He first holds a great synagogue service in which the law is read and interpreted to the people.  They are then bidden to observe the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles in accordance with its regulations.  Later, when he discovers that the people of the land have entered into foreign marriages, he tears his clothes and hair and sits for hours overwhelmed by the great crime that rests upon the community.  When the people are gathered about him, he upbraids them for their laxness and secures the appointment of a commission with himself at the head to investigate and put an end to these evil practices.  When after three months the community has been purified from this foreign element, the people are again assembled to listen to the reading of the law.  Then Ezra utters a fervent prayer in which he sets forth Jehovah’s leadership of his people in the past and the disasters which have come as a result of their sins.  After this public petition for Jehovah’s forgiveness, the people through their nobles, Levites, and priests subscribe in writing to the regulations imposed by the lawbook that Ezra had brought.  Its more important regulations are also recapitulated.  They are to refrain from foreign marriages, to observe strictly the sabbath laws, and also the requirements of the seventh year of release, to bring to the temple the annual tax of one-tenth of a shekel and the other dues required for its support and for the maintenance of the priests and Levites.

II.  The Historical Value of the Ezra Tradition.  Recognizing that the Ezra tradition comes from the hand of the Chronicler, certain Old Testament scholars are inclined to regard it as entirely unhistorical.  It can no longer be regarded as a strictly historical record.  Like ii Chronicles 31, it is shot through with the ideas current during the Greek period.  With no desire to deceive, but with nothing of the modern historical spirit, the Chronicler freely projects the institutions, ideas, and traditions of his own day into these earlier periods.  The result is that he has given not an exact or reliable historical record, but his own conception of the way in which the course of history should have unfolded.  The Ezra tradition also lacks the support not only of contemporary testimony, but also of all the Jews who wrote during the next few centuries.  Ben Sira in his review of Israel’s heroes speaks in highest terms of Nehemiah, but knows nothing of Ezra’s work.  Even the comparatively late Jewish tradition reflected in the opening chapters of ii Maccabees attributes to Nehemiah the re-establishment of the temple Service and the collection of the sacred writings of his race.  At many points the Ezra tradition is also inconsistent with the straightforward contemporary record contained in Nehemiah’s memoirs.  The real question is whether or not there is a historical nucleus in the Ezra story, and if so, what are the facts which it reflects.