What is strongest? Wine, asks the first bodyguard. The king, says the second. "Women are strongest," says the third — "but above all things truth beareth away the victory." 1 Esdras opens with this contest in the Persian court, where one of Darius the Great's guards — Zerubbabel the returned exile — wins by praising truth and spends his prize rebuilding the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. The rest retells, in Greek, material from 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. It circulated in the Septuagint for centuries, and the puzzle of why it exists alongside Ezra is one scholars still debate.

This book is also available in the Revised Version (1895) — modern spelling.