Biblion Bible Commentary
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Ezra Went Up
Ezra 7:1-10
1 Now after these things, in the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, Ezra the son of Seraiah, the son of Azariah, the son of Hilkiah, · WEB
The man the book is named for arrives with a genealogy back to Aaron, and is described by three verbs in a fixed order.
Now after these things — and the phrase covers about six decades. The temple was finished in Darius's sixth year Ezra 6:15; Ezra arrives in the seventh year of Artaxerxes, and the narrative measures nothing in between.
Five verses of ancestry come before the man does. The line runs back through Zadok, Phinehas, Eleazar, the son of Aaron the chief priest — so Ezra is introduced as a priest of the senior line, in a book that has just recorded priests removed for lacking exactly this Ezra 2:62. His credentials are produced before his name is used in a sentence.
Then verse 6 finally lets him act, and describes him twice over: this Ezra went up from Babylon. He was a skilled scribe in the law of Moses, which Yahweh, the God of Israel, had given.
The office is scribe rather than priest, and what he is skilled in is a text. That is the shift the book is recording — the community's center of gravity moving from the altar, which chapter 6 completed, to the law, which nobody had been reading.
And the reason his request succeeded is placed outside him: the king granted him all his request, according to Yahweh his God's hand on him. The first of the book's clearest uses of that image, and it will recur three more times in the two chapters that follow Ezra 7:9 Ezra 8:18 Ezra 8:31.
The journey is dated to the day and it took four months — out from Babylon on the first day of the first month, into Jerusalem on the first day of the fifth month. And the arrival is credited the same way: according to the good hand of his God on him.
Then verse 10, which is the fullest description of the man anywhere: Ezra had set his heart to seek Yahweh's law, and to do it, and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel.
Three verbs, and the order is not reversible. Seeking comes before doing, and doing comes before teaching. Nothing is passed on that has not first been searched out and then practiced — which is a claim about the sequence of the work rather than about his sincerity, and it is the sequence the last chapters will test.
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