What’s New with Ezra-Nehemiah

By Thomas M. Bolin

What’s new with Ezra-Nehemiah? This might not be the most exciting discussion on the Bible you can think of, but give me the chance to convince you otherwise. Granted, the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple after the Babylonian Exile has not been the stuff of great biblical epic or Hollywood blockbusters (although it is a favorite of some Christian children’s choirs). There are reasons why many Christian Bible readers who might otherwise know their Old Testament are not familiar, or interested, in Ezra-Nehemiah. Knowing these reasons reveals a story about biblical scholarship and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

Ezra is a significant figure in Judaism. In the Talmud, Rabbi Jose says, “Had Moses not preceded him, Ezra would have been worthy of receiving the Torah for Israel” (b. Sanh. 21b). The Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza historicized this rabbinic dictum and claimed that Ezra was the author of the Pentateuch. But the rise of almost exclusively Christian biblical scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a different view of Ezra, marginalizing him in the picture of Israelite history. This view was dominant until the very recent past. Not too long ago if you wanted to research the Persian period in ancient Israel, materials would have been few and hard to access. Lack of interest by biblical scholars in the postexilic period (from 539 BCE until the Herodian era beginning in 74 BCE) was in part to blame for this sad state of affairs. For most scholars, the postexilic era was the coda, or dénouement to the history of Israel whose glory days lay long before in the United Monarchy of the tenth century BCE, or the words of the “writing prophets” from the ninth through the sixth centuries The Persian period was relegated to the final few pages of the major histories of Israel and Old Testament introductions, its literary output limited to Ezra-Nehemiah, P, the so-called Priestly Source in the Pentateuch, and what one scholar famously termed the “strange books” of the Bible, Jonah, Daniel, Ecclesiastes, and Esther.

Much of this view is due to German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen’s influential historical reconstruction that dated the cultic legislation such as ritual laws and genealogies as the latest material in the Pentateuch. This allowed Wellhausen to divorce “genuine” Israelite faith—by which he meant spontaneous religious sentiment and ethical monotheism—from Judaism—which he equated with oppressive clericalism and legalism. The authors of the Priestly source were to blame for this theological sclerosis, and the figures of Ezra and Nehemiah became the faces of these anonymous scribes, supplying the required bad guys responsible for this shift from a Bible of the spirit to one of the letter. In the dramatic account of Ezra 10, Ezra demands enforcement of the injunction against exogamy, marriage outside the group, with the citizens of Jerusalem shivering in the rain. The chapter ends with the harrowing, terse observation that these men put away not only their foreign wives, but their offspring too. Never mind that the actual injunction is from the pre-exilic book of Deuteronomy (7:1–4). Ezra, and to a lesser extent, Nehemiah, were given the black hats of religious exclusivism, and they wore them for a long time. This flawed and biased historical and literary reconstruction remained regnant in the field for over a century. Why? The historical watershed of the exile allowed Christian scholars to separate the historical construct of “Israelite religion,” from an equally biased understanding of Judaism. As long as scholars working in the history of Israel were also Christian theologians, the explication of the biblical text was bound to the aim of expounding its message or applying it to the modern Christian theological project. Scholars needed a way to separate the legal material from the rest of the Old Testament, and this neat historical division allowed them to have their Old Testament cake and eat it too. Although the interpretive moves are different, similar attempts by Christians to separate the Hebrew Bible from Judaism are at least as old as Justin Martyrs’s Dialogue with Trypho from the second century CE. I first encountered this scholarly phenomenon twenty years ago while writing a dissertation on the book of Jonah. Many commentators on Jonah claimed that Jonah argued that the god of Israel was kind and merciful to all peoples, and that it was written as a rebuttal to the exclusivist theology of Ezra-Nehemiah. In the early 1990s I was also studying with two biblical scholars — Thomas L. Thompson and Philip Davies — who were writing books arguing that the bulk of the Hebrew Bible had been written in the Persian period. Their claims caused an uproar among biblical scholars and archaeologists, but served as a catalyst to reexamine the Persian period in the history of ancient Israel. This was part of a larger movement among historians and archaeologists to reexamine the Persian empire in general.

Thanks to the efforts of many, we now know much more about the Persians than was the case twenty years ago. The work of scholars specializing in the Achaemenid empire, notably the late Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, Amélie Kuhrt, and Pierre Briant, has allowed us to study the Persians beyond the tendentious accounts in Greek writers. Anyone embarking on a study of the Achaemenids now may begin with Kuhrt’s anthology of primary sources and Briant’s massive history. Moving beyond general history, there is also Maria Brosius’s volume on women in ancient Persia. Online, the ancient history website, Livius, has numerous pages with both texts and images. The University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute has made the Persepolis Fortification Tablets available for some time, and just this summer has launched a major new site, Achemenet, which provides a wealth of primary and secondary resources. Archaeology in the Persian heartland continues. In 2003, Australian and Iranian teams began work at Qaleh Lali in Southwest Iran and surveys are ongoing in the country. Excavations are ongoing in Persepolis, with news finds reported this year. There are also excavations of Achaemenid sites outside of Persia, including Pakistan. In biblical studies, the last twenty years have seen an upsurge in scholarship devoted to the Persian period, and the following can only be a selective discussion. Lester Grabbe’s numerous authored volumes and edited collections have both summarized earlier scholarship and furthered it regarding the history of Israel in the Persian period. Examination of the question of Persian involvement in the promulgation of the Torah in postexilic Yehud has led to the intensive study of the work of Ezra and Nehemiah. We are thankfully long past the days of Christian caricature of Ezra. Scholars are bringing nuanced and evocative anthropological theories to bear on the issue of the so-called “mixed marriages” in Ezra 9–10, pride of place belonging to Katherine Southwood’s book. Whereas historical work on Ezra-Nehemiah was too often limited to a handful of questions, e.g., whether Nehemiah preceded Ezra, the authenticity of the Aramaic letters in the text, today commentators bring a variety of approaches to the text, resulting in intriguing and provocative conclusions. A landmark work is Tamara Cohn Eskenazi’s 1988 study, which brought literary analysis to bear on Ezra-Nehemiah and looked at the text as more than a repository of historical sources. One of the most significant books of the past decade is Jacob Wright’s study of the so-called Nehemiah Memoir, a volume that has sparked a lively discussion in the field. Through a painstaking redactional analysis of Nehemiah 1–13, Wright makes a strong case for Ezra-Nehemiah to have undergone a lengthy process of revision throughout the Persian period, as varied constituencies in the province of Yehud tried to hash out exactly how to live according to the Torah under imperial rule.

Archaeological study of the Persian period in Yehud has also made recent strides. Oded Lipschits of Tel Aviv University has done extensive work in Yehud, particularly on the problem of stamped jar handles. He demonstrated that Persian administrative control tightened over Yehud throughout the Persian period as Egypt became more resistant to Persian hegemony. Studies on hundreds of Aramaic ostraca from Idumea (biblical era Edom), and excavations at Ramat Rahel have shown the efficiency of the Achaemenid taxation and resource exploitation apparatus. Given that a number of scholars now see significant scribal activity on the biblical texts in the Persian period, the question of the population of Yehud in general, and Jerusalem in particular, has become important. In Jerusalem, extensive excavations on the ridge south of the Temple Mount/Haram esh Sharif over the past decade have brought to light some Persian period pottery, but no structure that can be plausibly identified with Nehemiah’s wall. Israel Finkelstein has argued that the archaeological remains prove that Jerusalem was too small to have housed a scribal class capable of writing and/or editing the bulk of the Tanakh. Oded Lipschits has countered that significant building in later periods cleared prior structures down to the bedrock, obliterating Persian period structures and removing pottery. Recently, Finkelstein, Lipschits, and Ido Koch have put forward the possibility that significant Persian period remains were buried under Herod’s expanded temple platform and lie now under the southern portion of the Temple Mount/Haram. Free of the highly biased and restrictive preconceptions that hampered scholarship, a clearer picture of Ezra-Nehemiah and its world is coming into view. The answer to the question ‘what’s new’ is therefore, plenty.

Thomas M. Bolin is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at St. Norbert College.

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