One function of the lists given here and in Nehemiah was to establish the fact that the people who returned from exile in Babylonia were truly descendants of Israelite families. Official family registers had been kept in order to prove ancestry (1 Chr 5.17; 9.22). The people named in these verses came from the towns that are listed. These towns were presumably in Babylonia, but they are otherwise unknown. The people named here were not able to establish the identity of their families. Their records may have been lost. Meanwhile, they did not have full rights and privileges as members of the Jewish community.
This paragraph is marked off and separated from the preceding lists by an initial connective conjunction in Hebrew. The conjunction occurs with the plural demonstrative pronoun “these,” and this combination may be a discourse marker that indicates a break in the ordinary list. A possible translation to begin here is “Now the following people….”
Came up: The same verb is used here as in preceding verses with reference to returning to Jerusalem (see the comments on Ezra 1.3).
Telmelah and Telharsa were probably names of places in Babylonia meaning “hill of salt” and “hill of wood” respectively. Good News Translation follows the Hebrew by writing both of them as two separate words, while Revised Standard Version writes them as single words as done in the Septuagint. Translators should follow the pattern of their model for writing compound names.
They could not prove their fathers’ houses or their descent, whether they belonged to Israel: The Hebrew says literally “they were not able to show [the] house of their fathers and if their seed were from Israel.” “House” refers to their extended family and “seed” refers to their ancestry or their descent. Because family and descent are two aspects of the same thing, namely, one’s identity, Good News Translation simplifies to say “they could not prove that they were descendants of Israelites” and Contemporary English Version simplifies even more: “they could not prove that they were Israelites.” Nevertheless, the two factors, fathers’ houses and descent, are different and both were relevant in determining a person’s identity. Translators should therefore retain reference both to the father’s family unit and to physical ancestry. A possible translation is “they could not show by the name of their father’s house and by their bloodline that they were Israelites.”
Quoted with permission from Noss, Philip A. and Thomas, Kenneth J. A Handbook on Ezra. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2005. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .