command (sc. to build) be given from me.” יתּשׂם, Ithpeal of שׂוּם.
Verse 22
Ezr 4:22 “And be warned from committing an oversight in this respect,” i.e., take heed to overlook nothing in this matter (זהיר, instructed, warned). “Why should the damage become great (i.e., grow), to bring injury to kings?”
Verse 23
The result of this royal command. As soon as the copy of the letter was read before Rehum and his associates, they went up in haste to Jerusalem to the Jews, and hindered them by violence and force. אדרע with א prosthetic only here, elsewhere דּרע (= זרוע), arm, violence. Bertheau translates, “with forces and a host;” but the rendering of אדרע or זרוע by “force” can neither be shown to be correct from Eze 17:9 and Dan 11:15, Dan 11:31, nor justified by the translation of the lxx, ἐν ἵπποις καὶ δυνάμει.
Verse 24
Ezr 4:24 “Then ceased the work of the house of God at Jerusalem. So it ceased unto the second year of Darius king of Persia.” With this statement the narrator returns to the notice in Ezr 4:5, that the adversaries of Judah succeeded in delaying the building of the temple till the reign of King Darius, which he takes up, and now adds the more precise information that it ceased till the second year of King Darius. The intervening section, Ezr 4:6, gives a more detailed account of those accusations against the Jews made by their adversaries to kings Ahashverosh and Artachshasta. If we read Ezr 4:23 and Ezr 4:24 as successive, we get an impression that the discontinuation to build mentioned in Ezr 4:24 was the effect and consequence of the prohibition obtained from King Artachshasta, through the complaints brought against the Jews by his officials on this side the river; the בּאדין of Ezr 4:24 seeming to refer to the אדין of Ezr 4:23. Under this impression, older expositors have without hesitation referred the contents of Ezr 4:6 to the interruption to the building of the temple during the period from Cyrus to Darius, and understood the two names Ahashverosh and Artachshasta as belonging to Cambyses and (Pseudo) Smerdis, the monarchs who reigned between Cyrus and Darius. Grave objections to this view have, however, been raised by Kleinert (in the Beiträgen der Dorpater Prof. d. Theol.
