Introduction

There is a tradition going back to Late Antiquity that sees Ezra and Nehemiah as a single book, often simply referred to as “Ezra.” The two books, however, differ in form and are certainly not the work of a single writer. Ezra is a third-person narrative reporting historical—at least possibly historical—events affecting the returned exiles in the fifth century B.C.E. It includes the only extended passage (chapters 4–6) in the Bible outside of Daniel written in Aramaic, the language that by this time was in the process of becoming the vernacular of the people of Israel. In all likelihood, it was composed at the very end of the fifth century or perhaps during the early decades of the fourth century B.C.E. Nehemiah was probably written a little earlier, in the last quarter of the fifth century. A good portion of it consists of Nehemiah’s memoirs, written in the first person, and there is no equivalent to this form elsewhere in the Bible. It also incorporates Persian imperial documents, and these are probably authentic, even if they may have undergone a certain amount of reworking in the process of being translated into Hebrew. In any event, both Ezra and Nehemiah reflect a strong impulse to leave a record of historical events of their time, and they also manifest the new openness to formal diversity that characterizes Late Biblical literature. In the writing produced during the First Temple period, there was basically one kind of narrative, variously inflected from Genesis to Judges to Samuel to Kings, showing a good deal of stylistic uniformity and adhering by and large to the same literary conventions. In the prose produced in the period after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C.E., one encounters diversity and what may be thought of from a modern point of view as formal experimentation, as the generically and stylistically different Esther, Ruth, and Jonah vividly illustrate. In Ezra and Nehemiah, we have historical narrative, memoir, collages of historical documents, and a few passages that may well be drawn from folktales.

All this writing, moreover, is driven by a powerful political motive, which is not exactly the case in earlier Hebrew narrative. As happens several times in this period, political power is divided between two figures working in complementary fashion—Ezra the scribe and priest, who is concerned with the all-important project of the restoration of the cult and the canonization of the newly redacted Torah through the institution of its public reading, and Nehemiah, coming to Jerusalem from a high position in the Persian court, the political leader who addresses security issues of rebuilding the walls of the city and confronting armed enemies. Their joint concerns—reestablishing the Temple and the cult within it, authorizing a legal and historical national text, and creating a security apparatus—are conceived as the essential activities for the renewal of the life of the nation in its homeland after the long decades of exile.

The community of returned exiles found itself in sharp conflict with other groups in the country, and the ideology promoted by both Ezra and Nehemiah was stringently separatist. Those who had remained in the land and claimed to be part of the people of Israel—in particular, the Samaritans—were regarded as inauthentic claimants to membership in the nation and were to have no role in the project of rebuilding. This rejection led to resentment, armed attacks, and denunciations to the Persian court of the group led by Ezra and Nehemiah. The machinations of their adversaries and Nehemiah’s countermeasures are recorded in detail here.

Another policy dictated by Ezra and Nehemiah’s separatist view was the sweeping resistance to intermarriage. In the case of Ezra, this entailed draconian measures whereby not only were new intergroup unions to be absolutely avoided but also men who had long-standing foreign wives were to expel them with their children.

It should be noted that there was a strong antithetical view on this issue within the community of returned exiles that is reflected in the Book of Ruth, which in the end was included in the canon and surely must have embodied the outlook of more than a solitary writer. In Ruth, we recall, a young Moabite woman, widow of an Israelite man, evinces love and devotion in following her mother-in-law back to Bethlehem in Judah, where she marries a prosperous landowner and becomes the progenitrix of the line of David. It is hard to imagine a more vigorous riposte to the separatism promulgated by Ezra and Nehemiah. Ruth firmly rejects any notion of an ethnic test for belonging to the community of Israel, and, as in the literature of the earlier biblical period, there is an ease of movement into the community: a woman from across the border settles in Judah, quite naturally accepts the God of her new home, and becomes in every respect a daughter of the people. The Book of Ruth is a luminous testimony to the tolerance and universalism that were a part of the biblical heritage. But the separatist view embodied in Ezra and Nehemiah is the one that seems to have prevailed in its time: no foreign wives, no Samaritans or others of uncertain ethnic and religious background, were tolerated in the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem and the renewal of the Temple. For better or for worse, this is the approach that gained momentum and would predominate in the many centuries that followed.