You're listening to the Bible for normal people, the only God-ordained

podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Ens. And I'm Jared Bias.

Hey folks, welcome to this next installment in the Pete Ruins series and I'm happy to keep ruining things any way that I can.

So, with that, we're moving on in the order of the Old Testament books according to the English Bible.

Ezra comes after Chronicles, so here we are.

The so-called Inter-testimental period is not a theological dark age where Jews

were sitting around waiting for Jesus to show up. It was rather a vibrant time of

literary output and theological reflection on what it meant for Jews at the time

to be connected to this story of old.

It's during this period, the period after the exile, that the Bible as we know it came into shape.

Now in the Jewish canon, Ezra is grouped in that third category of Jewish tradition called the writings. The first two being Torah, aka Pentatuke or Law of Moses, and then the prophets.

Now the prophets in the Jewish Bible include the former and latter prophets as they're called.

In Christian Bibles, the former prophets are the so-called

historical books of Joshua through Second Kings, and the latter prophets are the Christian

prophetic books, Isaiah and the rest.

You've probably heard this before in other episodes, but one more wrinkle, the Jewish

canon places lamentations in Daniel, both are prophetic books in the Christian canon,

well it places them among the writings as well.

But our focus today folks is on the book of Ezra, named after its main character.

Now Ezra, according to Chapter 7 verse 3, where we first meet him, is a scribe, quote,

skilled in the law of Moses.

Chapter 7 goes on to describe him as someone who had, quote, set his heart to study the law of Moses and to do it very important and to teach the statutes and ordinances in Israel all of which we're going to see in this book.

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