The Letter of Artaxerxes to Ezra

¹¹ This is a copy of the letter that King Artaxerxes gave to Ezra the priest and scribe, a scholar of the words of the commandments of the Lord and his statutes for Israel:

The Tradition of the Elders

7 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, ² they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. ³ (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands,^[a] thus observing the tradition of the elders,^{(A) 4} and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash,^[b] and there are also many other traditions that they observe: the washing of cups and pots and bronze kettles and beds.^[c])^{(B) 5} So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands?”^{(C) 6} He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

⁸ “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”^(E)

⁹ Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!^{(F) 10} For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’^{(G) 11} But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God^[d]),^{(H) 12} then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, ¹³ thus nullifying the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”

¹³ “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in you stop them.^[a](A)

² “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat;^(A)

⁶ this Ezra went up from Babylonia. He was a scribe skilled in the law of Moses that the Lord the God of Israel had given, and the king granted him all that he asked, for the hand of the Lord his God was upon him.^(A)

⁶ The copy of the letter that Tattenai the governor of the province Beyond the River and Shethar-bozenai and his associates the envoys who were in the province Beyond the River sent to King Darius;^(A)

¹¹ this is a copy of the letter that they sent):

“To King Artaxerxes: Your servants, the people of the province Beyond the River, send greeting. And now