When the seventh month came and the sons of Israel were in the cities, the people gathered together as one man to Jerusalem.

From the first day of the seventh month they began to offer burnt offerings to the Lord, but the foundation of the temple of the Lord had not been laid.

In the second year of their coming to God’s house at Jerusalem, in the second month, Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua the son of Jozadak began [the work], with the rest of their brothers—the priests and Levites and all who came to Jerusalem from the captivity. They appointed the Levites, from twenty years old and upward, to oversee the work of the house of the Lord.

This temple was finished on the third day of the month of Adar, in the sixth year of the reign of King Darius.

The [former] exiles kept the Passover on the fourteenth [day] of the first month.

Ezra came to Jerusalem in the fifth month of the seventh year of the king.

For on the first of the first month he started out from Babylon, and on the first of the fifth month he arrived in Jerusalem, because the good hand of his God was on him.

We set out from the river Ahava on the twelfth [day] of the first month to go to Jerusalem; and the hand of our God was upon us, and He rescued us from the hand of the enemy and those who lay in ambushes along the way.

So all the men of Judah and Benjamin gathered at Jerusalem within three days. It was the twentieth [day] of the ninth month, and all the people sat in the open square in front of the house of God, trembling because of [the seriousness of] this matter and because of the heavy rain.

Then the [former] exiles did so. Ezra the priest and men who were heads of fathers’ households were selected, according to their fathers’ households, each of them by name; and they sat down on the first day of the tenth month to investigate the matter.

And by the first day of the first month they finished investigating all the men married to foreign wives.