One Book or Two?

Ezra-Nehemiah
Ezra 1-10

      We are now closing in on the historical narrative of the Israeli people. Long ago the books of Ezra and Nehemiah were considered to be one piece, Ezra-Nehemiah. The earliest copy of these texts date back to the 400s B.C.E. and are contained in one book. In the 300s A.D. the Christians split them into two books. It wasn't until the middle ages that the Jews also separated the works in their own canon. These two short books provide a final point for the historical narrative of the nation of Israel.
      The rest of the Old Testament takes us back to various points and places within the story arc of Genesis - Nehemiah. We will revisit old kings and prophets that we barely touched on in Kings and Chronicles, the story of Job is said to have taken place during the time between Genesis and Exodus, we'll take a look at life for the refugees in Babylonian captivity, and there is great poetry and words of wisdom attributed to the first great kings; David and Solomon.
    But lets not get ahead of ourselves......
    First we must finish the final chapter in the history of the Jews. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell the story of the fall of Babylon and the inspiration of Yahweh upon the gentile nations to shape the story of the role of the Jews in Yahweh's grand plan. These books are believed to have existed in their early forms in at least 400 B.C.E. since they deal with verified historical events of the rise of the unassuming Persian nation into the next great Empire. The traditional author is Ezra the scribe who served under the Govornor of Judah, Nehemiah, in the early years of the exiles return and rebuilding of Zion. Zion was the revered name of Jerusalem as Yahweh's throne on Earth.
      The events of Persia’s rise and Babylon’s fall occurred during the mid 5th century B.C.E. and was well documented. Cyrus II of Persia, AKA Cyrus the Great or Cyrus the Elder, was known by the nations he conquered as taking a different approach to conquest. Until this time when a nation rose to power they did so at the expense of the smaller cultures it dominated over. Often killing the inhabitants of places, the more fortunate ones were scattered to the four winds as refugees, and moving their own people in to interbreed and rub out the older, conquered, culture. Cyrus II took an approach that would later be a model for the great empires for the next couple thousand years. Whenever he conquered a nation he respected the people, their customs and their gods. He allowed them to keep their local rulers in most cases as long as they paid tribute and provided warriors for future campaigns.In the case of the new Babylonian empire of the Chaldeans when Cyrus overtook the land he allowed all the slaves to return to their homelands. According to ancient records of the Jews and Babylonians Cyrus had no known religion of his own, but held a respect for all the deities of the conquered lands. Giving respect to the Babylonians gods of Marduk and Bel as well as the Hebrew monotheism of Yahweh.

       No one is really sure who the author of these two books are. There are many competing theories out there, but its interesting to see how the dialogue changes from third person to first person early on in the book Ezra. The book of Ezra also ends rather suddenly with the plan to kick out all of Israel’s foreign wives and then it goes right into Nehemiah. One popular theory for this is that Ezra 1-6 and Ezra 9-10 were actually separate documents of the same story that were spliced together by the author of Ezra 7-8 in the very earliest compositions of the text and then underwent layering and editing over the next couple hundred years between 550 B.C.E. and at least 333 B.C.E.

       The Jewish Roman historian Josephus sets this date as being the latest date of final composition since the list of high priests in Nehemiah 12:22 ends with the high priest Jaddua, who shares the name with the high priest during the conquering of Persia by Alexander the Great in 333 B.C.E. This identification is not certain, but is used to set a latest possible composition date. By the end of the 1st century B.C.E. it was pretty much the book we have now in our own modern Bibles.