Then the king said to me, the queen sitting beside him, “How long will your journey be, and when will you return?” So it was good to the king to send me, and I gave him a set time.
O Lord, I beseech You, may Your ear be attentive to the prayer of Your slave and the prayer of Your slaves who delight to fear Your name, and make Your slave successful today and grant him compassion before this man.” Now I was the cupbearer to the king.
But during all this time I was not in Jerusalem, for in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon I had gone to the king. After some time, however, I asked leave from the king,
I said to the king, “If it is good for the king, and if your servant is good before you, send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ tombs, that I may rebuild it.”
Moreover, from the day that I was put in command to be their governor in the land of Judah, from the twentieth year to the thirty-second year of King Artaxerxes, for twelve years, neither I nor my relatives have eaten the governor’s food allowance.
“Those from among you will rebuild the ancient waste places; You will raise up the foundations of past generation upon generation; And you will be called the repairer of the breach, The restorer of the paths for one to inhabit.
¶Then they will rebuild the ancient waste places; They will raise up the former desolations; And they will make new the ruined cities, The desolations from generation to generation.
So you are to know and have insight that from the going out of a word to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince, there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be restored and rebuilt, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress.