And I said to the king, If it please the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the river, that they may set me forward till I come into Judah;

and a letter to Asaph the keeper of the king's forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the palace which appertains to the house, and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into. And the king granted me, according to the good hand of my God upon me.

And our adversaries said, They shall not know, neither see, till we come into the midst of them and kill them, and put an end to the work.

yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children; and behold, we must bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants, and some of our daughters are brought into bondage already; neither is it in the power of our hand to redeem them, for other men have our fields and our vineyards.

And I said, Should such a man as I flee? and who is there, that, being as I am, could go into the temple, and live? I will not go in.

And my God put into my heart to gather together the nobles, and the rulers, and the people, for registration by genealogy. And I found a genealogical register of those that had come up at the first, and I found written in it:

And thou didst divide the sea before them, and they went through the midst of the sea on dry ground; and their pursuers thou threwest into the depths, as a stone into the mighty waters.

And their children thou didst multiply as the stars of heaven, and thou broughtest them into the land concerning which thou didst say to their fathers that they should go in to possess it.

And the children went in and possessed the land; and thou subduedst before them the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and gavest them into their hands, both their kings and the peoples of the land, that they might do with them as they would.

And thou gavest them into the hand of their oppressors, and they oppressed them; and in the time of their distress, when they cried unto thee, thou heardest them from the heavens, and according to thy manifold mercies thou gavest them saviours, who saved them out of the hand of their oppressors.

And many years didst thou forbear with them, and testifiedst against them by thy Spirit through thy prophets; but they would not give ear: and thou gavest them into the hand of the peoples of the lands.

joined with their brethren, their nobles, and entered into a curse and into an oath, to walk in the law of God, which had been given by Moses the servant of God, and to keep and do all the commandments of Jehovah our Lord, and his ordinances and his statutes;

And we cast the lots among the priests, the Levites, and the people, for the wood-offering, to bring it into the house of our God, according to our fathers' houses, at times appointed year by year, to burn upon the altar of Jehovah our God, as it is written in the law;

and that we should bring the first-fruits of our coarse meal and our heave-offerings, and the fruit of all manner of trees, new wine and oil, to the priests, into the chambers of the house of our God, and the tithes of our ground to the Levites, that they, the Levites, should take the tithes in all the cities of our tillage.

And the priest the son of Aaron shall be with the Levites, when the Levites take tithes; and the Levites shall bring up the tithe of the tithes to the house of our God, into the chambers of the treasure-house.

For the children of Israel and the children of Levi shall bring the heave-offering of the corn, of the new wine and the oil, into the chambers, where are the vessels of the sanctuary, and the priests that minister, and the doorkeepers and the singers. And we will not forsake the house of our God.

And at that time men were appointed over the chambers of the treasures for the heave-offerings, for the first-fruits, and for the tithes, to gather into them, out of the fields of the cities, the portions assigned by the law for the priests and the Levites; for Judah rejoiced over the priests, and over the Levites that waited.

On that day they read in the book of Moses in the audience of the people; and there was found written in it that the Ammonite and the Moabite should not come into the congregation of God for ever;

because they had not met the children of Israel with bread and with water, and had hired Balaam against them, to curse them; but our God turned the curse into blessing.

And all Judah brought the tithe of the corn and the new wine and the oil into the storehouses.

In those days I saw in Judah some treading winepresses on the sabbath, and bringing in sheaves, and lading them on asses; as also wine, grapes and figs, and all manner of burdens; and they brought them into Jerusalem on the sabbath day; and I protested in the day on which they sold the victuals.