This was preparatory to
the principal and concluding act, in which the secular and
spiritual officials and elders, 85 in number, bound themselves
in writing to the Book of the Law, published by Ezra, and all
the rest undertook an obligation, with oath and curse, to walk
in the Torah of God, given by His servant Moses, and to keep
all the commandments of Jehovah and His statutes and laws.
Special attention was directed to such provisions of the Pentateuch
as were of immediate importance for the people in the circumstances
of the day--the greater part of the whole work is about the ritual
of the priests--and those were in particular insisted on which
refer to the contributions of the laity to the priesthood, on
which the very existence of the hierocracy depended. /1/
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1. Nehemiah viii. 1-x. 40. The credibility of the narrative
appears on the face of it. The writer of Chronicles did not write
it himself, but took it from his main source, from which also he
drew the fragments he gives us of the memoirs of Ezra and
Nehemiah. This we see from the fact that while copying Nehemiah vii.
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