Browse the Bible · Old Testament
Ezra opens with “A Decree, and a List of Those Who Went” and carries its history toward “A Confession Nobody Wanted.” Cyrus of Persia announces that the God of heaven has charged him to build a house in Jerusalem, and hands back the temple vessels Nebuchadnezzar carried off. Ezra arrives to find that the community that came home has married into the nations around it, and the officials led the way.
A clear path through the book’s major scenes, turning points, teachings, and lasting themes.
Ezra 1–2
Cyrus of Persia announces that the God of heaven has charged him to build a house in Jerusalem, and hands back the temple vessels Nebuchadnezzar carried off. Those who go are counted by family, by town and by trade, down to the singers, the gatekeepers and the men who could not prove their ancestry and had to wait.
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Ezra 3–4
The altar goes up before the foundation does, because they are afraid of the people around them. When the foundation is laid the young men shout and the old men who remembered the first house weep, and nobody outside can tell the two sounds apart.
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Ezra 5–6
The work stops for years under official pressure until Haggai and Zechariah start preaching and it starts again. A governor asks who authorised it, a search is made in the record office at Ecbatana, and the original decree is found in a scroll.
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Ezra 7–8
Sixty years later Ezra comes up from Babylon with a second group and a royal letter, and his purpose is set down in one sentence: to seek the law, to do it, and to teach it. He is ashamed to ask the king for soldiers after telling him God protects those who seek him, so he fasts by the river instead and carries the silver across the desert unguarded.
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Ezra 9–10
Ezra arrives to find that the community that came home has married into the nations around it, and the officials led the way. He tears his clothes, sits stunned until evening, and prays a confession that says we and never they. The assembly stands in the rain and agrees to an answer that costs them their own households, and the book ends without pretending it was painless.
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Move through an illustrated, spoken lesson with KJV references and media attached to the exact scenes they portray.
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Every figure whose history runs through these chapters, each with a sheet of its own.
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