Ezra6chapter 6

Ezra 6:1-2

Darius orders the archive searched, and the roll does not turn up in Babylon but at Achmetha in Media, the summer residence of the Persian kings where records travelled with the court. Cyrus's decree had lain filed for years, safe from the same officials who now doubt it exists. Matthew Henry reads the discovery as providence: the record was hidden from ill will yet came to light on its own schedule. The empire's own paperwork ends up vindicating the very people some in that empire wanted stopped.

Ezra 6:3-5

The roll preserves Cyrus's own words: let the house be built on its old site, the foundations firmly laid, three courses of stone to a course of new timber, and the cost charged to the king's own treasury. The order reaches further than money. The gold and silver vessels Nebuchadnezzar carried off are to go back to the house of God, every one to its place, so the temple's furniture and the temple's funding both trace back to one pagan signature.

Ezra 6:6-8

Darius answers Tatnai's own inquiry by name, ordering the governor and his companions to keep clear and let the elders of the Jews build in their place. The order does more than remove opposition. Darius funds the very work his own officer had reported with suspicion, drawing the cost from the royal tribute of the province beyond the river so that nothing hinders it. A king who could have shut the project down instead becomes its paymaster.

Ezra 6:9-10

wheat, salt, wine, and oil: The decree specifies bullocks, rams, lambs, wheat, salt, wine and oil, supplied day by day without fail so the priests can offer sacrifices unto the God of heaven, the court title for Israel's God that Persian-era writers share with the book of Daniel. Darius asks something in return, prayer for the life of the king and of his sons. Matthew Henry notes the exchange plainly, a pagan ruler who wanted the benefit of a praying people's intercession.

Ezra 6:11-12

Darius backs the decree with a threat as severe as the grant is generous: whoever alters this word will have a beam pulled from his own house to be hanged on, and the house itself left a dunghill. He closes by asking the God who caused his name to dwell there to destroy any king or people who lift a hand against the temple. Matthew Henry draws the larger lesson from the whole chapter here, that the heart of kings is in the hand of God, who turns it wherever he pleases.

Ezra 6:13-15

Tatnai and his companions obey speedily, exactly as Darius sent, and the delay that once stopped the work becomes the channel that funds it. Verse 14 names the true cause behind the king's paperwork: the elders builded, and they prospered through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo, the narrative anchor for both prophetic books. Wesley reads the same verse against any thought that Darius acted from mere kindness, tracing the success instead to God, who by his prophets required the work and then moved a pagan king's heart to fund it. The house is finished on the third day of Adar, in the sixth year of Darius, four years after the decree that restarted the work.

Ezra 6:16-18

Israel keeps the dedication with joy, the priests, the Levites and the rest of the returned captivity together. The offerings are modest next to Solomon's thousands, a hundred bullocks, two hundred rams and four hundred lambs, but the sin offering carries its own signature: twelve he goats, one for every tribe of Israel, a remnant of two provinces still counting itself as the whole twelve-tribe nation. The priests are set in their divisions and the Levites in their courses for the service of God, exactly as it is written in the book of Moses, worship resuming by the old pattern rather than a new one.

Ezra 6:19-20

With the passover the narrative itself changes language: the Aramaic of the Persian correspondence that has run since 4:8 gives way here to Hebrew, the record's own tongue returning as worship resumes on native ground. The children of the captivity keep the passover on the fourteenth day of the first month, exactly the day the law commands. The priests and the Levites purify themselves together, all of them pure at once, and kill the passover for the returned captivity, for their brother priests, and for themselves.

Ezra 6:21-22

The table includes more than the returned exiles. All who had separated themselves from the filthiness of the heathen of the land, to seek the Lord God of Israel, eat with them, proselytes joining a remnant that receives rather than excludes those who turn to the law. They keep the feast of unleavened bread seven days with joy, and the chapter closes by naming the source of that joy: the Lord had made them joyful, and turned the heart of the king of Assyria unto them, the old empire's own title given to Darius as the providence formula runs its full course. Adam Clarke reads king of Assyria as Persia's king wearing an older crown, since Cyrus and his successors inherited the rights of the Assyrian throne.