Ezra 4:2–10

²so they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of fathers’ households and said to them, “Let us build with you, for we, like you, seek your God; ^aand we have been sacrificing to Him since the days of ^bEsarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us up here.”

³But Zerubbabel and Jeshua and the rest of the heads of fathers’ households of Israel said to them, “^aYou have nothing in common with us in building a house to our God; but we ourselves will together build to Yahweh, the God of Israel, ^bas King Cyrus, the king of Persia has commanded us.”

⁴So ^athe people of the land ¹discouraged the people of Judah and dismayed them from building,

⁵and hired counselors against them to frustrate their counsel all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia.

⁶Now in the reign of ^1aAhasuerus, in the beginning of his reign, they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem.

⁷And in the days of ¹Artaxerxes, Bishlam, Mithredath, Tabeel, and the rest of his colleagues wrote to Artaxerxes king of Persia; and the ²text of the letter was written in Aramaic and translated ^afrom Aramaic.

The Letter to King Artaxerxes

⁸¹Rehum the commander and Shimshai the scribe wrote a letter against Jerusalem to King Artaxerxes, as follows—

⁹then wrote Rehum the commander and Shimshai the scribe and ^athe rest of their colleagues, the judges and ^bthe lesser governors, the officials, the secretaries, the men of Erech, the Babylonians, the men of Susa, that is, the Elamites,

¹⁰and the rest of the nations, which the great and honorable ¹Osnappar took away into exile and settled in the city of Samaria and in the rest of the region beyond the ²River. ^aAnd now—