Ezra-nāma (The Book of Ezra) is a short Judeo-Persian narrative poem by Mowlānā Shāhīn-i Shīrāzī (Our Master, the Royal Falcon of Shiraz), the earliest known and best of the Judeo-Persian poets who flourished in Iran in the fourteenth century. It is superficially based on the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and was usually appended to and copied with Ardashīr-nāma (The Book of Ardashīr [Ahasuerus]), an epic by the same poet based on the Book of Esther, with whose contents it is connected. Numbering only five hundred distichs, Ezra-nāma is written in the same meter as Ardashīr-nāma. It…