Ezra–Nehemiah
[1] The book covers the period from the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE to the second half of the 5th century BCE, and tells of the successive missions to Jerusalem of Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, and their efforts to restore the worship of the God of Israel and to create a purified Jewish community.
There the exiles blamed their fate on disobedience to God and looked forward to a future when a penitent and purified people would be allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.
The same period saw the rapid rise of Persia, previously an unimportant kingdom in present-day southern Iran, and in 539 BCE Cyrus the Great, the Persian ruler, conquered Babylon.
This consensus was challenged in the late 1960s in an important article by Sara Japhet, and today three positions dominate discussion: first, an affirmation that a Chronicler's History existed and included all or part of Ezra–Nehemiah; second, a denial that Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah were ever combined; and third, the suggestion that the two were by the same author but written at different times and issued as separate works.
[12] Of the three, it is generally accepted that Ezra–Nehemiah forms a unified work separate from Chronicles: the many scholars who agree on this include H. G. M. Williamson,[13] Sara Japhet, and Gary Knoppers.
Successive layers were then added to this, turning the building report into an account of Judah's restoration and depicting Nehemiah as a Persian governor who reforms the community of Israel.
[17] Lester Grabbe (2003), based on various factors including the type of Aramaic used in the youngest sections and the ignorance of Ezra–Nehemiah as a single book displayed by other Hellenistic Jewish writers, suggests that the two texts were combined, with some final editing, in the Ptolemaic period, c. 300 – c. 200 BCE.
[2]: 320 Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein has argued extensively that large portions of Ezra–Nehemiah (as well as Chronicles) include content not supported by the archaeology of Jerusalem and Yehud during the Persian period.
'Esdras beta' (Ezra–Nehemiah) supplemented 'Esdras alpha' in Christian bibles from the 4th century onwards, but appears rarely to have been read as scripture; and only the 'Nehemiah' sections are ever cited in patristic texts.
In later medieval manuscripts of the Vulgate, especially the Paris Bibles of the 13th century onwards, the single book of Ezra (corresponding to Ezra–Nehemiah) is increasingly split in two, so that the two-books tradition became fixed in the Western church.
Jewish bibles continued to treat as a single work, with the title "Ezra," until the 15th century AD,[12] but modern Hebrew bibles still print the Masoretic notes at the end of Nehemiah listing the middle verse as Nehemiah 3:32, indicating that a complete work of Ezra–Nehemiah is in view.
The Samaritans, who are their enemies, force work to be suspended, but in the reign of Darius the decree of Cyrus is rediscovered, the Temple is completed, and the people celebrate the feast of Passover.
Ezra leads a large body of exiles back to the holy city, where he discovers that Jewish men have been marrying non-Jewish women.
Artaxerxes commissions him to return to Jerusalem as governor, where he defies the opposition of Judah's enemies on all sides—Samaritans, Ammonites, Arabs and Philistines—to rebuild the walls.
[24] In the last half of Nehemiah the emphasis shifts to the joint role of Ezra and Nehemiah in instructing the people in the Law and in the dedication of the wall, these two activities together forming the reconstitution of Jewish life in Jerusalem;[24] Dillard and Longman describe this as the moment when "the whole city becomes holy ground.
[12] Hayes, in her article on impurity in Ancient Jewish society, states that it is commonly misconceived that the expulsion of the Gentile wives was a result of Judaean exceptionalism and nationalism.
Hayes points out that the theory is not correct arguing that the root cause is largely a fundamental and core belief found within the religious laws of the Judaeans.
Ezra, Hayes explains, imagined Israel as divinely ordained to remain pure and holy, set apart and without the influence of other nations in Canaan, just as the Priestly division were commanded, by God, to practice marriage exclusivity.
Transgressing Israelite moral structure was feared to cause violations of the commandments, which ordained by God, must be followed to maintain ethnical identity.
The influence of gentile women and culture upon Israelite men and posterity, through the eyes of ancient Judaean Priests, could turn Yahweh worshippers towards foreign deities and hedonism.
Ritual purity stresses the importance of keeping to sacred practices dictated by revered predecessors and the Holy Scriptures.
Olyan believes that Ezra's expulsion of the gentiles could also be linked with the idea that outside lineage would initially pollute the priestly bloodline, acting as an apparatus to destroy "right" ritual practice.
The motive behind prohibiting intermarriage with all Gentile women was due to the danger of assimilation resulting from the influence of social interaction with the surrounding nations.
The expulsion of the foreign women and their offspring was directed in order to preserve the purity of the Israelite "holy seed".
According to Hayes, Ezra is not a racial ideology that is concerned with purity of blood, but rather a religious notion of Israel as a "holy seed".
Venter cites verses such as Ezra 9:1 and notes that only the Ammonites, Moabites and Egyptians existed as separate ethnicities during the times of Ezra-Nehemiah.
[33] Despite this, there are verses such as Ezra 6:21 which indicate that these "gentile Judeans" abandoned their pagan background to join Ezra-Nehemiah's exclusive community.
Some have suggested it was some form of Deuteronomy, since Ezra's laws are heavily skewed towards that book; others have proposed that it was the "Priestly Writing", which probably dates from the Persian period; a third suggestion, and most popular, is that it was a form of the Torah, as it was clearly associated with Moses and contained both Deuteronomistic and Priestly elements; and the fourth view is that Ezra's law-book is lost to us and cannot be recovered.
