Ezrachapter 6
22 verses · BSBEzra book hub →
Speaks with:Ezra 5×5Ezra 4×4Ezra 7×42 Chronicles 36×21 Kings 6×2Proverbs 21×2
Summary
Chapter summary
Search is made, and at Ecbatana in Media a roll turns up with Cyrus's decree, the dimensions, and the costs charged to the king's house. Darius rules accordingly: let the governors keep far from thence, let the expenses and the daily supplies come out of the king's revenue, that they may sacrifice and pray for the life of the king and his sons; and whoever alters this word, let a beam be pulled from his house and himself fastened upon it. So the elders built and prospered through Haggai and Zechariah, and the house was finished the third of Adar in Darius's sixth year, dedication with joy, then Passover, for Jehovah had turned the king's heart toward them.
Context
History · Ezra — Ezra overview
- A. 1–12 The scroll found at Achmetha, and Darius makes the enemies pay
- B. 13–18 The house finished with joy in the sixth year of Darius
- C. 19–22 A Passover kept by all who had separated themselves
The outline
A.The scroll found at Achmetha, and Darius makes the enemies payvv. 1 to 12
Read vv. 1 to 12 →B.The house finished with joy in the sixth year of Dariusvv. 13 to 18
Read vv. 13 to 18 →C.A Passover kept by all who had separated themselvesvv. 19 to 22
Read vv. 19 to 22 →
The world behind this chapter
Ezra 6The history
Darius orders a search, and the record is not found in Babylon. It turns up at Ecbatana, in the palace in the province of Media — the summer capital, in the cooler highlands, where the court went to escape the heat. Cyrus had spent time there in his first year, so that is where his memorandum was filed.
The document found is a memorandum rather than a public proclamation, and it reads like an accounting note: the house to be built, dimensions given, costs to be paid out of the king's house, and the vessels restored. Persian archives really did keep this kind of record, and the detail that it was found in the right regional archive rather than the main one is the sort of thing a fiction writer would not bother with.
Darius's response goes further than the Jews asked. He orders Tattenai to keep away, funds the work out of the province's own tribute revenue, provides bulls, rams, lambs, wheat, salt, wine, and oil for the sacrifices, and asks for prayers for the king and his sons. Persian kings routinely supported local sanctuaries and asked their gods' favor — a similar practice appears in the Jewish community's papyri at Elephantine in Egypt.
He attaches a penalty clause of the kind Persian decrees used: anyone who alters this will have a beam pulled out of his house and be hanged on it.
The temple was finished on 12 March 516 BC — about seventy years after Nebuchadnezzar burned the first one in 586 BC. They dedicated it with sacrifices, appointed the priests and Levites by their divisions as written in the book of Moses, and then kept Passover the following month.
What it meant to them
For the community, the great reversal here is who is paying. The empire that had once funded the destruction of the temple was now funding its sacrifices out of tax revenue.
The dedication is modest compared with Solomon's — hundreds of animals, not tens of thousands — and the text does not pretend otherwise. But they "kept the feast with joy: for the LORD had made them joyful," and the sin offering was twelve goats, one for each tribe. A community of two tribes' worth of people offered for all twelve.
Sources cited
- Edwin Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible
- K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament
- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (Whiston translation)
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Ezra 6. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.