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Two Syrian church inscriptions bearing the name, one at Ezr’a and the other at Shaka, found by Burckhardt and Porter, and discussed by J. Hogg in the Transactions of the Royal Literary Society, may with some probability be assigned to the middle of the 4th century.

Examples of artificial arrangement appear notably in Ezr. ii.-iii.

The totals, as also the detailed figures, in Ezr.,

Ezr. ii., as already observed, appears to be in its more original context in Neh. vii., i.e. in the time of Artaxerxes, and it is questionable whether the earliest of the surviving detailed traditions in Ezra-Nehemiah went back before this reign.

Here the recension in 1 Esdras especially merits attention for its text, literary structure and for its variant traditions.10 Its account of a return in the time of Darius scarcely arose after Ezr. i.-iii.