus sent a proclamation throughout all his kingdom.
   • Cyrus also put the proclamation in writing.
   • The proclamation said the following.
2. 1:2
   • Cyrus king of Persia said these words.
   • Cyrus said the LORD, the God of heaven, had given him all the kingdoms of the earth.
   • Cyrus said the LORD had charged him to build him a house at Jerusalem.
   • Jerusalem is in Judah.
3. 1:3
   • Cyrus asked who among them belonged to all of God's people.
   • Cyrus said that such a man's God be with him.
   • Cyrus said such a man should go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
   • Cyrus said such a man should build the house of the LORD, the God of Israel.
   • Cyrus said that he is the God who is in Jerusalem.
4. 1:4
   • Cyrus said that anyone who remains, in any place where he lives as a resident alien, should be helped by the men of his place.
   • The help was to be with silver, gold, goods, and livestock.
   • The help was to be in addition to the freewill offering for the house of God in Jerusalem.
   • The house of God is in Jerusalem.
5. 1:5
   • The heads of the fathers' houses of Judah and Benjamin rose up.
   • The priests and the Levites rose up.
   • Those who rose were all whose spirit God had stirred up.
   • They rose to go up and build the house of the LORD in Jerusalem.
   • The house of the LORD is in Jerusalem.
6. 1:6
   • All those around them strengthened their hands.
   • They did so with vessels of silver, with gold, with goods, with livestock, and with precious things.
   • This was in addition to everything that was freely offered.
7. 1:7
   • King Cyrus brought out the vessels of the house of the LORD.
   • Nebuchadnezzar had brought those vessels out of Jerusalem.
   • Nebuchadnezzar had put those vessels in the house of his gods.
8. 1:8
   • Cyrus king of Persia brought those vessels out by the hand of Mithredath the treasurer.
   • Mithredath was the treasurer.
   • The vessels were counted out to Sheshbazzar.
   • Sheshbazzar was the prince of Judah.
9. 1:9
   • This is the count of the vessels.
   • There were thirty gold basins.
   • There were a thousand silver basins.
   • There were twenty-nine knives.
10. 1:10
    • There were thirty gold bowls.
    • There were four hundred and ten silver bowls of a second kind.
    • There were a thousand other vessels.
11. 1:11
    • All the vessels of gold and of silver were five thousand four hundred.
    • Sheshbazzar brought all of them up.
    • He brought them up when the exiles were brought up from Babylon to Jerusalem.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

1:1

Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, and his first year as ruler there was 538 BC. Fifty years earlier the Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem and deported much of Judah's population; those exiles and their children are the people this announcement concerns. The saying of Jeremiah referred to is his prediction that the exile would last seventy years and then the exiles would be brought back (Jeremiah 25:11-12; 29:10). Persia was centered in what is now Iran and had just absorbed the Babylonian empire.

1:2

"The God of heaven" was the ordinary way of naming the Jewish God in official documents of the Persian period, and Persian kings routinely issued decrees restoring local temples and sponsoring local gods; the wording here is what such a decree would sound like. "A house" means a temple (the building where a god was served), not a dwelling in the ordinary sense.

1:3

"Go up" is the standard expression for traveling to Jerusalem, which sits high in the hill country; one goes up to it from any direction, and down from it.

1:4

"The people who are left" means the survivors of the deportation and their descendants, those still living scattered in Babylonian territory. A "freewill offering" was a gift for the temple that no law required, given purely because the giver chose to; it was a recognized category of offering, distinct from obligatory dues.

1:5

"Family leaders" translates a phrase meaning heads of ancestral households (the senior men who represented extended family groups, the basic unit by which returning exiles were organized and counted. Judah and Benjamin were the two tribes that made up the southern kingdom taken into exile, so together they stand for the whole deported population. Priests were descendants of Aaron who alone could perform sacrifices; Levites were members of the wider tribe of Levi who handled the supporting work of the temple) music, gatekeeping, transport, and maintenance.

1:6

The King James "strengthened their hands" is an idiom for giving practical, material backing rather than encouragement. The picture of neighbors loading departing Israelites with silver, gold, and goods deliberately echoes the account of the exodus from Egypt.

1:7

Nebuchadnezzar was the Babylonian king who captured Jerusalem and destroyed its temple in 587/586 BC, carrying its metal equipment back to Babylon. Depositing captured temple objects in the victor's own temple was normal practice: it displayed the defeated nation's gods as subject to the conqueror's. Cyrus reversing this was likewise a recognized political act.

1:8

Mithredath is a Persian name ("given by Mithra"); the treasurer was the official responsible for the royal stores. Sheshbazzar also bears a Babylonian name. The title given him (Hebrew *nasi*, here "leader" or "prince") can mean a man of the royal line of David or simply a chief appointed over a district; the text does not settle which, and how Sheshbazzar relates to Zerubbabel, who leads later in the book, is not explained.

1:9

The King James "chargers" means large flat serving dishes or platters, not horses. The Hebrew word rendered "knives" is uncertain; ancient translators guessed variously at censers, bowls, or duplicate items, and no one can now say what these twenty-nine objects were.

1:10

"Of a second sort" renders a Hebrew word of unclear sense: it may mean second-rate, of a second kind, or duplicates matching the first set. The translators of the King James left the ambiguity standing rather than resolving it.

1:11

The listed items add up to about 2,500, not 5,400, and the discrepancy is in the Hebrew text itself; the ancient Greek version and the book known as 1 Esdras give different figures again, so the numbers were already unstable in antiquity. "Them of the captivity" in the King James simply means the deported community, the exiles as a group.