Ezra the scribe may have rebuilt Judaism around a book, not a temple
Around 457 BCE a Persian emperor reportedly sent a priest and scribe named Ezra from Babylon to Jerusalem to teach God's law. Jewish tradition credits him with restoring the scriptures after exile and founding the assembly behind Torah reading and Purim, yet historians still cannot agree he existed.
Ezra appears in the Hebrew Bible as a priest and sofer, or scribe, of the early Second Temple period. His name is probably a shortened Aramaic form of a Hebrew name meaning Yah helps, and the Greek Septuagint rendered it Esdras. According to the book that bears his name, Artaxerxes I dispatched him in the seventh year of his reign, about 457 BCE, and he led a party of Judean exiles home. Discovering that Jewish men had married foreign women, he tore his clothes, confessed Israel's sins and pushed through the dissolution of those marriages despite local resistance. Later, after Nehemiah had rebuilt Jerusalem's walls, Ezra read the Torah aloud and the people pledged to keep it.
His reputation grew enormously in tradition. Judaism credits him with writing Chronicles and even identifies him with the prophet Malachi. He is said to have founded the Great Assembly, forerunner of the Sanhedrin, which shaped the Amidah prayer, public Torah reading and the feast of Purim. The Babylonian Talmud lists ten ordinances attributed to him, including opening courts on Mondays and Thursdays and baking bread early on Fridays so the poor would have some.
Later literature went further. The apocalyptic book known as 4 Ezra, written around 100 CE, shows him receiving visions and dictating 24 books for everyone and 70 secret ones for the wise, casting him as a second Moses. Catholics keep his feast on 13 July, and rival traditions place his grave near Basra in Iraq or at Tadef near Aleppo.
Yet there is no scholarly consensus on whether Ezra was a real Aramean official or a literary creation, because no evidence outside the Bible confirms his mission and the dating of the Persian king's decree is disputed.
Source: Ezra
