Ezra2chapter 2

This chapter is a list, and lists were the backbone of ancient administration. It records about 42,360 people plus more than 7,000 servants, along with 736 horses, 245 mules, 435 camels, and 6,720 donkeys — a caravan large enough to be a small nation on the move and small enough to be swallowed by the land it was going to.

The list is organized two ways at once: some families are listed by ancestor, others by town — Bethlehem, Netophah, Anathoth, Jericho, Lod. Those town entries are property claims. A family that could prove it belonged to a place could go back and work that ground.

Priests, Levites, singers, gatekeepers, and temple servants are counted separately because the temple could not function without each group. Strikingly few Levites came — 74 out of tens of thousands.

Then a hard paragraph. Some families could not show their father's house or their descent, so they were treated as unclean and excluded from the priesthood until a priest could stand up with Urim and Thummim. Those were the objects used to seek a yes-or-no decision from God, kept in the high priest's breastpiece. Their answer was: wait for a ruling nobody could presently give.

The chapter ends with donations by weight — gold drams, pounds of silver, priests' garments — and the whole company settling in their cities before the seventh month.