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  • From: Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dates of Ezra and Nehemiah
  • Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 22:00:27 +0200


----- Original Message ----- From: "Lisbeth S. Fried" <lizfried AT umich.edu>

I have concluded that the author of Ezra-Nehemiah lived at the end of the
fourth century, after the conquest of Alexander. It seems to me that we have
a complete list of high priests in Neh. 12:10-11 (where Jonathan must
corrected to John, Yohanan, as in 12:22). This is a complete
list of Persian period priests from the period of the return to the time of
Alexander. Darius the Persian in 12:23 is Darius III. Therefore the author
of Ezra-Nehemiah must have lived after Alexander. That could put a century
between the writing and the historical Ezra of 398.

Yes, I know you have. I tend to date the editor of Ezra-Nehemiah a little earlier. But that's not the issue. The question is why would the editor make it seem like Ezra came first. Did he really not know that there were more than one Artaxerxes? Or did he have a hidden agenda?




Besides all of this, there are two additional figures, Meremoth the son of
Uriah the priest (Ezra 8:33; Neh. 4, 21) and Malciah son of Harim (Ezra
10:31 and Neh. 3:11), who are listed both as members of Ezra's group and
as
participating in Nehemiah's wall-building.
Meremoth worked on the wall as a husky fifteen-year old in 445, then in 398
he was a 62-year old man, a respected priest, with enough stature to
receive Ezra's vessels.
The same thing with Malkiah. He works on the wall as a teenager, then 47
years later, he agrees to divorce his wife of 40 years -- the jerk!
Both are minor figures. For the
editor to have "faked" their roles would have been very subtle in deed.
Despite all of this, there are still important scholars who accept this
theory.
I for one, why do the roles have to be faked???

I was thinking of you when I wrote "important scholars". But it does not work out. Neh. 3 does not list 15-year old laborers. It lists the heads of work-gangs. This means that they would be in their twenties at least. Which would make them WELL over sixty in 398. Now this is not impossible, but very unlikely.


Even more strange, is
that it also means that the dedication ceremony of the walls was held off
for at least 17 years!
Right, that's strange. A straightforward reading of the text implies a
dedication in the same year it was finished.

So what's your exlaination?

A fourth theory, suggested by Aaron Demsky, it that the "seventh year" of
Ezra refers to the sabbatical cycle. Nehemiah, as a Persian official, uses
"official" dates throughout, including Mesopotamian month names. He would
naturally refer to Persian regnal-years. Ezra, however, is a Jewish
"scribe".
Ezra is also a Persian official. He was appointed by the king to appoint
judges for the satrapy Beyond the River. This is also argued by R. Steiner
(JBL 201).

What I meant was, that Ezra was not a career official, like Nehemiah. He is appointed by the king (if you take Ezra 7:1-26 to be historical, which many scholars do not), but his career and training were from within the Jewish community. To use an anachronism, he was a rabbi. So he wrote in "Jewish" terms.



He uses traditional ordinal numbers for months, and it makes sense
that he would use "traditional" years as well (just like the author of
Daniel!). Demsky calculated back from the known sabbatical years of the
Hellenistic period, and found that 444 was a sabbatical year.
I 've argued that it may have even been a jubilee year (Fried and Freedman,
2001).

I'm not sure exactly what that would mean, or if jubilees were even observed at the time.


This means
that Ezra arrived in the summer after Nehemiah had finished building the
wall - hence his absence from the building but presence at the dedication,
I don't follow you here. When does anyone ever date anything to Sabbatical
years??
Name one text anywhere where anything is dated this way. People give the
regular dates, in terms of regnal years, and then may had that it was a
sabbatical year, but they can't date in terms of sabbatical years. A
sabbatical year can't provide a date, you don't know which sabbatical cycle
it is. So you're the seventh year, but the seventh year occurs every seven
years, it doesn't provide a date.

Who said that the author of the Ezra document intended to provide a date? IF we accept Demsky's theory, I would understand that the (original) author (Ezra himself?) wrote "seventh year" in order to emphasize that this was a sabbatical. For him, this was significant all by its own. It was the editor who assumed that "seventh year" must mean a date, and then, naturally for him, assumed that the date was of the king.


Bye for now,

Yigal




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