CHAPTER 1
Now it’s time for the homecoming. The histories of Kings and Chronicles both
end with the conquest of Judea by Babylon, and this one picks up as the
Babylonian Captivity ends. Cyrus,
Persian emperor, gives a decree that the Jews are to be let back into their old
land and allowed to rebuild the temple.
There is some wise political common sense going on
here. They were defeated by Babylon and
turned into a servant people, with the leaders forced to move to Babylon. Now Cyrus has taken over, and as the old
saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. He defeated the Babylonians and the Jews hate
the Babylonians, so make the Jews happy and he’ll have a bulwark people in the
western portion of his empire.
So they all take off, and we’re told that their neighbors
help them gather up their stuff to go.
That’s nice of them. And they’re
allowed by Cyrus to take all their church bling with them as well.
CHAPTER 2
This is one of those boring chapters, which just gives a
bunch of lists. It lists who is going
back and what their ancestral houses are.
In all, 42,360 people come back – not including servants. There are 7,337 of them, so nearly 50,000 in
all. I can’t tell if this is just adult
males (as in previous censuses) or altogether.
I want to say altogether, because this has nothing to do with military
service.
CHAPTER 3
The gang is back in Canaan, so it’s time to give burnt
offerings to the Lord. Also, they need
to rebuild the Temple. It’s 538 BC, 48
years after the destruction of the old temple, and they have Cyrus’s permission
to rebuild.
There is a touching seen when they break ground for the new
temple and we’re told that the, “heads of ancestral houses, who were old enough
to have seen the former house, cried out in sorrow as they watched the
foundation of the present house being laid.”
I don’t think that “sorrow” is the right word here, but that is a
beautiful image to add in here. And it
makes sense. After all those years of
hoping and yearning to return – it’s really happening! This would be a nice part to read right after
going over some of the Babylonian Captivity psalms.
CHAPTER 4
The rebuilding hits a snag, as all the non-Jews who live in
the area aren’t happy to see it going up.
They first offer to help the Jews build the Temple, but are rebuffed,
saying – no, it’s just our responsibility and Cyrus gave us the duty of doing
it.
When they are rebuffed, the Gentiles of the land get pissed
and try to stop construction. They bribe
people and do whatever they can to frustrate the plans. This goes on through all of Cyrus’s reign and
Darius’s reign.
The Bible doesn’t explain this at all. Why did they first try to help out? Why were
they rebuffed? Why did they try to sink
the project? I can answer the latter
ones better. Maybe they’re afraid that a
new Temple will be a signal of renewed Jewish political ambition, and these
guys lived under Jewish rule for quite a long time. The Jews rebuff them because they feel it
really is their duty to do it, and they probably fear that a combined
construction effort will help lead to placing other gods in the area. That’s what ruined them last time, after all
– all the other idols and gods being sacrificed to. OK, so why did the neighbors offer to help in
the first place? Maybe they were hoping
to use this as a way to get their gods along side the Hebrew God. This way, you might forestall any ambitions
and separateness on the part of the Jews right at the outset – nip it in the
bud, as it worse.
Or not. I’m just
guessing here.
But by the reign of the third emperor, Artaxerxes (I guess
this is Xerxes from Greek history), the Gentiles get a bit more active in their
opposition. They write the emperor,
asking him to kill the project. They
point that that Jerusalem has a habit of ruling over rather than being ruled,
and the people are prone to rebellion.
The emperor agrees, and orders the construction of the temple to be
abandoned.
Note: the part of the Bible includes some of the letters
going back and forth, and these letters were written in Aramaic instead of
Hebrew, as most of it was.
CHAPTER 5
But the temple construction is begun again as the Jews do
their own letter writing. This section
is actually kinda dull. It’s a bunch of
beaurocratic back-and-forth. It’s office
politics, but on a bigger scale.
CHAPTER 6
And the Jews win the battle of office politics. Darius orders a search of governmental
archives, and it shows that Cyrus did in fact give the Jews the right to
rebuild the Temple in keeping with their religious beliefs.
And so it is done.
The Temple is built and dedicated.
CHAPTER 7
Rather belatedly, the title character of the book shows up:
Ezra. He’s a priest and a descendent of Aaron.
To be exact, he apparently comes 16 generations after Aaron, going by
the begottings listed here.
Ezra is an easy to overlook Biblical figure, but he’s
arguably a really big deal. That’s an
argument I got from “Who Wrote the Bible” by Richard Elliot Friedman. He notes that the Torah is believed to have
been written by four different sources and then combined and edited together by
a fifth source, called the Redactor.
Friedman argues that Ezra is that Redactor. He’s the right man in the right place at the
right time.
Let’s see. Here we
learn that Ezra isn’t just a priest, but: “a scribe, well-versed in the law of
Moses given by the Lord, the God of Israel.”
Oh, and the Persian emperor, “granted him all that he requested.” So he’s got the full backing of the man with
power to enforce God’s laws with the Jews once they come out of exile. Yeah, that’s the right man in the right place
at what would be the right time.
Most of this chapter is a copy of an official document, and
that document is Xerxes statement to Ezra.
In short, Xerxes tasks him with having the law of your God in Judah and
Jerusalem. He’s given full control over
their religion. He is to appoint judges
and instruct those who don’t know the laws and execute judgment on those who
won’t obey the laws of Ezra’s God. By
“execute judgment” the statement makes clear that includes death itself, if it
is deemed appropriate.
Basically, Ezra will be made religious czar – backed by the
actual czar.
Let’s take a few seconds to note how important this will be
for the rest of the history of Jews. One
of the ironies so far is that they’ve been surrounded by God’s miracles but
very poor at observing God’s laws.
Doubly the irony, in the post-miracle phase of Judaism, Jews are much
better at observing the laws. God parts
the Red Sea, only to see them worship a golden calf. They have miracle in the times of Judges, but
keep lapsing from God’s ways. Their first king consults a soothsayer and their
second king – David himself – has a household idol. (He uses it to escape Saul). Elijah destroys the priests of Baal in an
epic showdown, but that makes no impression on people. Time and time again, the Hebrew went away
from the straight and narrow. Hell, 10
tribes totally fade into the woodwork of surrounding communities.
But from around 500 BC onward, Jews are much better at
staying on bath. Oh, sure some mix
fabrics and not all the laws of the Torah will always be observed. But there will be no more widespread Baal
worship. They do a much better job
holding the fort on the central matters.
There is the obvious non-believer answer to this oddity –
the miracles never happened but were just folklore (which is also why they
happened way back when, even to the Bible writers). But I think that misses something much more
important. The issue isn’t why they
lapsed so much then, but why they DIDN’T lapse so much afterwards. And that lack of lapsing is largely the
product of Ezra.
He’ll take the different sources before him – the J & E
sources (which was likely long sense combined into one), the P source, and the
D source of the Torah, combined with the entire D history cycle (and the P
history cycle in Chronicles) and meld them into one. They weren’t intended to be melded into
one. Heck, Friedman and others note that
P is pretty much an entire alternate Torah.
But the Redactor synthesized them very well, and made the Word of the
Lord speak with (largely) one voice. Now
that there was one main text, it was just a matter of implementing it.
To put it another way, up until now, the Hebrew religion had
been constantly evolving. Whether it evolved due to diving revelation or human
manufacture is beside the point. But
with Ezra, it was becoming set in stone.
And it’s easier to stray from something fluid than something fixed.
Ezra is thus an often overlooked figure, but a damn
important one. (Well, this is all assuming that he is the Redactor, but that
seems likely).
CHAPTER 8
Ezra and his caravan go to Judah. The most notable thing about this chapter is
midway through, something knew happens in the Bible – it switches to first
person. So far, the Bible has always
been in third person. Oh sure, there are times people talk and you get some “I”
talk. Even God talks. But now the narrator becomes the “I”
guy. We have Ezra expressing his own
personal feelings and thoughts. This is
a connection unlike any other we’ve had so far in the Bible.
For the most part they aren’t too memorable, with one
exception. He wonders if he’ll need
royal protection to travel from Babylon to Jerusalem without being attacked by
bandits. He decides he has to go
without, because he told the emperor that God would look after them. It would look lame if he said God would
protect them and then ask the emperor for protection.
Oh, one of the guys in the caravan is Hattush, descendent of
David. I know from reading Richard
Elliot Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible” that there is a mention in either Ezra
or Nehemiah of the descendents of David coming back, but then they drop out of
the narrative, never mentioned again.
(Rather odd, given that they’re supposed to be the leaders of the
Jews). I guess this is the
blink-and-you-missed-it mentioning.
CHAPTER 9
Ezra arrives and immediately confronts an abomination – Jews
are marrying out of the tribe. Even
Levites and priests are going for the local girls. Ezra is utterly horrified at this
“intermingling.” He tears his cloak and
lays down before God, too humiliated to raise his face to him.
As far as Ezra is concerned, as soon as the Jews have been
granted mercy by God to atone for their past misdeeds – BOOM – there they are,
making more misdeeds. Apparently, this
is a rule from somewhere in the Torah.
He’s horrified.
Ezra comes off like a jerk here, but ask yourself this:
without this sort of militant backbone, would the Jews survive as a people for
the next 2,500 years or so. Of all
times, this is when it helps to be militant, because Ezra is about to oversee
religious consolidation. That means
enforcement of the consolidation. Let
things slide, and the entire consolidation project slides with it. (Later on, once the religion has become fully
consolidated, letting people ignore the rules won’t be as big a deal, but right
now there is really no guarantee that the religion will survive).
Also, of all the rules to violate – intermarriage actually
matters. Again, I’m not looking at this
through modern sensibilities of individuals marrying who they want. Instead, I’ll just say this: this is the
easiest way for the Jewish people to melt/merge into other groups.
Ezra comes off like a jerk here, but being the right man at
the right place at the right time means you’re the right jerk at the right
place at the right time.
CHAPTER 10
They come up with a solution to the intermarriage crisis –
all Jews should abandon their Gentile wives and the kids they had with
them. Yeah, Ezra sure comes off like a
jerk here, indeed.
The rule is decreed to all, who are made to attend a
ceremony. It’s in the rain and they are
shivering, and they use the weather as an excuse to briefly delay implementation,
but implementation happens. A few refuse
to go along with it, but most do. This
is presented as something of a happy ending.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
There isn’t much too this book on the face of it, but based
on the Biblical scholarship I’ve read, Ezra is one of the most important
figures in the Bible. He doesn’t come
off as very likable, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t very influential.
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