Ezra 2:1 Commentary and Bible Study

This chapter is going to give us a list of the leaders of Israel and heads of families according to their names or the locations where they settled in Judah. Some interpret the word ‘province’ to refer to places in Babylon from which they came, but it is preferable to understand this as a reference to the province of Judah, a satrap in the Persian empire, allocated its own governor by Cyrus I. This province was considerably smaller than the territory occupied by Judah prior to the exile. The word ‘province’ is referred to later in the book where it says: ‘Be it known unto the king, that we went into the province of Judea’ (Ezra 5:8).The same record of names and numbers that we find in this chapter is also found in Nehemiah 7 but with some variation. This is accounted for by commentators on the basis that either some committed to go but changed their minds, or that alternative names are used for the same people, or that changes happened in the same families between the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.‘Every one unto his city.’ They seem to have returned to their ancestral lands initially, described here as to their city. Although some treat this reference as allocated cities to which they were sent, it is more likely these were cities their ancestors had previously come from. But the province given to them by Persia was considerably smaller than the territory previously occupied by Judah before the exile. Zerubbabel was the leader of Israel, who took the place of a king, but he was in fact a governor appointed by the king of Persia over the satrap that consisted of Judah. He was in the line of the Messiah and a descendant of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, and of David before him. He is listed in the genealogy of Christ in Matthew. Some of the names of the leaders accompanying Zerubbabel are probably not the individuals with those names that we are familiar with. This almost certainly not the Nehemiah mentioned later, nor the Mordecai found in the book of Esther.At the beginning of the list we have the names of prominent people, showing there was order even in their return.