- verses
- 2
- first named
- Ezra 2:55
- last named
- Nehemiah 7:57
- period
- Exile and Return
- role
- Man
Description
Who was Sotai?
Sotai is mentioned in Ezr.2.55 and Neh.7.57 as the ancestor of a family of Solomon's servants who were among the exiles that returned to Jerusalem from Babylon. Solomon's servants were a group of people who were assigned to work for King Solomon and his descendants, possibly as craftsmen, laborers, or officials.
The descendants of Sotai are listed among the exiles who returned to Jerusalem under the leadership of Zerubbabel, the governor of Judah, and Jeshua, the high priest. This return took place around 538 BC, after the Persian king Cyrus issued a decree allowing the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.
The mention of Sotai and his descendants in the lists of returning exiles highlights the importance of maintaining family records and genealogies among the Israelites, even during the Babylonian captivity. It also shows that not only the prominent families but also the servants and workers were included in the return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Jewish community.
Relations
Direct connections
The kinship import reads the registry's own columns — parent, child, sibling, spouse — for every entity in it, and records none here. An extracted relation would be listed beside them, and none names this person either.
Not stated
No family is recorded for this person.
Places
Where this happens
A person is placed by the events they take part in, and an event has to clear three things to place them: it must say where it happened, that place must be one the gazetteer can put a coordinate on, and the verse must report it rather than foretell, command or ask it. Nothing anchored here clears all three. Where the text names a setting no gazetteer surveys — a vineyard, a palace, a plot of ground — it is left off rather than guessed at; where a place is named only in a prophecy, the map does not draw what was said to be coming as though it had happened; and a place reached only through a relation is not inherited, because standing beside somebody is not being somewhere.
No verse Atlas has read as a report puts this person anywhere.
Not read yet
The pattern
Where Sotai is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
2 verses across 2 of 66 books; 64 write the name nowhere. Named in Ezra (1) and Nehemiah (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 2, across 2 books.
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Sources