Ezra gathers five scribes and begins to dictate.

Unlike his predecessors, Ibn Ezra begins his review of Biblical history not with Adam, but with the giving of the Torah.

The works dealing with the Old Testament included Commentary on Samuel, Commentary on Genesis, Commentaries on Ezra and Nehemiah, On the Temple, On the Tabernacle, Commentaries on Tobit, Commentaries on Proverbs, Commentaries on the Song of Songs, Commentaries on the Canticle of Habakkuk, The works on Ezra, the Tabernacle and the Temple were especially influenced by Gregory the Great's writings.

Its subject is the Return to Zion following the close of the Babylonian captivity, and it is divided into two parts, the first telling the story of the first return of exiles in the first year of Cyrus the Great ( 538 BC ) and the completion and dedication of the new Temple in Jerusalem in the sixth year of Darius ( 515 BC ), the second telling of the subsequent mission of Ezra to Jerusalem and his struggle to purify the Jews from the sin of marriage with non-Jews.

The Book of Ezra consists of ten chapters: chapters 1-6, covering the period from the Decree of Cyrus to the dedication of the Second Temple, are told in the third person ; chapters 7-10, dealing with the mission of Ezra, are told largely in the first person.

Letter of Artaxerxes to Ezra ( Artaxerxes ' rescript ): King Artaxerxes is moved by God to commission Ezra " to inquire about Judah and Jerusalem with regard to the Law of your God " and to " appoint magistrates and judges to administer justice to all the people of Trans-Euphrates — all who know the laws of your God.

The events take place in the second half of the 5th century BC, and together with the Book of Ezra, it represents the final chapter in the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible

The original core of the book, the first-person memoir, may have been combined with the core of the Book of Ezra around 400 BC.

Nehemiah assembles the people and has Ezra read to them the law-book of Moses ; Nehemiah, Ezra and the Levites institute the Feast of Booths, in accordance with the Law.

Ezra-Nehemiah, grouped as a single book with the title " Ezra ", was translated into Greek around the middle of the 2nd century BC.

The Nehemiah Memorial, chapters 1-7 and 11-13, may have circulated as an independent work before being combined with the Ezra material to form Ezra-Nehemiah.

Both the Nehemiah and Ezra material are combined with numerous lists, Censuses and other material.

The first century Jewish historian, Josephus, deals with Ezra in his Antiquities of the Jews.

In this book, Ezra has a seven part prophetic revelation, converses with an angel or God three times and has four visions.

" Ezra restores the law that was destroyed with the burning of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Traditionally Judaism credits Ezra with establishing the Great Assembly of scholars and prophets, the forerunner of the Sanhedrin, as the authority on matters of religious law.

Many Islamic scholars and modern Western academics do not view Uzair as " Ezra "; for example Professor Gordon Darnell Newby associates Uzair with Enoch and Metatron.

Gosta W. Ahlstrom argues the inconsistencies of the biblical tradition are insufficient to say that Ezra, with his central position as the ' father of Judaism ' in the Jewish tradition, has been a later literary invention.

Most scholars hold that Ezra lived during the rule of Artaxerxes I, though some have difficulties with this assumption: Nehemiah and Ezra " seem to have no knowledge of each other ; their missions do not overlap ; and no reflection of Ezra's activity appears in Jerusalem of Nehemiah.

Esdras, about the classification of the books adscribed to Ezra: Book of Ezra ( and Book of Nehemiah for the non-rabbinical tradition, combined with the former into Ezra-Nehemiah ), 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras

According to the biblical history Ezra and Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem in the middle of the 5th century BCE, the first empowered by the Persian king to enforce the Torah, the second with the status of governor and a royal mission to restore the walls of the city.

A list of priests and Levites who returned in the days of Cyrus ( the first returnees from Babylon ) is presented ; Nehemiah, aided by Ezra, oversees the dedication of the walls and the rebuilt city.

A second group of 5, 000, led by Ezra and Nehemiah, returned to Judah in 456 BCE although non-Jews wrote to Cyrus to try to prevent their return.

Between Cyrus and Darius, an exchange of letters with King Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes is described ( chapter 4, verse 7 ), the grandson of Darius I, in whose reign Ezra and Nehemiah came to Jerusalem.

Zerubbabel led the first group of Jews, numbering 42, 360, who returned from the Babylonian Captivity in the first year of Cyrus, King of Persia ( Ezra ).

According to the Book of Ezra chapter 2, Zerubbabel returned to Jerusalem in the first wave of liberated exiles under the decree of King Cyrus of Persia in 538 BCE.

According to the Book of Ezra, Zerubbabel is also under the authority of King Cyrus of Persia to build the Temple ( Ezr.

According to the Bible, when the Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem following a decree from Cyrus the Great ( Ezra 1: 1-4, 2 Chron 36: 22-23 ), construction started at the original site of Solomon's Temple, which had remained a devastated heap during the approximately 70 years of captivity ( Dan.

According to Ezra 4: 1-6 " the enemies of Judah and Benjamin " asked to help build the temple, and when this was denied hired counselors to frustrate the people of Judah from completing the rebuilding throughout the reign of Cyrus, Xerxes (' Ahasuerus '), and Artaxerxes, until the reign of Darius.

Glorified by Ezra, and by Isaiah, Cyrus is the one to whom " Yahweh, the God of heaven " has given " all the Kingdoms of the earth ".

During the Babylonian exile, JE was unified with P and D by a different redactor ( R ), probably Ezra, with the encouragement of Cyrus the Great, who was interested in unifying the Jewish exiles by redacting the holy texts.

Among the foremost of the Chicago industrialists, lawyers, financiers, and merchants were John Villiers Farwell, Edmund Dick Taylor, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, Charles Gray, Marshall Field, Richard Teller Crane, Martin Ryerson, John Jacob Glessner, Jacob Bunn, John Whitfield Bunn, John Graves Shedd, Cyrus Hall McCormick, Edward Avery Shedd, Charles Banks Shedd, Leander McCormick, Stanley Field, Charles Deering, James Deering, Robert Law, Francis Peabody, Leonard Richardson, Milo Barnum Richardson, Joseph Edward Otis, Frank Hatch Jones, Arthur Jerome Eddy, Arthur J. Caton, Nathaniel Kellogg Fairbank, Ezra Butler McCagg, Julius Rosenwald, Morris Selz, Harry Selz, William McCormick Blair, William Douglas Richardson, Charles Farwell, James Monroe Stryker and John Stryker of the Bunn-Richardson-Stryker-Taylor family ( See: John Whitfield Bunn and Jacob Bunn ), Samuel Insull, Max Adler, Lucius Fisher, Lucius Teeter, John Peter Altgeld, Walter Gurnee, Philip Danforth Armour, Gustavus Franklin Swift, Michael Morris, Jacob Best, Jonathan Y. Scammon, and many others.

* Ezra Asher-ex-wife of detective Antonio Vargus ; former ally of Saint Cyrus Leviticus

In the book of Ezra, the Persian kings are credited with permitting and enabling the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple ; its reconstruction was affected " according to the decree of Cyrus, and Darius, and Artaxerxes king of Persia " ( Ezra 6: 14 ).

He fully supported Ezra 1: 1 and viewed the decree of Cyrus, exhorting the Jews to return to their land, as a real event.

The Cylinder's text has traditionally been seen by Biblical scholars as corroborative evidence of Cyrus ’ policy of the repatriation of the Jewish people following their Babylonian captivity ( an act that the Book of Ezra attributes to Cyrus ), as the text refers to the restoration of cult sanctuaries and repatriation of deported peoples.

This passage has often been interpreted as a reference to the benign policy instituted by Cyrus of allowing exiled peoples, such as the Jews, to return to their original homelands The Cylinder's inscription has been linked with the reproduction in the Book of Ezra of two texts that are claimed to be edicts issued by Cyrus concerning the repatriation of the Jews and the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

During the early years of the Second Temple, the highest religious authority was a council known as the Great Assembly, led by Ezra of the Book of Ezra.

A set of eighteen ( currently nineteen ) blessings called the Shemoneh Esreh or the Amidah ( Hebrew, " standing "), is traditionally ascribed to the Great Assembly in the time of Ezra, at the end of the Biblical period.

A set of eighteen ( currently nineteen ) blessings called the Shemoneh Esreh or the Amidah ( Hebrew, " standing "), is traditionally ascribed to the Great Assembly in the time of Ezra, at the end of the Biblical period.

Yale was swept up by the great intellectual movements of the period — the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment — thanks to the religious and scientific interests of presidents Thomas Clap and Ezra Stiles.

The Pharisee (" separatist ") party emerged largely out of the group of scribes and sages who harked back to Ezra and the Great Assembly.

Ibn Ezra excelled in philosophy, astronomy / astrology, mathematics, poetry, linguistics, and exegesis ; he was called The Wise, The Great and The Admirable Doctor.

The books of Ezra-Nehemiah record that the construction of the Second Temple was finished in the sixth year of Darius the Great ( 516 BCE ), following which Artaxerxes I sent Ezra and then Nehemiah to rebuild the city's walls and to govern the Yehud province within the Eber-Nari satrapy.

The Talmud ascribes to the Great Assembly of Ezra a Rabbinic decree imposing further restrictions on men ritually impure from a seminal discharge, including a prohibition on studying Torah and from participating in services.

Previously the small press had been called Three Mountains Press and run by William Bird, an American journalist in Paris, who had published books by its editor from 1923, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams ' The Great American Novel, Robert McAlmond and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time.

The combination of these two passages, which evidently have the same basis, offers another instance of the general assumption that all the members of this body were regarded as belonging to one generation, which included Ezra, while Joshua b. Levi, one of the earliest amoraim, even derived the term " Great Synagogue " from Neh.

As certain institutions supposed to have been established in the first period of the Second Temple were ascribed to Ezra, so others of them were ascribed to the men of the Great Synagogue.

In some cases Ezra, the great scribe and the leader of the Great Synagogue, is mentioned as the author, in others the entire body is so mentioned ; in all cases the body with Ezra at its head must be thought of as the real authors.

In traditional literature, however, a distinction was generally drawn between the institutions of Ezra and those of the men of the Great Synagogue, so that they figured separately ; but it is not surprising, after what has been said above, that in Tan., Beshallaḥ, 16, on Ex.

205, originally textual euphemisms ), should be ascribed to the men of the Great Synagogue, since the author of the passage in question identified the Soferim ( i. e., Ezra and his successors ) with them.

In this baraita, as well as in the gloss upon it, Ezra and Nehemiah, " men of the Great Synagogue ," are mentioned as the last Biblical writers ; while according to the introduction to the Second Book of the Maccabees ( ii.

" This is due, however, to a corruption of the text, for, according to Luria's skilful emendation, this phrase must be read with the preceding words " Ezra and the men of the Great Synagogue "; so that the phrase corresponds to the " bene ha-golah " of Ezra x.

Among his novels are Michel Ezra Safra and Sons, My Sister the Bride ( published 1979 in English by Massada Press ), The Great Confession, and The Cedars of Lebanon.