¹⁰ “You are standing today, all of you, before the Lord your God: the heads of your tribes,^[a] your elders, and your officers, all the men of Israel,

¹² And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and ^(A)books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is ^(B)the book of life. And ^(C)the dead were judged by what was written in the books, ^(D)according to what they had done.

¹⁵ Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave^[a] and free, ^(A)hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains,

The Obligations of the Covenant

^28 (A)“The rest of the people, the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, the temple servants, ^(B)and all who have separated themselves from the peoples of the lands to the Law of God, their wives, their sons, their daughters, all who have knowledge and understanding,

^38 [a] “Because of all this ^(A)we make a firm covenant in writing; on ^(B)the sealed document are the names of^[b] our princes, our Levites, and our priests.

The People of Israel Confess Their Sin

9 Now on the twenty-fourth day of ^(A)this month the people of Israel were assembled ^(B)with fasting ^(C)and in sackcloth, ^(D)and with earth on their heads. ^2 (E)And the Israelites^[a] separated themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers.

² So Ezra the priest ^(A)brought the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they heard, ^(B)on the first day of the seventh month.

^29 (A)Then the king sent and gathered together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. ³⁰ And the king went up to the house of the Lord, with all the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the priests and the Levites, all the people both great and small. And he read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord. ³¹ And the king ^(B)stood in his place ^(C)and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of the covenant that were written in this book. ³² Then he made all who were present in Jerusalem and in Benjamin join in it. And the inhabitants of Jerusalem did according to the covenant of God, the God of their fathers.