Ezra

In the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, Ezra is a priest and expert scribe who travels from Babylonia to Jerusalem with the permission of the Persian king Artaxerxes, reads the Law of Moses to the people and enforces it. Jewish tradition remembers him as a second Moses who restored the Torah. Scholars debate his date and how much of his portrait is historical.

Several later texts use his name. 4 Ezra, also called 2 Esdras, is a Jewish apocalypse from around 100 CE in which the angel Uriel answers Ezra's questions about suffering and the end of the age.

In Islamic tradition Ezra is usually identified with Uzair. Quran 9:30 says some Jews called Uzair the son of God, a statement historians find puzzling since no known Jewish group held that view. Commentators also often named Uzair, equated with Ezra, as the man in Quran 2:259 who passes a ruined town and is made to sleep for a hundred years, although the verse itself names no one.