Settling the Land a Second Time—Ezra–Nehemiah

Abstract

IN SOME WAYS, Ezra–Nehemiah is a companion piece to Esther, another story of Jews living as vassals of the Persian Empire, although it has none of the patent absurdity of Esther. Nehemiah’s story, like Esther’s, starts in a Persian court, but most of the composite story takes place in Jerusalem. Cyrus “the Great,” the first ruler from the Achaemenid dynasty, in the first year after his conquest of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE issued a decree that allowed Jews to rebuild the temple (Ezra 1:1–4). The decree marked a policy of granting provinces a greater measure of local and regional control in exchange for cooperation with imperial economic and political goals. The book covers a period that exceeds the life of the two individuals for whom Ezra–Nehemiah is named. Four or five Persian kings are mentioned—Cyrus, Darius, Ahasuerus/Xerxes, Artaxerxes I, and maybe Artaxerxes II (Ezra 4:5–7; 6:14)—whose reigns span more than a century (c. 538–400 BCE). The book makes no consistent attempt to specify the chronology. The so-called Nehemiah memoir is considered by some the oldest and most accurately historical part of the book, recording the experience of a highly placed imperial agent. It suggests that some twenty years into the reign of Artaxerxes I (445 BCE), Jerusalem was still largely in ruins (Neh 2:3), even if the temple had been reconstructed two or three generations earlier (c. 515 BCE) at the urging of the prophet Haggai....