Ezra and the Return to the Law

The Temple rebuilt, the people still had to be remade. Ezra, priest and scribe, returns from Babylon with the Law, resolved to make it the heart of Israel again. Around him, the community recovers the Law as its rule and its soul; and the great public reading in Jerusalem makes Israel, more than ever, the people of the Book.

Ezra the Scribe

Decades after the first return, a man in his turn goes up from Babylon with a new group of exiles: Ezra, a priest of the line of Aaron and a scribe expert in the Law of Moses. The Persian king, Artaxerxes, authorizes him, loads him with gifts for the Temple, and entrusts him even with the power to appoint judges and to teach the Law of his God as the law of the land. Before setting out, Ezra does not dare ask the king for an armed escort, so as not to belie what he had said of God’s protection; he proclaims a fast by a river, entrusts himself to God, and arrives safe with his treasures. His whole being is held in a single passion. "Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord, to practice it, and to teach its statutes and rules in Israel." Ezra 7:10 He is the father of the scribes, those men who copy, study, and expound the Scripture. For a people that has no king any longer and now lives under foreign empires, he is a leader of a new kind: it is no longer the throne that unites Israel, but the Law; after the Temple, which restores to God his worship, the Law restores to the people their soul.

The Crisis of Mixed Marriages

Scarcely arrived, Ezra learns from the leaders themselves a wound that threatens everything: many of the returned, even priests and Levites, have married women of the surrounding pagan peoples. The peril is not of blood, but of faith: to mingle with the idolatrous nations is to risk letting back in, through families, the false gods that had led Israel into exile, and dissolving the small remnant into the mass, just after God has saved it. Ezra is appalled; he tears his garments, pulls out his hair, and, at the hour of the offering, prays aloud, confessing before God the people’s fault as if it were his own, recalling that the exile had already come from such unfaithfulness and that they fall back into it scarcely raised up. Moved by his grief, the community assembles in the rain, trembling, and takes it upon itself to separate from these unions, examined case by case. The measure is harsh, and it aims to keep intact, through the centuries, the seed from which the Messiah will come; for it is this same Messiah who, once come, will open the covenant to all the nations and make the foreigner a son in full.

The Reading of the Law

The summit of this restoration is a scene altogether simple. On the first day of the seventh month, all the people, men, women, and children old enough to understand, gather in the great square of Jerusalem and ask of themselves that the Law be read to them. Ezra goes up on a wooden platform raised for the occasion; when he opens the book, all the people stand, answer "Amen, Amen" with lifted hands, then bow with their faces to the ground. He reads from morning until midday, while the Levites, in the crowd, explain phrase by phrase what is read. "They read distinctly from the book of the law of God and gave its meaning, so that the people understood the reading." Nehemiah 8:8 The people weep, measuring by this word how far they had strayed from it; but Ezra and Nehemiah forbid them mourning, for the day is holy, and turn their tears into a feast. "Do not be grieved: the joy of the Lord is your strength!" Nehemiah 8:10 They then keep the feast of Booths, each in his hut of branches, with a reading each day, as it had not been kept since Joshua. The Law is no longer only guarded in a chest: it is read, explained, understood, and lived, and this reading gives the people their joy.

The People of the Book

In the following days, the people gather in mourning dress for a great confession: the Levites recount aloud the whole history of God’s fidelity and Israel’s infidelity, from creation and the call of Abraham, the exodus and Sinai, the desert march, the conquest, the judges, the kings, and the prophets, down to the exile, acknowledging that God has been just in all that has come upon them. Then the people bind themselves by a written pact, sealed by their leaders, to keep the Law, not to mingle with the pagans, to observe the sabbath and the year of rest, and to provide for the service of the Temple. From then on, Israel is centered on the Scripture as never before. This religion of the Book, which reads and meditates the Law in the assembly, will keep alive the pure faith and the expectation of the Messiah through the dark centuries to come, until Christ, who comes not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it. And the very manner in which Ezra proclaims it, the book opened before the assembled people, the word read and then explained, prefigures the liturgy of the Word that the Church will celebrate, where the Scripture is proclaimed and unfolded in the midst of the people of God.