That they may offer sacrifices of sweet aroma unto the God of heaven, and pray for the life of the king, and of his sons.
Read Chapter 6
Bede
AD 735
And Ezra rose up from before the house of God and went away to the room of Jehohanan son of Eliashib, and entered there. Eliashib was the high priest at that time. For after Jeshua son of Josedech, his son Joachim occupied the office of high priest, and Joachim's son Eliashib served after him, as both the following part of this sacred narrative and Josephus's History of the Jews attest. He ate no bread and drank no water, for he continued to mourn over the transgression of those who had come from captivity. Here we have an exceptional example not only of weeping and praying but also of fasting on behalf of those who have sinned. And although those who mourn and weep over their own sins are blessed because they are comforted by the forgiveness they receive, how much more blessed should we believe are those who weep even for the errors of their brethren, so much so that they do not even wish to touch bread and water (which is the refreshment of the abstinent), or to enter their own house, or lie down on their own bed5 but rather rejoice to spend the night praying in the courts of the Lord's house. For in that place there was a priest's house which Ezra is said to have entered when evening came. In fact, for 'the chamber of Jehohanan' another edition has 'the pastoforium of Jehohanan', a name that Scripture frequently applies to those porticos that surrounded the temple on all its sides and in which the ministers and stewards of this same temple were accustomed to dwell. Moreover, even today people mourn over the transgression of those who have come from captivity when they lament that those who have recently been freed from sins by doing penance have fallen into them once more by doing wrong, so that they can be captured again by the devil. The Apostle Peter speaks of their seducers as though of the parents of unclean wives: For by speaking proud words of foolishness they seduce into the self-indulgent desires of the flesh those who have only just escaped from them, and a little further on concerning those who, coming up as it were from captivity, are nevertheless enslaved by self-indulgence, he says: For if they escape the corruptions of the world through knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are entangled again and overcome by them, and are worse off at the end than they were previously.
