Sunday Sermonette: Temple II?

Ezra 8 makes a very strange implication, or actually a couple of them. First we get a long list of  families who decide to return to Jerusalem with Ezra, but like Ezra himself, their parents and grandparents all must have decided to remain in Babylon and not return when they had the chance at least 80 years earlier. Somehow, for two or three generations, they have retained their ethnic and religious identity, and now, for unexplained reasons, suddenly decide to return to Jerusalem after all. Even stranger, however, is that although they have held on to their religion, there are no Levites among them. Yet Ezra knows that in Kasiphia, which is a place in northern Babylonia, there are a whole lot of Levites, and a whole lot of temple servants, who have somehow maintained their identity and skills, which would seem to imply there was a functioning temple of some sort in this obscure Babylonian province; and that the people manning it were willing to drop everything and head back to Jerusalem at the behest of some people they had, a far as we know, never met or heard of before. Whatever.Then we get the usual totally absurd quantities of gold and silver. 8 These are the family heads and those registered with them who came up with me from Babylon during the reign of King Artaxerxes:2 of the descendants of Phinehas, Gershom;of the descendants of Ithamar, Daniel;of the descendants of David, Hattush3 of the descendants of Shekaniah;of the descendants of Pa...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs