Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Passover Kept
Ezra 6:19-22
19 The children of the captivity kept the Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month. · WEB
The first Passover in the rebuilt house admits outsiders who had separated themselves, and credits the joy to a foreign king's change of heart.
The children of the captivity kept the Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month.
The date is the one the law fixed, and keeping it in Jerusalem meant something no exile generation had been able to do. The feast that commemorated a deliverance from Egypt is celebrated by people who have just been delivered from Babylon, in a house rebuilt by permission of the empire that let them go.
Verse 20 notes a reversal in the order of purification: the priests and the Levites had purified themselves together, all of them were pure. Then the Levites killed the Passover — for the people, for the priests, and for themselves. In the household form of the feast each family had done its own killing; here the thin order of Levites Ezra 2:40 does it centrally, and the priests are among those served rather than serving.
Then verse 21, which is the widest sentence in the book: those who ate were the children of Israel who had returned out of the captivity, and all who had separated themselves to them from the filthiness of the nations of the land to seek Yahweh, the God of Israel.
Two groups at one table. The returned exiles, and people who had not been in exile at all — outsiders who had turned from the practices around them.
That is worth setting beside chapter 4, where an offer of partnership from neighbors was refused Ezra 4:3. The difference is not ancestry. Those men claimed to have been sacrificing to the same God for generations while remaining what they were; these have separated themselves, and the phrase names a break rather than a claim. On the book's own terms the door is defined by that break, not by descent — which is the standard the last chapters will be applying to marriages.
And the joy is attributed, in verse 22, to a source outside the community: Yahweh had made them joyful, and had turned the heart of the king of Assyria to them, to strengthen their hands in the work.
A Persian ruler is called the king of Assyria, the old name of whoever held that ground. And the hand image closes where the book opened — hands weakened by neighbors Ezra 4:4, and strengthened here by a king who did not know whose work he was funding.
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