Ezra
King James Version · 10 chapters · 280 verses · Old Testament
Going home and starting again
Cyrus issues his decree and about fifty thousand exiles go back to a ruined city. They rebuild the altar first, then lay the temple foundation, and when they do the young men shout and the old men who remembered the first temple weep, and nobody could tell the two sounds apart. Then the work stops for years under local opposition and official complaint, until Haggai and Zechariah stir them to finish it. Decades later Ezra himself arrives, a scribe skilled in the law, and finds the people have married straight back into the nations they were meant to be separate from.