The Return of the True People of God: The text now informs us of the composition of the returnees, who duly set out and arrived in Judah and prepared to rebuild the temple. The narrator, writing considerably later than the events of the first mission, drew on this list, which appears again in Nehemiah 7:6–73a. First, Nehemiah found this list in the Jerusalem archives and incorporated it into his memoirs, but the narrator in Ezra did not find it in the archives or the memoirs, since he cited it along with Nehemiah 7:73b–8:1a (= substantially Ezra 3:1). This latter material is part of the next passage in Nehemiah, which is drawn from different material associated with the work of Ezra. Thus the narrator in Ezra knew and used the list in the form in which it currently appears in Nehemiah 7. T…