Ezra 2:61

A family’s descent decided a great deal for the people who came home. Ezra 2 lists, family by family, those who returned to Judah with Zerubbabel and Jeshua after Cyrus allowed them to go (Ezra 1). God had promised through Jeremiah, “after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place” (Jeremiah 29:10). Through Isaiah he had said, “I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west” (Isaiah 43:5–6), and Ezekiel heard him promise to open his people’s graves and place them in their own land (Ezekiel 37:12–14). Each name and number in this chapter belongs to the record of those promises kept.

After decades away, descent placed a man in his tribe, backed his claim to his family’s land, and decided who might serve at God’s altar. Israel had been counted by tribe and by the house of their fathers since the wilderness (Numbers 1). God gave the priesthood to Aaron and his sons (Exodus 28:1), had them consecrated to it (Exodus 29), and appointed them to wait on the priest’s office (Numbers 3:10). So the priestly families are listed with care earlier in the chapter (Ezra 2:36–42), and the people of this register went on to build the altar and lay the foundation of the temple (Ezra 3).

The list in Ezra 2:1–60 names families, Levites, singers, porters and temple servants with their numbers. These verses close it with the people whose names raised a question, and the same two groups appear in the parallel list in Nehemiah 7:61–63.

Six hundred fifty-two returning exiles, of the families of Delaiah, Tobiah and Nekoda, were unable to prove their descent. Verse 59 names the places they came up from: Telmelah, Telharsa, Cherub, Addan and Immer, towns in Babylonia where they had lived during the exile. They made the journey with everyone else. What they lacked was proof of where they belonged.

“Their father’s house” stands for the Hebrew bêth ʼâb. The word ʼâb is father, and it can also mean a forefather or the chief of a family. The word bayith is a house, and also a household, a family or even a dynasty. Together they name the extended family or clan, the basic unit of Israel’s life, through which a man knew his tribe, his land and his place in worship. Their “seed” is zeraʻ, the word for seed or grain that is sown, which is also used for offspring. Here it means their line of descent. The verb “shew”, nâgad, means to make something known or declare it. These families were unable to declare, with records to back it, which house they came from.

The last phrase carries the weight of it: “whether they were of Israel”. The doubt touched their very place among the people of God.

They were put out because their names were missing from the written genealogies of the priests. Verse 61 turns from the people to “the children of the priests”. The word is kôhên, the Hebrew word for a priest, here the sons of Aaron. Three families are named: Habaiah, Koz and Barzillai.

The third is explained. An ancestor of that family “took a wife of the daughters of Barzillai the Gileadite, and was called after their name”. Barzillai the Gileadite was the wealthy and loyal man of Gilead who brought food and supplies to David and his men when David fled from Absalom (2 Samuel 17:27–29). He was highly honoured, and he was a layman. The name, Barzillay, comes from the word for iron and means “iron-hearted”. It stands twice in this verse, once for the priestly family and once for the Gileadite whose name they took.

The verb qârâʼ means to call or to name, and here the priest “was called” by his wife’s family name. Scripture leaves his reason unstated. Marrying into a lay family of Israel was within the law, which limited a priest’s marriage in other ways (Leviticus 21:7) and limited the high priest’s more narrowly still (Leviticus 21:13–15). The difficulty came with the name. Once the family was known as the sons of Barzillai, the record of their descent from Aaron passed out of sight, and generations later their sons were unable to prove it.

Verse 62 tells what happened when they tried: “These sought their register among those that were reckoned by genealogy”. To seek, bâqash, is to search out or look for something. Their “register” is kâthâb, from the verb to write: something written, a record or a book. They looked for their own entry in the written genealogies of the priests, “but they were not found”. So “were they, as polluted, put from the priesthood”. The priesthood, kᵉhunnâh, is the office of priest with all its work and privilege, and they were set outside it. Nehemiah 7:64 records the same decision.

The governor forbade them the priests’ holy food until God’s answer could be had through the Urim and Thummim. “Tirshatha”, Tirshâthâʼ, is a Persian title for a governor, the deputy who ruled Judah for the Persian king. Ezra leaves him unnamed here. He is commonly taken to be Zerubbabel, who led this first return and was of David’s royal line. A governor of the province gave a ruling in a matter of worship, and he used his authority to uphold the law of God.

He told these men “that they should not eat of the most holy things”. The word qôdesh means a holy place or thing, and the Hebrew here sets it beside its own plural, “holiness of holinesses”, the highest degree of holiness. The most holy things were the portions of the offerings set apart for the priests alone to eat: the showbread, and parts of the sin offerings, trespass offerings and meat offerings that were left over from the altar. Eating them belonged to the priest’s portion and marked his place before God. The law guarded the priests’ holy food from anyone outside the priest’s household (Leviticus 22:10–16), so a man whose priesthood was in doubt was kept from it.

The ban had an end in view: “till there stood up a priest with Urim and with Thummim”. The governor treated the claim as a matter for God to settle. When a priest could ask the LORD in the way God had given, the answer would decide whether these families were sons of Aaron, and until then they waited.

They stayed among God’s people, counted in the register, and the priests among them lost the right to serve and to eat the holy food. The verses leave the end of their story untold. The ruling expelled none of them from the community, and their names stand in the record of the return. The lay families of verse 59 most likely lived among the people without the full standing of a proven family, such as a claim to ancestral land. Their place was settled for the time being and left open for God to confirm.

Christ is the priest whose right to serve rests on the power of an endless life, and in him every believer is made a priest unto God. Jesus’ own descent is written down, “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1), and Luke traces it as well (Luke 3). His priesthood stands after the order of Melchizedek, and he is made priest “after the power of an endless life” (Hebrews 7:11–17).

Hebrews says of Melchizedek that he was “Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually” (Hebrews 7:3). The men of Ezra 2:62 needed a written descent to serve. Melchizedek, a priest of unrecorded descent, is the likeness of the Son, who abides a priest for ever.

These priests were counted “as polluted”. The high priest we have is “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners” (Hebrews 7:26), and his blood purges our conscience to serve the living God (Hebrews 9:14). He “washed us from our sins in his own blood” and has “made us kings and priests unto God” (Revelation 1:5–6). Peter calls believers “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9) and “lively stones” built up into “a spiritual house” to offer spiritual sacrifices (1 Peter 2:5).

These men were kept from the most holy things. In Christ, our “great high priest” (Hebrews 4:14), believers have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus”, by “a new and living way” (Hebrews 10:19–20), and so we hear, “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16).

The ruling waited for a priest who could bring God’s answer. God “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–3), the Word made flesh (John 1:14), and the Spirit of truth guides his people “into all truth” (John 16:13). Jeremiah promised a new covenant in which all God’s people would know him (Jeremiah 31:31–34).

These verses show a people who chose to wait on God over guessing about the things of God. They honoured his holiness at real cost to some of their own, and they trusted him to give an answer in his time. A lost record kept a family from the priesthood, while the register God keeps of his own is complete. In Ezra’s day the families of Delaiah, Tobiah and Nekoda came home under names that confess the LORD’s deliverance and goodness, and they were counted with their question still open. Through Christ that question is answered for everyone who believes. Your place among God’s people rests on the priest who abides for ever, and through him the Father’s house is open to you.