Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

General preface

Author’s preface

A selection of dates

Introduction

1. Ezra and Nehemiah in the setting of their times

2. The religious policy of the Persian kings

3. Some leading themes of Ezra-Nehemiah

Commentary on Ezra

Additional note on the list of vessels, 1:9?11

Commentary on Nehemiah

Appendices

1. The designation, sources, languages and authorship of Ezra-Nehemiah

2. The identity of Sheshbazzar

3. The Elephantine papyri and some statements of Josephus

4. A question of chronology: Ezra-Nehemiah or Nehemiah-Ezra?

5. Ezra’s book of the law

6. Ezra-Nehemiah as history

1. Ezra and Nehemiah in the setting of their times

The chequered story of the Kings, a matter of nearly five centuries, had ended disastrously in 537 BC with the sack of Jerusalem, the fall of the monarchy and the removal to Babylonia of all that made Judah politically viable.

It was a death to make way for a rebirth. A millennium before this, Israel had been transplanted to Egypt, to emerge no longer a family but a nation. Now her long night in Babylon was to mark another turning-point, so that she emerged no longer a kingdom but a little flock with the makings of a church. This is the point at which the book of Ezra begins.

Its own story can be soon told, at least in outline. It covers, with the book of Nehemiah, a little over a hundred years, from 538 BC when Cyrus sent the exiles home to re-erect their temple, to some point around 438, or in the following decade, when Nehemiah exercised his second term of office in Jerusalem. It is not continuous, but centres round three movements and personalities. First there was the struggle to get the Temple rebuilt in the days of Zerubbabel (with Jeshua the high priest and eventually Haggai and Zechariah the prophets). This went on from 538 to 516 and it dominates Ezra 1 – 6, apart from a digression in chapter 4:6–23. Then we hear no more for nearly sixty years, when another expedition sets out from Babylonia. This time it is led by Ezra, whom the emperor has commissioned to enforce the law of Moses – a task whose immediate consequences bring the book to a painful and abrupt conclusion. The third great personality is Nehemiah, who largely tells his own invigorating story of rebuilding the city wall, of outfacing his enemies, repopulating Jerusalem and routing the traitors within his camp. By the end of these two books the former exiles have had their chief structures, visible and invisible, re-established, and their vocation confirmed, to be a people instructed in the law and separated from the nations.

But this renewed sense of identity went hand in hand with political subservience. Oddly enough, they were now more distinctively themselves, more Jewish, than at any time of their existence as a sovereign state. There was now less scope for dreams of grandeur; there had been hard lessons; there were some men of steel to lead them. Providentially, too, the Persian empire gave positive encouragement to its peoples to practise their own religions in full style and with due seriousness.

This brings us to the wider setting of these books, and some brief account of this world power. …

So the two centuries of the Persian empire were among the most formative periods of Jewish history. Out of the ruins of the little kingdom of Judah there had emerged the small community whose concern to be the people of God by pedigree and practice shaped it into the nation which meets us in the New Testament. Already the future prominence of the Temple and its priests, of the law and its scribes, as well as the enmity between Jews and Samaritans, could be seen developing. Throughout this time the Persian régime was given a substantial part to play, both in sending and subsidizing the three expeditions, of Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah, and in backing their authority with its own. It was not the first empire, nor the last, to be allotted some such role. …