Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezra · About this commentary
The Register of the Returned
Ezra 2:1-35
1 Now these are the children of the province who went up out of the captivity of those who had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away to Babylon, and who returned to Jerusalem and Judah, everyone to his city; · WEB
The restoration takes the form of a list, and what the list is for is to put named households back in named places.
Now these are the children of the province who went up out of the captivity. What follows is not narrative. It is a document, and reading it as a document is the only way it makes sense.
The opening sentence sets the terms. These are people whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away to Babylon, and who returned to Jerusalem and Judah, everyone to his city.
That last phrase is the register's purpose. The aim is not a general resettlement of the land but the restoration of specific families to specific towns — which requires knowing who belongs where, and that is what a list of households with numbers provides.
Eleven men are named as leading the return: Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Seraiah, Reelaiah, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispar, Bigvai, Rehum, and Baanah. Zerubbabel and Jeshua head it, and they are the two who will act throughout the early chapters Ezra 3:2 Ezra 4:3. The other nine appear here and are not heard from again.
Then the count, family by family, beginning the children of Parosh, two thousand one hundred seventy-two.
The numbers are wildly uneven. Some houses return in their thousands and some in double figures, and the register makes no comment on the disparity — a house that came back with a few dozen members is entered in the same form as one that came back with two thousand. Being on the list at all is what the document records.
Several entries are organized by place rather than ancestry, listing the men of a town. So two kinds of identity are being tracked in one register: descent from a named father, and attachment to a named settlement. For a people that had been away for decades, either could be lost, and the list is an attempt to hold both.
What the chapter therefore shows is the unglamorous shape of the restoration. Prophets had promised a return; what arrived was a census — and the next paragraphs will show what happened to those whose entry could not be verified Ezra 2:62.
settled What this mark means