When their fathers or brothers come and protest to us, ¹  we’ll say to them, “Do us a favor and let them be, ²  for we could not get each one a wife through battle. ³  Don’t worry about breaking your oath! ⁴  You would only be guilty if you had voluntarily given them wives.’” ⁵ 

So the exiles proceeded accordingly. Ezra the priest separated out ¹  by name men who were leaders in their family groups. ²  They sat down to consider this matter on the first day of the tenth month,

Children are gathering firewood, fathers are building fires with it, and women are mixing dough to bake cakes to offer to the goddess they call the Queen of Heaven. ¹  They are also pouring out drink offerings to other gods. They seem to do all this just ²  to trouble me.

Now the Lord said ¹  to Abram, ²  “Go out ³  from your country, your relatives, and your father’s household to the land that I will show you. ⁴ 

When God made me wander ¹  from my father’s house, I told her, ‘This is what you can do to show your loyalty to me: ²  Every place we go, say about me, “He is my brother.”’”

Jacob heard that Laban’s sons were complaining, ¹  “Jacob has taken everything that belonged to our father! He has gotten rich ²  at our father’s expense!” ³ 

While Israel was living in that land, Reuben had sexual relations with ¹  Bilhah, his father’s concubine, and Israel heard about it. Jacob had twelve sons:

Amram married ¹  his father’s sister Jochebed, and she bore him Aaron and Moses. (The length of Amram’s life was 137 years.)

The Lord ¹  is my strength and my song, ²  and he has become my salvation. This is my God, and I will praise him, ³  my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

they will by no means ¹  see the land that I swore to their fathers, nor will any of them who despised me see it.

Look! I have already given the land to you. ¹  Go, occupy the territory that I, ²  the Lord, promised ³  to give to your ancestors ⁴  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to their descendants.” ⁵ 

Then when the Lord your God brings you to the land he promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you – a land with large, fine cities you did not build,

fed you in the desert with manna (which your ancestors had never before known) so that he might by humbling you test you ¹  and eventually bring good to you.

Then he ¹  said to me, “Get up, set out leading ²  the people so they may go and possess ³  the land I promised to give to their ancestors.” ⁴ 

The Lord will force you and your king ¹  whom you will appoint over you to go away to a people whom you and your ancestors have not known, and you will serve other gods of wood and stone there.

The Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of wood and stone.

Today he will affirm that you are his people and that he is your God, ¹  just as he promised you and as he swore by oath to your ancestors ²  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Then people will say, “Because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt.

So Joshua said to the Israelites: “How long do you intend to put off occupying ¹  the land the Lord God of your ancestors ²  has given you?

He went to his father’s home in Ophrah and murdered his half-brothers, ¹  the seventy legitimate ²  sons of Jerub-Baal, on one stone. Only Jotham, Jerub-Baal’s youngest son, escaped, ³  because he hid.