Ezra עֶזְרָא

The book of Ezra is the Bible's book of the return — the story of how a destroyed Temple was rebuilt and a scattered people re-rooted, told in two movements a generation apart. In the first (chapters 1–6), Cyrus's proclamation sends Zerubbabel and Jeshua up from Babylon with forty-two thousand others: the altar is set on its bases before there is so much as a foundation, the foundation is laid to trumpets and cymbals while the old men who remember Solomon's house weep aloud, adversaries write letters and the work stops — until the prophets Haggai and Zechariah stir it awake, a scroll is found at Achmetha, and Darius himself orders the house finished at the king's expense. In the second movement (chapters 7–10), Ezra the scribe — 'a ready scribe in the Law of Moses' — comes up with the king's letter in his hand and the Law in his heart, and faces a quieter ruin: the holy seed mingled with the peoples of the lands. His torn mantle, his prayer of confession, and the covenant in the rain are the book's true climax — the rebuilding of a people to match the rebuilt house. Uniquely among the books of the Hebrew Bible, nearly a quarter of Ezra is in Aramaic: the book preserves the actual imperial correspondence — accusation, decree, and reply — in the chancery language in which it was written, so that the reader holds the documents themselves.

This edition presents each verse word by word: the Hebrew or Aramaic, its transliteration, its root, its gematria, and a form-true English gloss, beneath a complete modern English translation adapted from the public-domain Jewish Publication Society version of 1917. Six classical commentaries accompany the text — the commentary printed as Rashi (attributed), the commentary printed as Ibn Ezra (attributed to Moses Kimchi), the Metzudat David and Metzudat Zion, the Malbim, and the Ralbag.