[Sidenote:  Ezra 1:5, 6; I Esdr. 5:1-6] Then the heads of the fathers’ houses of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites, even all whose spirit God had stirred to go up to build the temple of Jehovah which is at Jerusalem, arose.  And all those who were about them supplied them with silver vessels, with gold, with goods, and with beasts, and with precious things, besides all that was voluntarily offered.

These are the names or the men who went up, according to their tribes, by their genealogy.  Of the priests the sons of Phinehas, the son of Aaron:  Jeshua the son of Jozadak, the son of Seriah.  And there rose up with him Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel of the house of David, of the family of Peres, of the tribe of Judah; in the second year of Cyrus king of Persia in the first day of the month Nisan.

[Sidenote:  Ezra 3:2-4, 6b] Then Jeshua the son of Jozadak, and his kinsmen the priests, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and his kinsmen arose and built the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt-offerings on it, as prescribed in the law of Moses the man of God.  And they set up the altar in its place; for fear, because of the peoples dwelling in the land, had come upon them, but they plucked up courage and offered burnt-offerings to Jehovah, even burnt-offerings morning and evening.  And they kept the feast of booths as it is prescribed, and offered the fixed number of daily burnt-offerings according to the direction for each day; but the foundation of the temple of Jehovah was not yet laid.

I. The Transformation of the Jews into a Literary People.  The destruction of Jerusalem transformed the Jewish peasants of Palestine into a literary race.  Before the final destruction of Jerusalem they had lived together in a small territory where communication was easy and the need of written records but slight.  The exile separated friends and members of the same families, and scattered them broadcast throughout the then known world.  The only means of communicating with each other in most cases was by writing, and this necessity inevitably developed the literary art.  The exiles in Babylonia and Egypt were also in close contact with the two most active literary peoples of the ancient world.  In countries where almost every public or private act was recorded in written form, and where the literature of the past was carefully preserved and widely transcribed, it was inevitable that the Jews should be powerfully influenced by these examples.  Furthermore, the teachers of the race, prophets and priests alike, prevented by the destruction of the temple from employing their former oral and symbolic methods of instruction, resorted, as did the priest Ezekiel, to the pen.  Thus the religious thought and devotion of the race began to find expression in its literature.