Righteous
Righteous Ezra
V век до Р.Х.
Righteous Ezra — a priest of the line of Aaron and a scribe who led a group of Jews back from the Babylonian captivity to Jerusalem under the Persian king Artaxerxes, and restored the reading and observance of the Law of Moses; he has no individual feast day in the Orthodox calendar.
Righteous Ezra, a priest of the line of the high priest Aaron and a scribe, lived in Babylon during the period of Persian rule (traditionally dated to the seventh year of the reign of King Artaxerxes I, though some modern scholars associate the events with Artaxerxes II, c. 398 BC). Given authority by the king, he led a group of Jewish exiles returning from captivity to Jerusalem, where he publicly read and expounded the Law of Moses to the people, sought the dissolution of mixed marriages with pagan women, and restored strict observance of the Mosaic Law after a long period of captivity. For these labors of spiritual renewal, later tradition calls him "the second Moses." The Book of Ezra is part of the Old Testament canon. There is no individually established feast day for Righteous Ezra in the Orthodox calendar (unlike Righteous Esther, he is not included among those commemorated on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers); the date "July 13," which sometimes appears in reference materials, derives from the Roman Catholic Martyrology, not from Orthodox tradition.