 Folio 5r from the Codex Amiatinus,
Ezra the scribe.
(larger image)No record exists for the 14 years between 459 BCE, when Ezra is thought to have organized the ecclesiastical and civil affairs of the Israelite nation, and 445 BCE, when Nehemiah first appears in the Bible's chronology. Nehemiah's first recorded act was to rebuild the ruined wall of the city. After this reconstruction, a great group of people gathered in Jerusalem to dedicate the wall. On the appointed day, Ezra and his assistants read the Torah aloud to the whole population. According to the text, a great religious awakening occurred. For successive days, beginning on Rosh Hashanah, the people rejoiced in the holy days of the month of Tishri. Ezra read the entire scroll of the Torah to the people, and he and other scholars and Levites explained and interpreted the deeper meanings and applications of the Torah to the assembled crowd. These festivities culminated in an enthusiastic and joyous seven-day celebration of the Festival of Sukkot, concluding on the eighth day with the holiday of Shemini Atzeret. On the 24th day, immediately following the holidays, they held a solemn assembly, fasting and confessing their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. Then, they renewed their national covenant to follow the Torah and to observe and fulfill all of the Lord's commandments, laws and decrees (Neh. 10:30). Abuses were rectified, and arrangements for the temple service were completed.
Relation to the Book of Ruth
According to many scholars, the Book of Ruth was originally a part of the Book of Judges, but it was later made into a separate book. Its opening verse explicitly places it during the time period of the Judges, and its language and description seem to make the authorship contemporary with that period. On the other hand, the message of the book, which shows acceptance of marrying converts to Judaism, has been used to suggest that the book was written during the early days of the Persian period. At that time, Ezra condemned intermarriages and, according to his eponymous book, forced the Israelites to abandon their non-Jewish wives who did not convert. According to this theory, the Book of Ruth was written in response to Ezra's reform and in defense of these marriages. More likely, the book was a response to critics of King David, who contested his qualifications as a Jew due to his Moabite ancestry. In that context, the book uses the precedent set by a Jewish court, led by Boaz, to demonstrate that a Moabitess could convert and be a member of the Children of Israel.
Place in editing the Torah and Bible
According to Rabbinic Jewish tradition, Ezra collected and arranged some relatively minor books that today form part of the canon of the Hebrew Bible. Traditional Jewish sources do not mention any process of fundamental editing or redacting of the Humash, or Five Books of Moses. Rather, the aggada suggests that Ezra and the Men of the Great Assembly edited such works as Daniel, Esther and Ezekiel (Bava Batra 14b). The Apocryphal book of II Esdras (the Apocalypse of Ezra, which is also known as IV Ezra) tells us that Ezra wrote 94 Books in 40 days; 24 of those Books were to distributed among the people and the other 70 were to given to the wise alone.
According to some Biblical scholars, Ezra did play a fundamental role in the compilation of nearly all parts of the Hebrew Bible, including the Five Books of Moses (the Torah). According to this theory, the documentary hypothesis, Ezra is thought to have interspersed various primary texts with occasional additions of his own that were intended to help reconcile apparent contradictions among the original texts. Discussion of the merits of the documentary hypothesis can be found in works by Rabbi David Weiss Halivni such as Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (Westview Press, 1997), and Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (Oxford University Press, 1998), as well as in works such as "Who Wrote the Bible?" (Harper San Francisco, 1997 reprint) by Richard Elliot Friedman.
Ezra in the Qur'an
Ezra is also mentioned in the Muslim Qur'an as Uzair "9:30: The Jews call 'UZAIR a son of God, and the Christians call Jesus the Son of God. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. God's curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!" There is no historical evidence that Jews referred to Ezra as the son of God: the Encyclopaedia Judaica states, "H. Z. Hirschberg proposed another assumption, based on the words of Ibn Hazm, namely, that the 'righteous who live in Yemen believed that 'Uzayr was indeed the son of God.' According to other Muslim sources, there were some Yemenite Jews who had converted to Islam who previously had believed that Ezra was the messiah.
Ezra is also mentioned in the Hadith of seeing God as clear as the sun.
The book of Ezra is a book of the bible in the old testament and Hebrew Tanakh. This book is the record of events occurring at the close of the Babylonian exile. At one time, it included the book of Nehemiah, the Jews regarding them as one volume. The two are still distinguished in the Vulgate version as i and ii Esdras; Ezra was a priest, scribe and religious reformer who led a group of exiles back to Jerusalem in 458 bce. He was a descendant of the high priest at the time of the destruction of the temple in 586 BC.
Historicity and genealogy
Mary Joan Winn Leith in The Oxford History of the Biblical World believes that the historical Ezra's life was enhanced in the scripture and was given a theological buildup, but this does not imply that Ezra did not exist. Gosta W. Ahlstrom, argues the inconsistencies of the biblical tradition are insufficient to say that Ezra, with his central position as the 'father of Judaism' in the Jewish tradition, has been a later literary invention. Those who argue against the historicity of Ezra argue that the presentation style of Ezra as a leader and lawgiver resembles that of Moses. There are also similarities between Ezra the priest-scribe (but not high priest) and Nehemiah the secular governor on the one hand and Joshua and Zerubbabel on the other hand. The early second century BCE Jewish author Jesus ben Sirach praises Nehemiah, but makes no mention of Ezra.
According to the biblical genealogy of Ezra in Ezra 7:1-7:5, he is the son of Seraiah, the high priest taken captive by Babylonians.
1 After these things, during the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, Ezra son of Seraiah, the son of Azariah, the son of Hilkiah, 2 the son of Shallum, the son of Zadok, the son of Ahitub, 3 the son of Amariah, the son of Azariah, the son of Meraioth -Ezra 7:1-3 ESV
Timeline
Scholars are divided over the chronological sequence of the activities of Ezra and Nehemiah. Ezra came to Jerusalem "in the seventh year of Artaxerxes the King". The text does not specify whether the king in the passage refers to Artaxerxes I (465-424 BCE) or to Artaxerxes II (404-359 BCE). Most scholars hold that Ezra lived during the rule of Artaxerxes I, though some have difficulties with this assumption: Nehemiah and Ezra "seem to have no knowledge of each other; their mission do not overlap; and no reflection of Ezra's activity appears in Jerusalem of Nehemiah." These difficulties has led many scholars to assume that Ezra arrived in the seventh year of the rule of Artaxerxes II, i.e. some 50 years after Nehemiah. This assumption would imply that the biblical account is not chronological. The last group of scholars regard "the seventh year" as a scribal error and hold that the two men were contemporaries.
References
- Liwak, Rüdiger; Schwemer, Anna Maria "Ezra." Brill's New Pauly.
- Ezra." Encyclopædia Britannica.2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
- The New Encyclopedia of Judaism, Ezra
- Edward Kessler, Neil Wenborn,A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge University Press, p.398
- Ashraf, Shahid (2005). "Prophets ’Uzair, Zakariya and Yahya (PBUT)" (Google Books). Encyclopaedia of Holy Prophet and Companions. Daryaganj, New Delhi: Anmol Publications Pvt. Ltd. pp. 199–200. ISBN 8126119403. . Retrieved on 2007-11-20. Retrieved on 6/20/2010
- Ibn Kathir; Ali As-Sayed Al- Halawani (trans.). "`Uzair(Ezra)". Stories Of The Quran. Islambasics.com. Retrieved on 6/20/2010.
- Emil G. Hirsch, Isaac Broydé, "Ezra the Scribe", Jewish Encyclopedia (Online)
- Ezra 7:1-7:5
- Ezra 7:7, Ezra 7:11-7:28
- Watson E. Mills, Roger Aubrey Bullard, Mercer Dictionary of the Bible, p.285
- Ezra 8:15-8:28
- Catholic Encyclopedia, Esdras
- Nehemiah 8:1
- Nehemiah 8:2
- Nehemiah 8:7
- Nehemiah 8:18, Nehemiah 9:1-9:3
- Nehemiah 10:1
- "Greek Ezra" or sometimes named I (or II or III) Esdras was considerably popular in the early Church. It was included in the canon of the Septuagint (a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek). In the reforming Council of Trent (1545–63), the Roman Catholic Church removed the book from the canon and placed it as an appendix to the New Testament. (cf. "biblical literature." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online, p.173; "Esdras, First Book of." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online ) The Eastern Orthodox Church however considers I Esdras as canonical, as does the Oriental Orthodox Church (cf. Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, p.423; R. W. Cowley, The Biblical Canon Of The Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today, Ostkirchliche Studien, 1974, Volume 23, pp. 318-323.)
- "Esdras, First Book of." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online
- Howard H. Cox, The Pentateuch: History Or Story?, p.101
- Bamidbar Rabbah 3:13, quoted in Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, Revelation Restored, ch.1; also cited in Avot de-Rabbi Natan xxxiv.
- Uzayr, Encyclopedia of Islam
- Winn Leith, Mary Joan (2001) [1998]. "Israel among the Nations: The Persian Period". in Michael David Coogan (ed.) (Google Books). The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. pp. pg. 306. LCCN 98-016042. ISBN 0195139372. OCLC 44650958. Retrieved on 6/20/2010
- Gosta W. Ahlstrom, The History of Ancient Palestine, Fortress Press, p.888
- William David Davies, Louis Finkelstein, William Horbury, John Sturdy, The Cambridge History of Judaism, p.144
- Ezra 7:7
- Porter, J.R. (2000). The Illustrated Guide to the Bible. New York: Barnes & Noble Books. pp. 115–116. ISBN 0-760-72278-1.
- The dates of Nehemiah's and Ezra's respective missions, and their chronological relation to each other, are uncertain, because each mission is dated solely by a regnal year of an Achaemenian King Artaxerxes; and in either case we do not know for certain whether the Artaxerxes in question is Artaxerxes I (465-424 B.C.) or Artaxerxes II (404-359 B.C.). So we do not know whether the date of Ezra's mission was 458 B.C. or 397 B.C.' Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, vol.12 (1961) Oxford University Press, 1964 pp.484-485 n.2
- Nehemiah 8 is transposed for rhetorical reasons; Nehemiah 8:9 is almost unanimously considered to be a scribal harmonization
- Winn Leith, Mary Joan (2001) [1998]. "Israel among the Nations: The Persian Period". in Michael David Coogan (ed.) (Google Books). The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. pp. pg. 281. LCCN 98-016042. ISBN 0195139372. OCLC 44650958. http://books.google.com/books?id=zFhvECwNQD0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Oxford+History+of+the+Biblical+World&ei=v-FhR-q_MJKIiQGU-eCIBw&sig=09eixie3bqkoalqx66xDGO9GBqI#PRA2-PA281,M1.Retrieved on 6/20/2010
- John Boederman, The Cambridge Ancient History, 2002, p.272
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