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.
Besides all of this, there are two additional figures, Meremoth the son ofas
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
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.I for one, why do the roles have to be faked???
Despite all of this, there are still important scholars who accept this
theory.
Even more strange, is
that it also means that the dedication ceremony of the walls was held offRight, that's strange. A straightforward reading of the text implies a
for at least 17 years!
dedication in the same year it was finished.
A fourth theory, suggested by Aaron Demsky, it that the "seventh year" ofEzra is also a Persian official. He was appointed by the king to appoint
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".
judges for the satrapy Beyond the River. This is also argued by R. Steiner
(JBL 201).
He uses traditional ordinal numbers for months, and it makes sense
that he would use "traditional" years as well (just like the author ofI 've argued that it may have even been a jubilee year (Fried and Freedman,
Daniel!). Demsky calculated back from the known sabbatical years of the
Hellenistic period, and found that 444 was a sabbatical year.
2001).
This means
that Ezra arrived in the summer after Nehemiah had finished building theI don't follow you here. When does anyone ever date anything to Sabbatical
wall - hence his absence from the building but presence at the dedication,
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.
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