The Oxford History of the Biblical World (72 page)

The defective and probably fictional priestly genealogy for Ezra (Ezra 7) is not
meant to mislead but rhetorically to convince the reader that Ezra’s mission should be viewed in continuity with preexilic legal and ritual traditions. Ezra’s commission (Ezra 7.12) from the Persian king Artaxerxes (I?) calls him “the priest… [and] scribe of the law of the God of heaven,” the official Persian name for Yahweh. While Ezra’s title has been cited by those who claim that Ezra served as the imperial official in charge of Jewish affairs, there is scant evidence for such a post elsewhere in the empire. The title “scribe,” however, does suggest that Ezra had some official function. Ezra is sent to Judah and Jerusalem to inquire concerning the “law of your God, which is in your hand” (Ezra 7.14). Of what Ezra’s “inquiry” was to consist is also a difficult question. The Judean priesthood and community were not bereft of religion nor ignorant of Israel’s legal traditions, many of which had long ago been set down in writing. The Temple ritual had been restored, a theocracy well established. There is no reason to think the people were hearing anything startlingly new. The account of Ezra’s public Torah reading (Neh. 8–9) follows a liturgical pattern also found in the account of Josiah’s reform in the seventh century (2 Kings 23); the narrative is shaped to impress readers with the theological momentousness of the event.

Rabbinic tradition attributed to Ezra the creation of Judaism
(m. Abot
1.1), and claimed that “Ezra and the Torah surpassed in importance the building of the Temple”
(b. Megilla
16.b). The author/editor of Ezra 7–10 and Nehemiah 8, the ancient rabbis, and many modern scholars have believed Ezra’s “law” to be the completed Pentateuch (Torah). But it is almost impossible to correlate any aspect of Ezra’s commission in Ezra 7 with specific Pentateuchal legislation, and the few quotations that we have from Ezra’s Torah do not match the wording of the received Pentateuch. Biblical references to the Torah need not refer to the Pentateuch at all. For example, the word
tora
in Psalm 119 (roughly contemporary with Ezra and Nehemiah) refers not so much to a written text as to a fluid principle of God’s commandments and teaching, received from teachers and sages and by charismatic revelation.

Some scholars maintain, with justification, that the editing and promulgation of ancient Pentateuchal traditions occurred in an “Ezra school.” The Ezra-Nehemiah narrative, like the book of Chronicles, does contain numerous allusions to Pentateuchal legal traditions—Deuteronomic, Priestly, and the Holiness Code. For example, in the list of peoples excluded from Israel (Ezra 9.1), we see Deuteronomic laws undergoing a process of exegetical development, in other words, early Jewish biblical interpretation. The Ezra narrative drops some groups from the traditional Deuteronomic seven peoples (Deut. 7.1) and adds others, including Ammonites, Moabites, and Egyptians. Notably, the list does not include Samarians, with whom the Jerusalem priesthood continued to intermarry into the next century. To complicate the picture there are also practices that accord with neither Deuteronomic nor Priestly law. By the mid-fifth century, then, the Pentateuch was on its way to completion but not yet fully formed.

Clearly, some of Ezra’s tasks are quite worldly. He is charged with distributing gifts and Temple vessels to the “God of Israel, whose dwelling is in Jerusalem” (Ezra 7.15). And in accordance with the wisdom of Ezra’s god (Ezra 7.25–26), he is ordered to appoint magistrates and judges to uphold “the law of your God and the law of the king” and to ensure that all the people observe them. The close association of the law of God and the law of the king suggests that Ezra’s task may have involved
replacing existing officials with new appointees charged with enforcing a new legal order in a region of new strategic importance.

Whatever the nature of his imperial mission, in the biblical text Ezra’s main interest is the problem of mixed marriages and consequently of denning the boundaries of Israelite ethnicity. Because some of Judah’s leaders, namely, priests, head the list of guilty persons (Ezra 10.18), Ezra may represent an exclusivist faction of Yahwism battling a more assimilationist local priestly or lay-priestly governing faction. Ezra 10.15 describes Jewish leaders as resisting Ezra’s orders.

Another approach to assessing Ezra’s actions against mixed marriage is to consider the marriages as other than a purely religious crime that causes the community’s “great guilt” (Ezra 9.13). The penalties for staying away from the great assembly (Ezra 10.7), where the guilty will be dealt with, are not religious but economic and social: loss of both property and membership in the assembly of “the exiles,” the dominant group of the restoration community.

Ezra, we must always remember, was a representative of the Babylonian Diaspora and the bearer of an official Persian mandate. While the Bible suggests that Ezra came to Judah to root out corrupting influences on the purity of ancient Jewish law, as a Persian agent, Ezra might well have channeled the interpretation of that law into new areas. Political theorists note that law in imperial systems is used to maintain the relationships between groups in a subject territory and the imperial center. Broadly based reforms of the legal system occur when the relationship between subject and imperial center changes enough to require new legal structures. In the mid-fifth century Persia’s fear of Greek expansionism enhanced Judah’s strategic value. Ezra’s mission may have resulted in the creation of a legal apparatus for defining an ethnically circumscribed community, the Bible’s “community of exiles,” or “Israel.” Such a community could gain privileges from the Persian authority; according to the imperial view, all conquered land was the great king’s to distribute. Returning exiles or local loyalists could hope to benefit from such tangible expressions of royal patronage. At the same time, however, they would constitute a loyal elite, socially and economically bound to the empire.

Beginning with Cyrus, the Persians carefully coordinated imperial policy with local religious laws to foster political stability. Persian officials, for example, intervened several times in the religious lives of the Elephantine Jews; the Elephantine papyri include a letter dated 419
BCE
to the Egyptian satrap concerning regulations for the Jewish Festival of Unleavened Bread in the Elephantine community. Like Udjahorresnet, Darius I’s Egyptian legal and ritual reformer, Ezra was probably the agent not of imperial condescension but of strengthened imperial control mechanisms.

In the short term, Ezra’s actual success appears limited. The Bible’s Ezra, however, colored by hindsight (even if the composition date of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah remains elusive), shapes both the future and the sacredness of God’s holy people by bringing them (back) to the Torah of Moses. Like important postexilic Jewish leaders before him, he then recedes into the historical obscurity from which he emerged. Josephus’s report that Ezra died at an old age and was buried in Jerusalem is formulaic, a detail appropriate to a biblical figure. But Josephus’s need to account for Ezra’s death also demonstrates the honor accorded him at the end of the Second Temple period.

Despite Ezra’s centrality to the biblical account of the Persian period, Nehemiah’s is the dominant personality. Nehemiah, the king’s cupbearer (not a eunuch), left the Persian court and Susa to begin his mission to Judah in “the twentieth year of Artaxerxes” (Neh. 2.1). He served for at least twelve years, returned to Persia, and was back in Judah again around 430
BCE
. References to “Sanballat the governor of Samaria” in a letter of 408 from the Jewish community of Elephantine to Bagoas, the then-governor of Yehud, have led to a consensus that Nehemiah served under Artaxerxes I, beginning in 445. Scholars identify the Sanballat of the Elephantine letter with Nehemiah’s archenemy (Neh. 2, 10, 19).

Nehemiah is one of the most colorful figures in the Bible, thanks to the lively first-person voice of the “Nehemiah memoir.” This memoir does include Nehemiah’s own words, but it is more rhetorical than factual. Nehemiah could not have been privy to many of the events and the motivations he describes. Not an autobiography, the “memoir” has affinities with royal inscriptions and votive texts (it is addressed to God), prayers of the falsely accused, a self-justification addressed to an angry monarch, and biographical tomb inscriptions such as that of Udjahorresnet. Whatever its original form, it was revised and reworked in the light of later events.

Nehemiah’s emotional, strong-willed—some have said vain—character emerges vividly from the pages of his story. It opens with the hero weeping at the news of Jerusalem’s fallen walls and then artfully inducing his royal master to send him to the rescue of his ancestral city. Once in Jerusalem, he physically separates the holy city from the profane peoples around it by rebuilding the walls under difficult circumstances. A wall identified as Nehemiah’s lies higher up the slope from the preexilic fortifications, circumscribing a relatively small area and possibly explaining the brief period of fifty-two days for the work. Religiously, too, he walls off the holy community by sternly enforcing regulations derived from Deuteronomic law concerning the Sabbath and intermarriage.

From an imperial perspective, Nehemiah’s job was to build a city wall and an imperial fortress (the citadel of the Temple, Neh. 2.8) just outside the city. The fortress and the fortifications of Jerusalem may have been part of the general Persian deployment of garrisons suggested in the archaeological record. The Persians did not encourage the building of walls in Levantine cities, probably considering them symbolic of civil independence; Samaria, for example, never had an urban wall system in the Persian period. The unusual nature of Nehemiah’s wall-building with the blessing of the great king is highlighted in the biblical narrative.

Explanations for the fortification of Jerusalem include the suggestions that the Persians were hoping to foster or to reward Judean loyalty. Alternatively, in a region where Persian control was threatened by international military adventurism, Jerusalem became an inland defensive city and possibly a new center for the collection and storage of imperial revenues (delivered in kind and not in coin before the late fifth century). The latter is suggested by the account of the people’s economic distress in Nehemiah 5. When Nehemiah lightened the tax burden, rather than aiming at some sort of rapprochement between peasant and aristocracy he may have been trying to minimize an increased tax burden caused by the need to maintain the new garrisons. The implied criticisms of Persian rule by the later author/editor of Ezra-Nehemiah (Ezra 9.8–9; Neh. 5.1–19; 9.37) may reflect Persia’s tightened grip on Judah
and the economic consequence of Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s work. The Samarian governor Sanballat’s obstructionist behavior suggests that he understood that Jerusalem’s walls announced for that city a status higher than Samaria’s, ensuring greater royal favor. Judean national revival would not have appealed to a citizen of the former northern kingdom, aware of Judah’s ancient claims on his territory. Sanballat must have sensed that Nehemiah’s official privileges could only be diminished by addressing directly to the king himself insinuations about Nehemiah’s disloyalty (Neh. 2.19).

Always Nehemiah struggled against opposition. This opposition is difficult to characterize and is multifaceted, but its sources are political and economic, not religious. He helped Judean peasants by suppressing excesses of usury and remitting the taxes paid for his own maintenance, but he was also willing, as an upper-class member of the influential eastern Diaspora, to exclude them from his definition of Israel. He may have pleased the Levitical families by giving them an enhanced role in the Temple while alienating some priestly officials. Whereas biblical tradition depicts Sanballat, the Ammonite Tobiah, and the Arab king Geshem as mean-spirited pagans, it is more likely that their disagreements with Nehemiah were political. Sanballat and Tobiah were probably Yahweh worshipers, and before the new governor arrived all three men had enjoyed friendly relations with Jerusalem. After Nehemiah’s return to Persia we find Tobiah, a relative of Eliashib the high priest and other Judean nobles, in possession of an office in the Temple (Neh. 6.18; 13.4–9). A number of Jerusalemites also disagreed with Nehemiah’s activities. These included the Jerusalem district administrator Shallum (Neh. 3.12), Shemaiah (Neh. 6.10–13), and the influential female prophet Noadiah and her fellow prophets (Neh. 6.14). Nehemiah all but accuses Noadiah of waging psychological warfare (Neh. 6.14).

As with Ezra, even marriage regulations can be viewed as a mechanism for imperial control. Regardless of whether Nehemiah’s attention to matters such as the Sabbath regulations and mixed marriages stemmed from Deuteronomic principles, Persian policy, or both, they may have been seen as extreme by local leaders. His expulsion of the high priest’s son from Jerusalem for refusing to divorce his Samarian Sanballatid wife would not have endeared him to either family (Neh. 13.28). Some of the “foreign” women could have been Yahweh worshipers; the marriage habits of Jerusalem’s priestly elite show that what Ezra and Nehemiah condemned as mixed marriages were considered within the bounds of good Yahwism by others. No difficulties are expressed over mixed marriages in the Chronicler’s history, a work thoroughly informed by the ideology of postexilic Judah. The book of Ruth, although resistant to dating, may contain a postexilic call for inclusiveness in its positive depiction of King David’s great-grandmother, Ruth the Moabite.

The restricted definition of Israel in Ezra and Nehemiah and the xenophobia of postexilic oracles against the nations (Isa. 46–47) hang in dynamic tension with the trend toward greater universalism in prophetic writings of the Persian period, most notably in Third Isaiah (Isa. 56.3–8) and Zechariah (Zech. 8.20–23). Malachi gives Gentiles credit for sincere worship (Mai. 1.11–14), and by acknowledging that even foreigners (Ninevites) can receive God’s favor, the book of Jonah rejects the exclusion of other nations from membership in the people of God.