Ezra 1 – “In the
first year of King Cyrus of Persia, the Lord fulfilled the prophecy he had
given through Jeremiah” (1:1). He sends the exiles back to Jerusalem to rebuild
the Temple. 539 is the date of Cyrus’ conquest over
Babylon, 538 the first year of his reign over the Empire. The 70 years turns
out to be about 49 years unless, as a Jerusalem
Bible note suggests you count Babylonian rule from the beginning of
Jehoiakim’s reign in 609. Then the numbers work.
He sends out an edict saying, “The Lord, the God of heaven,
has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem in Judah” (1:2). The Persians were generally good about letting subject
people worship their own gods, but their own special devotion was to the “the
gods of heaven.” Perhaps for this reason they felt the Jewish God was their
supreme deity as well. Any Jew is free to go up and assist in the
rebuilding of the Temple. “[E]veryone whose spirit God had stirred” (1:5) went
or sent gold or goods with the returnees to help them. The treasure that
Nebuchadnezzar took from the Temple is returned. Sheshbazzar is the prince of
Judah at this time.
Ezra 2 – The
people who return with Zerubbabel and ten other leaders (one is Nehemiah) are
numbered by town of origin. The Jerusalem Bible has twelve family heads, adding Nahamani. A note
indicates that their list was reconstructed a bit from the Memoirs of Nehemiah. It also says the layfolk are listed by clan
for the upper classes and by town for the lower.
Then returnees from the priestly families, the Levites, the
temple servants, etc are enumerated. It is obviously a carefully kept record of
people and families in exile. Genealogical records are alluded to in verse 62.
The whole assembly together was 42,360 not counting male and female servants
and singers (1:65).
When they get to Jerusalem, the heads of families make
freewill offerings. People return to their towns. The priests stay in Jerusalem
(1:70).
“Friends and Scripture”
This
article is one I wrote some years ago and it was eventually part of the book I
wrote called Leadings: A Catholic’s
Journey Through Quakerism. My plan here is just to include a few paragraphs
of the chapter each day.
Part 2
I know my own conversion experience, which resulted in large
measure because of my contact with these early Friends’ writings, led me to see
from the beginning that the scripture words, contexts and reference points had
been utterly central to me.
When I tried to tell
people what it had been like, feeling reawakened to God and to Christ, I had
used an image from a popular move I knew everyone was familiar with, The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft
and Patty Duke. For those who aren’t
familiar with it today, the movie is about the childhood of Helen Keller, a
well-known celebrity whose victory over blindness and deafness made her a
heroine in the early years of the twentieth century. In the story the movie tells, Helen’s
teacher, Annie Sullivan, seeks to free
Helen’s mind from its dark, silent prison by teaching her a tactile alphabet
that can make it possible for Helen to learn words and language. Helen
quickly learns the alphabet and the game of fingering words to get what she
wants--her D-O-L-L, her M-O-T-H-E-R or the sweet C-A-K-E she loves; but the
concept of words, that everything in the world can be named and that words make
learning and communication with other human beings possible, this Helen cannot
seem to learn. For months Miss Sullivan
labors to get the idea across with no success.
Finally, as she is about to give up, Helen has a moment of grace at the
water pump outside her parents’ home.
Forced to refill a pitcher of water that she intentionally dumped on her
teacher, Helen holds the pitcher under the spout while Miss Sullivan pumps the
water and repeatedly fingers the word W-A-T-E-R into her palm. Something in that moment at the pump--its
intensity--its repetition or its evocation of a primitive memory Helen has of a
time when she could still see and hear and knew what water
was—something--sparks a light in Helen’s mind and she sees what her teacher has
been trying to open to her.
This was exactly what I had experienced in my conversion. I was seeing a
landscape I had never seen before, a set of realities I had “knocked around” in
and stumbled over and been curious about for years but had never really
seen. But now I was seeing, not directly
because those realities
are not directly perceivable but I was seeing them through the medium of this language
I had been taught [night prayers, Christmas story,
Easter – the messages inscribed on everybody’s mental “hand” if they
live in a Christian country] earlier in my life but had never seen the point of—not
really. Now I was seeing their point and their power--the Light of Christ, sin,
the fall, the cross, resurrection--they had to open up this landscape of
spiritual truth in me.
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