Hebrew Ezra, "help." Priest and scribe (Ezra 7:6, 10-11), descended from Aaron, who led the second wave of Jewish returnees from Babylon to Jerusalem in 458 BC — about 80 years after the first return under Zerubbabel. He carried with him a commission from the Persian king Artaxerxes I: to teach the Law in Judah, appoint judges, and beautify the temple. The distinctive description: "Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel" (Ezra 7:10). Those three verbs — study, do, teach — in that order — define the biblical expositor.
Ezra's life's work was the restoration of Torah-based covenant life. Two crises dominate his narrative. (1) The scandal of mixed marriages (Ezra 9-10) — returning exiles had intermarried with surrounding pagan peoples, jeopardizing the covenant community. Ezra tore his garments, fell on his face, and led a national confession. The resolution was painful — divorce of unbelieving wives and restoration of covenant purity — an episode that unsettles modern readers but must be read in its covenantal-theocratic context, not as a general template for Christian marriage (cf. 1 Corinthians 7:12-14 for the NT treatment). (2) The reading of the Law (Nehemiah 8) — Ezra stands on a wooden platform before all the assembled people "from early morning until midday" and reads from the Book of the Law of Moses. The Levites help by "giving the sense, so that the people understood the reading" (8:8). The people weep as they hear, then feast as Ezra and Nehemiah tell them "the joy of the LORD is your strength." This scene is the patristic-era prototype of expository preaching: read the text, explain it, apply it. Ezra essentially invented the synagogue model: Scripture read, expounded, and obeyed by a community gathered around it.