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[This is still part of our series from The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. We have found this totally objective approach to be helpful to readers/students, since no doctrinal interpretation is infused, thereby distorting the plain meaning of the text. This concludes the series, i.e. we’ve featured all the OT books, and only those . . . since the NT canon, in our view, is not divine revelation but man-made scriptures of another monotheistic world religion that regards YHWH’s Torah as passé and obsolete and only for Jews. Reformatted and highlighted for this post.]
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Ezra and Nehemiah – Shemaryahu Talmon
Ezra and Nehemiah are our main sources—
- on the period of the return from the Babylonian Exile,
- a time of transition between the First Temple period,
- which came to an end in 586 B.C.E.,
- and the emerging Second Commonwealth.
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Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, Daniel, and Esther,
are the latest works in the canon of Hebrew Scriptures,
and together they manifest the Hebrew literary genius of the age.
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The authors of these books
could draw upon a wealth of traditions and literary techniques
which had developed in the era of the biblical monarchies
and use them in trying to shape the social and religious awareness of their contemporaries.
But notwithstanding their preoccupation with adapting exemplary tradition
to the changed religious and political circumstances,
they were genuinely innovative in the spheres of
literature, religious thought, and cultic and societal organization.
The writings of this period also reveal
the development of the exegetical principles of the legal (halachic)
and possibly also the narrative (aggadic) midrash
which were subsequently refined by the Sages
and applied to the interpretation of Scripture.
(See the essay on Chronicles in this volume.)
In early Jewish tradition Ezra and Nehemiah were considered one work, written (together with most of Chronicles) mostly by Ezra but completed by Nehemiah.
This ascription may have resulted from the prominence which the Jewish Sages accorded Ezra, whom they viewed as a second Moses.
Ezra and Nehemiah are counted as one work—
- in the traditional tally of twenty-four books that make up the Hebrew Bible,
- in the Septuagint,
- and in the earliest roster of the books of the Old Testament,
- by Melitto of Sardis (second century C.E.)
Origen (third century)and Jerome (fourth century), however, refer to two separate books,
- named First Ezra
- and Second Ezra.
This division prevailed in—
- the Vulgate,
- whence it made its way into a Hebrew manuscript dated 1448
- and subsequently into most printed editions of the Bible.
It may well be the original arrangement,
- for the Book of Ezra bears no superscription,
- whereas the Book of Nehemiah is introduced by the caption “The account [AR] of Nehemiah the son of Hachaliah” (1:1).
If Ezra and Nehemiah are indeed two separate works by different authors, we could better explain the duplication of certain passages such as—
- the roster of returning exiles (Ezra 2 = Neh. 7)
- and the apparent dislocation of the section dealing with “the reading of the Law,”
- a tradition clearly attributable to Ezra but contained in Nehemiah 8-9.
Another possible index of different authorship is language.
- Nehemiah, like Chronicles and Esther, is written entirely in Hebrew.
- In contrast, Ezra contains a passage in Aramaic dealing with the building of the Temple, between the account of the initial stage of the return (1:1-4:5) and the chronicle of Ezra (7:1-10:44), both written in Hebrew (with the exception of the Aramaic decree issued by Artaxerxes to Ezra, 7:12-26).
Composition
The present literary complex Ezra-Nehemiah comprises three narrative units, each focusing on a central character.
- The first six chapters deal with
- the initial stage of repatriation
- under the leadership of the Davidic scion Zerubbabel and the high priest Jeshua (538-515 B.C.E.).
- This stage ends with the inauguration of the rebuilt Temple (Ezra 6:16-18)
- and the celebration of the Passover festival (6:19-22).
- In view of its content, this section could appropriately be designated “The Book of Zerubbabel” (BZ).
- The next four chapters (Ezra 7-10)
- pertain to Ezra the priest and scribe,
- who is reported to have headed the return of another contingent of Judeans
- in the seventh year of the reign of the Persian king Artachshast (Artaxerxes Longimanus, 458 B.C.E.).
- Ezra’s activities in the province of Jehud (Judea) are recounted,
- including the expulsion of “foreign women” from the community of those who returned.
- The section culminates in the account of “the reading of the Law,”
- which for reasons that cannot be ascertained was inserted as a self-contained passage in Nehemiah 8-9. Thus the “Ezra Memoirs” (EM), the Book of Ezra proper, consists of Ezra 7-10 and Nehemiah 8-9.
- The third unit,
- the “Nehemiah Memoirs” (NM),
- which corresponds to Nehemiah 1-7 and 10-13,
- relates the history of Nehemiah son of Hachaliah.
- Nehemiah, we are told (2:1), came to Jerusalem in the twentieth year of the reign of Artaxerxes I (445/44 B.C.E.), having been appointed governor of the province of Jehud (5:14-19).
- The presentation of the march of events suggests that Nehemiah returned to Persia in 433/32 after having served as governor for twelve years.
- A year later he came back to Jerusalem for a second term of office (13:6).
- Though the duration of this second term is not known, it seems likely that the period of Nehemiah ended about 420 B.C.E.
All three constituent blocks display a similar structure and, with one exception, are composed of the same four types of subunits:
1. In Ezra only, royal documents worded in Aramaic for the use of the Persian bureaucracy (4:17-23; 6:3-5, 6-12; 7:11-26) or in Hebrew for Judeans in the Diaspora (1:1-4).
2. Letters in a common epistolary style, written in Aramaic by Persian officials to the king (Ezra 4:8-16, 5:6-17) and in Hebrew in an exchange between Nehemiah and Sanballat, the governor of Samaria (Neh. 6:2-9).
3. Diverse lists, all in Hebrew, perhaps from Temple archives or the files of the provincial governors of Jehud: inventories of Temple vessels (Ezra 1:9-11, 8:24-28); rosters of returnees (Ezra 2:2-64 = Neh. 7:7-66; Ezra 8:1-14) and of those among them who had married “foreign wives” (Ezra 10:18-44); lists of the inhabitants of the resettled cities of Judah and Benjamin (Neh. 11:25-36) and of Jerusalem (11:3-24), of the builders of the city wall (3:1-32), and of the signatories to Nehemiah’s covenant (10:1-27).
4. Passages of a cultic or devotional nature, such as the account of the reading of the Law (Neh. 8), the dedication ceremony of the city walls (12:27-43), and the celebration of the Passover festival (Ezra 6:19-22a). Especially significant is Ezra’s confessional prayer (9:6-15), which is a forerunner of the later Jewish widuy, or public confession (Ezra 10:11); Nehemiah’s invocation (1:5-11; compare Dan. 9:4-19); and the Levites’ recitation after the reading of the Law (Neh. 9:5-37), which resembles the genre of the “historiographical psalm,” such as Psalms 78, 105, and 106.
Structural Devices
The complex composition of Ezra-Nehemiah suggests an intricate and possibly multiphase process of literary structuring. A close reading of the text reveals some of the redactional techniques used and helps us trace the contours of originally independent components.
In Nehemiah’s Memoirs, for example, the end of a topical unit is recurrently marked by the closing invocation “Remember me/them, O my God” (13:22, 29; 5:19; 6:14), which is also used to close the book as a whole (13:31).
Throughout Ezra-Nehemiah the extent of a textual unit is sometimes delineated by a summary notation, which recapitulates the major issues mentioned in that unit in a catalogue of catchphrases. Like the recapitulation of themes at the end of a musical composition, it produces a sense of significant closure.
- In its simplest form, such a notation occurs in Nehemiah 12:26, condensing the roster of priests and Levites named in12:10-25 (see also 12:47 in respect to 12:44-46).
- A more elaborate concluding formula appears in Ezra 4:4-5a, summarizing the obstacles hindering the returnees’ efforts to rebuild the Temple: “Then the people of the land weakened the hands of the people of Judah, and troubled them in the building, And hired counsellors against them, to frustrate their purpose.”
- The first half of the summary recalls 3:3: “and they [could only] set the altar upon its bases, for fear was upon them because of the people[s] of the land” [AR], while “[they] hired counsellors” presumably refers to “the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin” who originally offered to participate in the building operations but became “adversaries” when their offer was rejected (4:1-3).
- The summary in Ezra 4:4-5a enables us to recognize 3:2-4:3 as a textual unit. A similar instance of summary notation appears in Ezra 6:13-14, recalling details reported in the Aramaic account of the building of the Temple (5:1-6:12).
Most revealing is the tersely phrased catalogue of Nehemiah’s reform measures (13:29b-31a), lodged between the closing invocations (13:29a and 31b) at the end of the book. Here, only matters mentioned in Nehemiah 10-13 are enumerated:
- those who “have defiled the priesthood” are the priests who have intermarried with the house of Sanballat the Horonite (13:28);
- “the covenant of the priesthood, and of the Levites” refers to Nehemiah’s reinstitution of the payment of dues to the cultic personnel (10:36-39, 12:44);
- “thus cleansed I them from all strangers” recalls his battle against marriages with “foreign women” (10:30; cf 13:23-27);
- “[I] appointed the watches of the priests and the Levites, each in his function” [AR] relates to the restitution of the priestly and Levitical watchers who served their turns in the Temple (12:44b-45; cf. 13-22);
- and “the wood offering, at times appointed, and … the firstfruits” brings to mind the corresponding provisions made in the covenant (10:35, 36, 39).
Because it echoes only matters described in chapters 10-12 and, to a lesser extent, in chapter 13, the summary notation in Nehemiah 13:29b-31a supports a prevalent hypothesis that chapters 10-13 should be viewed as an entity separate from the rest of the Nehemiah Memoirs.
Another structural device, resumptive repetition, marks the extent of a self-contained unit inserted in a longer passage: the resumption of the original narrative interrupted by the insertion is indicated by the partial repetition of the last verse before the insertion.
In Ezra 4:6-24a, for example, the cluster of “accusations” leveled against the returnees “all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia” (4:5b) is revealed as an insertion by the repetition of the latter part of this statement in an Aramaic variant in 4:24b: “So it [the work of the Temple] ceased unto the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia.”
Likewise Ezra 2:70 (= Neh. 7:73)—“the priests, and the Levites, and some of the people … dwelt in their cities”—marks a resumption of the narrative broken off at 2:1b (= Neh. 7:6b)—“Now these are the children of the province that went up out of the captivity … and came again unto Jerusalem and Judah, everyone unto his city”—and indicates that the “list of returning exiles” (Ezra 2:1-70 = Neh. 7:7-70) was originally a separate unit, subsequently inserted into EM and NM.
Biblical Historiography
All three units of Ezra and Nehemiah are representative examples of biblical historiography, characterized by straightforward prose narration. This genre was deliberately nurtured by the Hebrew writers, who deemed it more suitable for the recording of historical events than either the epic or the annals which predominated in the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East, especially in Mesopotamia.
Epic singers are bound by—
- formulaic language,
- traditional motifs and themes,
- poetic parallelism of members,
- and other fixed structural devices.
The epic mode mirrors a synthetic past, shot through with myth and legend.
Prose narration, on the other hand, provides a stylistic flexibility which is indispensable in relating historical fact.
Biblical historiography is not altogether free from elements of historicized fiction. This tendency toward fiction may reflect the influence of ancient Near Eastern myths and epic songs, especially on early biblical literature. But such influence diminishes appreciably in the post-Exilic period. By then the epic genre was waning in the Near East, and, saturated as it had been by pagan ideals, the repatriated exiles were hardly likely to incorporate it in their cultural heritage.
Although all three units of Ezra-Nehemiah adhere to straightforward historiographical prose narration, they progress from straight historical narrative in the Book of Zerubbabel, to partly historical and partly autobiographical narrative in the Ezra Memoirs, to predominantly autobiographical narrative in the Nehemiah Memoirs.
An example of this autobiographical genre, which may be considered an innovation of the post-Exilic period, occurs in Ezra’s speech of thanksgiving to God for the decree he received from Artaxerxes:
Blessed be the Lord God of our fathers, which hath put such a thing as this in the king’s heart, to beautify the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem: And hath extended mercy unto me before the king, and his counsellors, and before all the king’s mighty princes. And I was strengthened as the hand of the Lord my God was upon me, and I gathered together out of Israel chief men to go up with me. (7:27-28)
Nehemiah exhibits this autobiographical style from the very outset:
And it came to pass in the month Chisleu, in the twentieth year, as I was in the citadel of Shushan [AR], that Hanani, one of my brethren, came, he and certain men of Judah; and I asked them concerning the Jews, the remnants that remained there [AR] of the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said unto me, The remnant that are left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach: the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire. And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned for [AR] days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven. (1:1-4)
Thereupon follows the wording of Nehemiah’s supplication (1:5-11).
The historical account in Ezra—Nehemiah is distinguished throughout by stylistic features that make for vivid biblical prose narration and set it off to advance in comparison with the listlike Mesopotamian annals.
- Action predominates over description: verbs often outnumber nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. The resulting dramatic effect is heightened by the close temporal and spatial limits circumscribing the scene of action.
- Dialogue, as a form of “verbalized action” everywhere central in biblical narrative, is skillfully employed to enliven the continuous prose tale. A good example is Nehemiah’s colloquy with some groups of poor citizens who complain about the heavy payments of interest exacted for loans from their richer compatriots (5:1-5). The dialogue is arranged in two corresponding series of speeches, moving from the bitter outcries of the totally destitute to the complaints of those who are suffering economic hardship but not yet dire poverty:
Round One
“We must pledge our sons and “Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of
daughters so that we can buy corn, our brethren, our children as their children:
eat, and live.” (v. 2 [AT])
“We have mortgaged our fields, vine- “and some of our daughters are brought into
yards, and houses, that we might buy bondage already, neither is it in power to
corn, to save us from hunger.” (v. 3 [AR]) redeem them;” (v. 5b)
“We have borrowed money for the “for other men have our fields [AR] and
king’s tribute …” (v. 4a)
This verbal exchange prompts Nehemiah to rebuke the oppressors and make them swear to restore to the poor their fields, vineyards, and houses: “And the people did according to this promise” (5:13).
Another example of dialogue dynamically integrated into the plot is found in Nehemiah’s report on his defense measures to ensure the safety of the inhabitants of Jerusalem:
When Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites heard that the walls of Jerusalem were being restored and the breaches being filled up, they fumed; and all conspired to come and attack Jerusalem and cause her harm. We prayed to our God and set a watch against them day and night. The Judeans [literally, Judah] said: “The strength of the carriers is failing and there is much rubble; we cannot build the wall.” Our adversaries said: “They will not know nor notice until we come into their midst and slay them and stop the work.” When the Judeans who lived among them came and told us ten times that they were planning to steal up against us, I stationed my men by families, armed with their swords, their lances, and their bows, opposite the open places, behind the wall, and on the ramparts.
(Neh. 4:7-13 [AT])
Once again, the dialogue advances the development of events by dramatically defining the stances of the participants. At the same time, it serves as a bridge between two sections of narrative.
Historical Scope
In its entirety Ezra-Nehemiah is generally regarded as—
- a narrative compilation
- in which diverse documents and sources are inserted at appropriate junctures.
This feature explains the discontinuity in the historical account, which covers approximately one century. Some sixty years between the end of the period of Zerubbabel (Ezra 6:18 or 22) and the return of Ezra (7:1-10) remain uncharted.
There are probably further breaks between Ezra 2 and 3, and within chapter 3, which make it difficult to ascertain the chronological progress of events. The problem is compounded by the lack of any date at all for some events (for example, Ezra 2:1, 68 = Neh. 7:6, 73; Ezra 3:10; 4:1, 7, 8; 9:1; Neh. 4:1, 7, 15; 9:38; 11:1; 13:1) and the provision of only a month and a day for others (for example, Ezra 3:1, 4, 6, 8; 6:19; 9:15; Neh. 9:1). In only a few instances is an event dated by reference to the regnal year of a Persian king (for example, Ezra 1:1—compare 5:13—4:6; Neh. 5:14, 13:6), occasionally with the addition of the day and the month (for example, Ezra 6:15, 7:7-9; Neh. 1:1, 2:1). This lack of exactness and the stringing together of episodes in the text sometimes create the impression that one event follows directly upon another, whereas they may in fact have been chronologically quite remote from each other.
The impression of an immediate chronological sequence is intensified by the repeated use of the common biblical expressions “Now after these things” (Ezra 7:1), “Now when these things were done” (Ezra 9:1), and “And before this” (Neh. 13:4), with which the compiler links independent episodes. These terms, however, are simply formulaic literary connecting devices, rather than indications of true historical sequence.
The compiler or Ezra-Nehemiah recorded events of which he had immediate knowledge. In this respect, the difference from the earlier biblical historical books is noteworthy. The chronological limits are clearly set out in a summary notation which concludes the account of religious and societal regulations introduced or reinstituted by the leaders of that period: “And all Israel in the days of Zerubbabel, and in the days of Nehemiah, gave the portions of the singers and the porters, every day his portion” (Neh. 12:47). This notation is significantly preceded by a comprehensive roster ranging from “the priests and the Levites that went up with Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua” (12:1) to those who officiated “in the days of Nehemiah the governor, and of Ezra the priest, the scribe” (12:26). Thus, even when the writer is reporting on the earliest phase of the return from the Exile (538-515 B.C.E.) the lapse of time between the actual occurrences and the time of writing in about 400 B.C.E. is probably the shortest in biblical historiography.
The chronological proximity of historical event to historical record puts certain restraints on the literary license of the compiler of Ezra-Nehemiah. Although his religious, social, and political convictions are certainly discernible in his exposition, his account still bears the stamp of factuality. The writer’s influence is less evident in the selection and the coloring of historical facts reported than in the order of their presentation.
Because the compiler’s audience also had immediate knowledge of the events reported and a sense of their intrinsic meaning or else had access to the same sources of information, the distance between reader and text would necessarily have contracted; the contemporary audience could identify with or seek to enter into and be entered into by the text. In this respect Ezra-Nehemiah differs both from the older narrative sequence that runs from Genesis to Kings and from the contemporaneous Book of Chronicles, in both of which personages and events are seen from a certain distance, through the strong mediation of tradition, folklore, and literary invention.