3:1-5.  About ninety years afterwards, upon the completion of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, about 445 B.C., we find Ezra the priest—­“a ready scribe in the law of Moses, which the Lord God of Israel had given,” Ezra 7:6—­on the occasion of the feast of tabernacles bringing forth “the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded to Israel,” and reading in it “from the morning unto midday, before the men and the women, and those that could understand.”  In this work he was assisted by a body of men, who “caused the people to understand the law;” and the reading was continued through the seven days of the feast:  “day by day, from the first day unto the last day, he read in the book of the law of God.”  Neh. ch. 8.  It was not the book of Deuteronomy alone that they read.  We might infer this from the extent of the reading, which was sufficient for all the preceptive parts of the Pentateuch.  But here we are not left to mere inference.  On the second day “they found written in the law which the Lord had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths in the feast of the seventh month;” and that they should “fetch olive-branches, and pine-branches, and myrtle-branches, and palm-branches, and branches of thick trees, to make booths, as it is written.”  Neh. 8:13-17.  The precept concerning booths with boughs of trees occurs in Lev. 23:40-43, a passage which they might naturally enough reach on the second day.

Ezra’s assistants gave the sense not by labored expositions, but by interpreting the Hebrew in the Chaldee vernacular of the people.  This would about double the time devoted to a given section.  All that pertained to the structure of the tabernacle was superseded by the first temple, which served the returned captives as their model in the erection of the second.  We may well suppose that this was omitted.  There would then remain only four or five chapters in the book of Exodus.  Thus the passage in question would naturally fall on the second day.

5.  Jewish tradition ascribes to Ezra the work of settling the canon of the Old Testament, and setting forth a corrected edition of the same.  Though some things included in this tradition are fabulous, the part of it now under consideration is corroborated by all the scriptural statements concerning him, nor is there any reasonable ground for doubting its correctness.  Be this as it may, it is admitted that from Ezra’s day onward the Pentateuch existed in its present form.  We are sure, therefore, that “the book of the law of Moses,” out of which he read to the people, was the book as we now have it—­the whole Pentateuch, written, according to uniform Jewish usage, on a single roll.  Ezra belonged to the priestly order that had in charge the keeping of the sacred books, Deut. 31:25, 26, compared with 2 Kings 22:8, and was moreover “a ready scribe in the law of Moses.”  His zeal for the reestablishment of the Mosaic law in its purity shines forth in his whole history.  In his competency and fidelity we have satisfactory evidence that the law of Moses which he set forth was the very law which had been handed down from ancient times, and of which we have frequent notices in the books of Kings and Chronicles.