EZRA WRAP-UP

Joyce Voysey

Mary Baker Eddy says in her Miscellaneous Writings: “Scarcely a moiety, compared with the whole of the Scriptures and the Christian Science textbook, is yet assimilated spiritually by the most faithful seekers, yet this assimilation is indispensable to the progress of every Christian Scientist.”  Therefore, as we read the Bible, we are always on the look-out for something that will forward that spiritual assimilation. 

However, the last two chapters of Ezra

Summary of Ezra – notes taken during a one-hour stop-over at Melbourne airport

Julie Swannell

I’m surprised how a book which may seem obscure and difficult at the beginning of the month can be quite accessible by the end of the month, with the help of our book club friends.  When I first tried to read Ezra on July 1, I really struggled with the language and the ideas presented.  Then, when I sat down quietly to review its pages the other day, I really enjoyed catching up

TEMPLE TREASURE

Joyce Voysey

Now I have been worrying about all that treasure!  And, I am not the first to do so.

Here is some info from the web site -  http://www.templemount.org/TMTRS.html

The Treasures of the House of the Lord by Lambert Dolphin:

The materials assembled for the tabernacle

Ezra – chapters 7 and 8

Joyce Voysey

Way back at the beginning of my musings on Ezra, I mentioned that there were books written objecting Ezra’s exclusive policies.  See post 11.7.12.  Ezra 7:26 gives part of the king’s decree in the letter of commission to Ezra, rather than Ezra’s policy.  I wonder if there is more that has not been revealed as yet.

Chapter 8 offers another recorded listing of those families which went with Ezra: 13 families - totalling 1,496 people.  (Dummelow counted them for me.)  Yes.  Most of the families

Looking deeper

Hello dear readers!

As we continue our study of the book of Ezra, we have been discovering a lot of history and geography of the land we now refer to as the Middle East.  Those who take an interest in weather will know

Ezra Chapter 7    .... by Joyce Voysey

Here we are at chapter7 and we finally get to see Ezra’s name.  Interestingly I hadn’t realised that he had not been mentioned before.  Looked up the Bible Concordance and found that he gets a mention in 1 Chronicles, and in Nehemiah.  I wonder when I will be urged to find out what they say about him?

More than 50 years have passed in the meantime, according to the reckoning of the times of the kings mentioned.  Artaxerxes is now king of

Haggai and Zechariah – see Ezra 5: 1

Joyce Voysey

A note on Haggai:  It seems he was old, probably about 80 years, because he had seen the old temple which had been destroyed (inferred in Hag. 2:2).  He tells the people that God is telling them that their troubles will be alleviated if they will get to work and build the house (temple):  “Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes.  Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Consider your ways.  Go up to the mountain, and bring wood, and build the house...” Hag.1:6 – 8 (to ;)  

Zechariah was young, apparently.  He finds the Lord telling him that he is displeased with the fathers who have done no building all these years.  Zechariah had visions where

The work resumes and is completed    By Joyce Voysey

Chapter 5, and, it seems, 15 or 16 years later, we find the prophets Haggai and Zechariah on the job urging resumption of the building.  Builders Zerubbabel and Jeshua were blessed with having the prophets working with them on the side of Truth.  They took their case directly to King Darius for authentication of the mission approved by Cyrus, when questioned by the opposition of their time. 

(It seems the timber and stones had been sitting on the site all those years.)

In Chapter 6 we find the value of

A Building Fund. Work starts, and stops! – by Joyce Voysey

O dear!  Jeremiah is in the prophesying act too, and gets all the credit in those first verses of Ezra.  See also Jer. 29:10, 25:11-18.  Is he perhaps repeating Isaiah’s prophecy?  What period were they writing about? Isaiah:  742-687BC; Jeremiah: 626-580BC.  Of course, Jeremiah was there in plain view all the time – in verse 1!

Will I ever get past those first four verses?  Now I notice that the people were very well off in Babylon, seeing that they could contribute from their silver and gold, goods and beasts towards the effort of rebuilding Jerusalem, even if they were not part of the actual expedition.

What a restoration this was

STOP PRESS - CYRUS CYLINDER

We thought this comment was so important that we'd post it separately.  Please do take a look at the TED Video on Iran, Cyrus Cylinder and freeing of the Jews by Neil MacGregor, sent to us by a visitor from Louisiana, Colleen Moore.

This is what Colleen has written: 

Have you seen this great TED video on the Cyrus Cylinder at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8ayZoqmBHE 

I became aware of this story from a Mother Church Reading Room workshop, and I was glad to learn about how mulitcultural this Persian King was who freed the Jews at the end of the Babylonian captivity. Cyrus is the subject of Isaiah 45 and was blessed by God although as a Persian, Cyrus did not acknowledge the Hebrew God. As the Mother Church Librarian pointed out, this Cyrus Cylinder explains Isaiah 45: “I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me.”

Thank you Colleen!

Ed. Here are some photos of the Cyrus Cylinder -

Cyrus and leadership lessons

Joyce Voysey

I see the land was called Judah at that time.  And Isaiah was the prophet; amazing Isaiah.  See Isa. 44:26-28.  He even named Cyrus as the anointed of the Lord - Isa 45:1.  This prophecy was been made some 150 years before the people were taken away to Babylon.  Dummelow's One Volume Bible Commentary describes Cyrus, “as being consecrated to carry out the purposes of Jehovah,  i.e. to release Israel from Babylon.”  Angels come is various guises, don’t they?

However, I find that some scholars think that Cyrus’ actual name was inserted after the event somehow.

The introduction (verses 1-4) to our book this month – Ezra - give us the idea that Cyrus, the king of Persia who had conquered Babylon (the Medes*), where the Jews had been enslaved for 50 years, was a good man and recognised the God of the Jewish people.

EZRA – a challenge

Joyce Voysey

Ezra, so far, is proving to be quite a challenge; so different from Mark and Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy. 

Julie has done us a great service with writing up the results of her investigations.  I, too, found Dummelow to be very good with its information.  For example, we find that the book of Ezra is very important in the recording of the history of the Jewish people, being the chief authority for that particular period.  It records the fulfilling of the prophecy that the Jewish people will be restored to their own land; which they were, after 50 years in Persia.  To quote Dummelow further: It relates the establishment at Jerusalem of the community to which the world owes the preservation, arrangement and completion of the Hebrew Scriptures, and it marks the beginning and development of that intense attachment to the Mosaic Law which became so conspicuous a feature of Jewish religion life in after times.

My investigations had me consulting Ann Putcamp’s Guide for Bible Teaching in seeking to get my thinking straight about the historical order of the books of the Bible.  I found that Malachi, Isaiah 56-59, 63-65, Ruth and Jonah were all written at about the same time circa 400 BC.  It states that these were written as protests against Ezra’s exclusive policies.

So, as I read I must remember to look out for evidence of that.  And, I need to establish the identity of the prophet who foresaw that the Jewish people would be restored to their own land.  What was their land called?  Israel?  Judea?

What did the TEMPLE look like?

Here is a clue from Wikipedia:

 

Description	English: Model of Second Temple made by Michael Osnis from Kedumim. Dansk: Model af det andet, jødiske tempel, fremstillet af Michael Osnis fra Kedumin.
Date	2008(2008)
Source	Own work
Author	Daniel Ventura

Getting to know Ezra’s story



Julie Swannell



It seems that the Old Testament is often rather obscure and that the lessons to be gained require discernment and determination on the part of the reader.  At least for this reader!  So, I've been doing a bit of research.  My main resource for what follows has been Dummelow's One Volume Bible Commentary.


The first thing is: where is he in the Bible? Well, he appears tucked in between Chronicles and Nehemiah and my reading informs me that we could even read these three books as one continuous story (which, by the way, I have not to date done).


The second thing is: he is only mentioned 26 times in the entire Scriptures: once in I Chronicles where we learn he had four sons (Jether, Mered, Epher, and Jalon); thirteen times in the book of Ezra, and even then only in two of the chapters (7 and 11); and eight times in the book Nehemiah.


Thirdly it seems that the story may have been written sometime between 340 and 300BC, some two hundred years after the events, and Dummelow suggests that the writer incorporated the writings of Ezra himself Ezra 7: 27 to 9:15); genealogies and records (Ezra 2, 10:18 - 44); and extracts from Aramaic documents (Ezra 4: 7 to 6:18, 7: 12 - 26) in the record.



The Exile

We learn at the outset of the book that we are in Persia and that Cyrus is the current king. Cyrus gives the go-ahead for a new temple ("the house of the Lord") to be constructed miles away in Jerusalem.


Now we need to have a little background here to understand what is going on. It's about 538BC and Cyrus of Persia has just conquered Babylon by diverting the river Euphrates and marching his soldiers along the dried-up riverbed. (The "Cyrus cylinder" records his feelings and is held at the British Museum.) He controlled an empire that stretched over an area of 5,000 km (3,000 miles).


About fifty years before, in 586BC, Jerusalem had been captured by Nebuchadnezzar (king of Babylon), the temple destroyed, and the people deported to Babylonia, where the Euphrates River flows, and where the newly relocated people undoubtedly gathered together into colonies.

Ezra

To get us underway with our new book I thought it might be interesting to share here part of the introductory remarks given by Eugene Peterson in The Message (the Bible in contemporary language).  He writes:

“History had not treated the People of Israel well and they were in decline. A superpower military machine, Babylon, had battered them and then, leaving their city and temple a mound of rubble hauled them off into exile. Now, 128 years later, a few Jews back in Jerusalem had been trying to put the pieces back together decade after weary decade. But it was not going well at all. They were hanging on by their finger-nails. And then Ezra arrived.”