*************************************** 1.  With regard to his relation to the law, we have to consider the following points:  he was a scribe (SWPR = literatus), at home in the Torah of Moses, vii. 6.  He had directed his mind to study the Torah of Jehovah, and to do and to teach in Israel judgment and statute, vii. 10.  “The priest Ezra, the master of the law of the God of heaven,” vii. 21.  The most important expression, however, is that which states that the law (the wisdom) of his God was in his hand:  thus it was his private property, though it claimed authority for all Israel.  With this agree the statements as to the object of the learned priest’s mission. **************************************

But Ezra did not, as we should expect, at once introduce the law on his arrival in Judah.  In concert with the heads of the people, and proceeding on the existing Torah, that, namely, of Deuteronony, he ordained and relentlessly carried out a strict separation of the returned exiles from the heathen and half-heathen inhabitants of the land.  This was done a few months after his arrival in Jerusalem.  But a long time, at least fourteen years, elapsed before he produced the law which he had brought with him.  Why he delayed so long we can at the best only surmise, as no accounts have reached us of what he did in the interval; there is a great gap in the narrative of the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah between the 7th and the 20th year of Artaxerxes.  Perhaps the outward circumstances of the young community, which, probably in consequence of the repellent attitude taken up to the surrounding peoples, were not of the happiest, made it unadvisable at once to introduce a legislative innovation; perhaps, too, Ezra desired to wait to see the correcting influence of the practice of Jerusalem on the product of Babylonian scholarship, and moreover to train up assistants for the work.  The principal reason, however, appears to have been, that in spite of the good-will of the king he did not enjoy the energetic support of the Persian authorities on the spot, and could not without it get the authority of the new law recognised.

But in the year 445 it came about that a Jew and a sympathiser of Ezra, Nehemiah ben Hakkelejah, cup-bearer and favourite of Artaxerxes, appeared in Judea as Persian governor.  With straightforward earnestness he first addressed himself to the task of liberating the Jewish community from outward pressure and lifting them up from their depressed condition; and, this being accomplished, the time had come to go forward with the introduction of the Pentateuch.  Ezra and Nehemiah were manifestly in concert as to this.  On the 1st day of the 7th month—­we do not know the year, but it cannot have been earlier than 444 B.C.—­the whole people came together as one man before the water-gate, and Ezra was called on to produce the book of the law of Moses, which Jehovah had commanded Israel.  The scribe mounted a wooden pulpit; seven priests stood beside him on