Ezra ('help,' Gr. and Lat. form Esdras), the Scribe, the descendant of the high-priest Seraiah (who was put to death after the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar), first becomes known to us as living with the Jewish exiles in Babylon during the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus. With this king he stood so high in favour that he was commissioned to lead a band of his fellow-countrymen from Babylon to Jerusalem (458 B.C.), there to reorganise the Jews, the descendants of those who returned in the reign of Cyrus, and to teach them the Law. By the same decree the priests, Levites, and temple servants generally were exempted from all taxation. Ezra's first care, after his arrival at Jerusalem, with the Law of God in his hand (vii. 14), was to annul the marriages that the Jews had contracted with the women of the surrounding nations. After this nothing more is heard of him for thirteen years. In 445 Nehemiah came to Judæa as Persian governor. He quickly delivered the struggling community from external pressure, and set all things in order for the work of Ezra. At a great public meeting convened by Nehemiah (Neh. viii.–x.) the Law was solemnly read in the ears of the people; and this was followed by a second renunciation of their foreign wives on the part of those who in the interval had lapsed into their old habits, by the institution of the feast of tabernacles—which had not been observed according to the Law since the days of Joshua (Neh. viii. 17)—by a solemn pledge to keep Sabbaths and holy days and to duly observe the Sabbatical year, and by the promulgation of ordinances whereby the expenses connected with the temple and its services might be defrayed. It was a solemn national covenant subscribed by the secular and spiritual leaders, eighty-five in number, and the rest of the people 'clave unto their brethren, their nobles, and entered into a curse, and into an oath, to walk in God's Law.' After this we read no more of Ezra the scribe.
It was probably during the interval between his first and his second appearance that Ezra arranged in one collection the books of the Mosaic law (the Pentateuch) as we have it now. The book which bears his name was anciently and justly regarded as forming one book with Nehemiah; and in their present shape Ezra and Nehemiah are simply the continuation of Chronicles (q.v.). The Book of Ezra consists of two portions. Chapters i.–vi. inclusive narrate the story of the first band of exiles who returned to Jerusalem in the reign of Cyrus about the year 538; the remainder (chapters vii.–x. inclusive) relates the events attendant upon Ezra's leadership of the second band of returning Jewish exiles. Not all of this book is written in Hebrew: iv. 8 to vi. 18 are written in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Semitic world at that epoch of history. The work of Ezra began the transition from the religion of the living Word to the written letter. His services in fixing the text of the Law led in later times to the legend that he had restored from direct inspiration not only the Pentateuch (supposed to have been burned in the destruction of Jerusalem), but all the rest of the Old Testament, and other holy books besides; and they also formed the foundation of the equally fabulous legend of the 'Great Synagogue.' He had humbly distinguished himself from the prophets (ix. 11), and though the greatest man in the later spiritual history of Israel, he was no prophet in the true sense, but a priest and scribe, whose whole heart was set on the sacred ordinances, as set down in the 'book of Moses' written by God's servants the prophets. Yet in later times he was even identified with the prophet Malachi (Targum to Mal. i. 1), and Mohammed, in the 9th Surâ of the Koran, speaks of Jews of his time who in opposition to the Christians held Ezra to be the Son of God. See BIBLE, ESDRAS, and the commentaries by Bertheau (1862), Keil (1870; Eng. trans. 1873), F. W. Schultz (1876), and Neteler (1877), and the introductions by Rosenzweig (1876) and Sayce (2d ed. 1887); also Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881), and Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Eng. trans. 1885).
F
is the sixth letter in the English and Latin alphabets. The original symbol in the Egyptian hieroglyphs was the picture of a cerastes or horned asp; the horns being represented by the two horizontal bars in our F, and the body by the vertical stroke (see ALPHABET). When the Egyptian sign was adopted by the Phœnicians it received the name of Vau, from the resemblance to a nail or peg. From the Phœnicians it passed into the early Greek alphabet as a semi-vowel, but at some time previous to the oldest extant Greek inscriptions it was differentiated into two characters, one of which, F, had the sound of w, and the other, Y, with the name upsilon, became a vowel. As early as the 7th century B.C. the character F became obsolete as a letter in the Eastern Greek alphabet, being retained only as the numeral for six (see DIGAMMA). It must, however, as Bentley proved, have been in use when the earlier portions of the Homeric poems were written. In the Western alphabet, which was used chiefly in the Peloponnesus, F was retained as a letter till the 5th century B.C. From the Chalcidian alphabet it was transmitted to Italy, retaining its position as the sixth letter, but acquiring in Latin the sound of f instead of v or w.
This sound f is called a labio-dental fricative, and is formed by bringing the lower lip into contact with the upper teeth. Hence it is one of the easiest of the consonants to pronounce, and may take the place, under certain circumstances, of any of the mutes. Thus, a primitive bh, gh, and dh, which respectively become b, g, d in English, may be represented by f in Latin. For instance, the Sanskrit bhar corresponds to the English bear and the Latin fero; while the Sanskrit bhratar is the English brother and the Latin frater. The Sanskrit dhumu corresponds to the Greek thumos and the Latin fumus; the Sanskrit dvara to the Greek thura, the Latin fores, and the English door; the Greek thēr to the Latin fera and the English deer. The Greek eholē is the English gall and the Latin fel. Other correspondences are exhibited in the Latin fremo, which answers to the Greek bremo; and in frango, where the f answers to the aspirate in the Greek rhēgnumi. An f easily lapses into h, as is seen in the Italic equivalents faba and haba, ficus and hireus. So the Spanish hembra represents the Latin femina. An English f usually represents a primitive p, as is seen by comparing father with pater, fish with piscis, or foot with pes. In four and five the English f corresponds to a guttural in the Latin quatuor and quinque. The words enough, cough, and laugh, in which gh is pronounced as f, exemplify the tendency of gutturals to lapse into the easier sound. The Russians regularly change the difficult sound of th into f, the name Theodore, for instance, becoming Feodor. In like manner children sometimes say free and fum for three and thumb.
An Anglo-Saxon f is sometimes lost in modern English. Thus, hlaforð, hafoc, wif-man, and hus- wife have become lord, hawk, woman, and hussy. Or f may become v, as in vixen, which is merely the feminine of fox.
The Greek letter was not equivalent in sound to the Latin f, but was rather a p followed by an aspiration, as in our word up-hill. Thus, though a primitive bh becomes in Greek and f in Latin, the Romans, when transliterating Greek names, were careful to represent by ph and not by f, and this distinction is very properly followed in English when we write Philip and phonetic, instead of Filip or fonetie. From erroneous analogy, ph is sometimes used in words not derived from the Greek, as in the case of Adolphus, which represents the Teutonic Adolf, and is correctly written Adolfe by the French.