CHAPTER II

THE HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS

THE history of the Jews in the years succeeding the advent of Cyrus is by no means clear, and if we are to trace the attitude they adopted towards other nations we must first draw out as accurately as possible the historical course of events. The principal documents which we are to use are the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The literary problems presented by Ezra and Nehemiah are some of the most difficult in the Old Testament, and it is only natural that they should have been left aside while the problems connected with the earlier books of the Old Testament were being tackled. The result however has been that attempts to reconstruct the post-exilic history of the Jews have not been based on a thorough-going criticism of the important documents. In recent years a serious attempt to grapple with the problems has been made by Prof. C. C. Torrey of Yale; and if his conclusions prove satisfactory they must inevitably influence our conception of this period of Jewish history. His Ezra Studies have given a great stimulus to the task of delineating afresh the religious ideas of the Jews after the Exile. A noteworthy attempt had been made in 1898 by Prof. Cheyne in his lectures on Jewish Religious Life after the Exile, but in spite of Cheyne's brilliant scholarship and imagination that work is now seen to be far from

satisfactory because many of the foundations were not securely laid.

We begin then with a consideration of the literary and historical criticism of Ezra and Nehemiah. It will not be necessary here to repeat in detail the work of Torrey, which should be read in its entirety, but only to give a short summary of it, and to deal rather more fully with the few points in which his conclusions are questioned.

In the writings known as I and II Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, we have what professes to be a complete history from the creation to the fifth century B.C. The history was written with a distinct motive, and therefore the parts which were not of interest to the Chronicler are omitted or summarily mentioned. Thus the early part of the history is compressed into a mere genealogy, while the period of the Babylonian Exile is passed over in complete silence. The motive of the Chronicler, to put it in few words, was to glorify Judaism and Jerusalem. Earlier on there had been a desire to glorify Jerusalem, when the prophets tried to abolish the worship of Yahweh in the country high places, and when the author of Deuteronomy declared that no sacrifice might be offered except in Jerusalem. But from those days to the time of the compilation of Chronicles much had happened to Israel, and the most remarkable change was the dispersion of the Jews in foreign lands. Either forcibly or of their own free will the Jews had been scattered all over the civilized world. We know of the deportations to Babylon by Nebuchadrezzar, and we know of the Jewish colonies in Upper Egypt in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. During the Persian period this dispersion continued,

until in the Greek period, i.e. after Alexander the Great, the Jews in Judaea began to be numerically of small importance compared with the Jews in other lands. There was a danger that the scattered Israelites would cease to look on Jerusalem as the centre and joy of the whole earth. And worse than this the people of Samaria, who also worshipped Yahweh, had built a temple of their own on Mt Gerizim, and this bade fair to rival the temple at Jerusalem. It was with feelings of intense anxiety at the thought of these things that the Chronicler sat down to write his history of the world which gave the place of first importance to the Jewish people and the Jewish religion, and regarded Jerusalem and its temple as the pivot of the world. Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah are in reality one book, and indeed the careless scribe who separated them did not make a clean cut, but ended II Chron. in the middle of a sentence, and then in beginning Ezra repeated the last two verses which he had written in II Chron. It is however only with the period covered by Ezra and Nehemiah that we are concerned. In order to obtain the text of that portion of the Chronicler's work as it left his hand we have the following materials:

(a) A Greek version known as "Eodpas a, which is translated into English in our Apocrypha under the title I Esdras.

(b) A recension partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic, which is printed in our Hebrew Bibles, and is translated in our English Bibles under the titles Ezra and Nehemiah. To distinguish this recension we shall call it .

(c) A Greek version of which appears in the Greek Old Testament under the title "Eodpas ß. As this follows very closely it is not translated independently into English. This must not be confused with the book in our English Apocrypha called II Esdras which is translated from a Latin work in no way connected with our book.

There are also versions from "Eodpas 8 into other languages, such as the Latin Vulgate, which are not of great importance to us.

very

It has just been said that "Eodpas B follows closely. This is not the case with "Eodpas a (our I Esdras) which consists of some parts of Chron., Ezr., and Neh., arranged in a different order, and with some additional matter, thus:

I Esdras i.

ii. 1-15

ii. 16-30

iii. 1-v. 6

v. 7-73

= II Chron. xxxv. 1−xxxvi. 21. = Ezra i.

=

=

Ezra iv. 7-24.

= additional matter: the story

of the Three Guardsmen.

= Ezra ii. 1-iv. 5.

vi. 1-ix. 36 Ezra v.-x.

ix. 37-55

=

-Neh. vii. 73-viii. 13a.

It will be noticed that a sentence, the words "and they were gathered together” (καὶ ἐπισυνήχθησαν) being the opening words of a sentence in Neh. viii. 13. The first words of I Esdras also "And Josiah held the passover" do not sound like the beginning of a book, and it is therefore thought that I Esdras is a fragment of a book which had been torn off at both ends.

I Esdras ends in the middle of

What is the relation of I Esdras to ? It used to

be thought that some scribe had taken certain parts of and rearranged them, together with some additional matter, and called it I Esdras. But we find that in some cases I Esdras is right and intelligible when is wrong and unintelligible; and in one case I Esdras has preserved eighteen verses which have dropped out of . Further, the story of the Three Guardsmen, I Esdr. iii. 1-v. 6, shows by its idioms that it was not written originally in Greek, but is a translation from Aramaic, so that this interpolation was made when the book was in Hebrew or Aramaic. These facts suggest that I Esdras is a Greek translation from a Hebrew and Aramaic book which differed in important particulars from the Hebrew and Aramaic book which we know as . That is, the Hebrew-Aramaic book existed at one time in two recensions or editions which differed considerably from one another, the one being, and the other being the text presupposed by I Esdras.

The methods of textual criticism must now be applied to these two texts, in the endeavour to suggest the original order of the text as written by the Chronicler. The test whether we have guessed aright will be whether we can suggest plausible reasons for the changes that took place in producing these two very different recensions.

Both Ezra-Nehemiah and I Esdras as they stand confuse the historical order of events. The original text which we are trying to get at should differ from both our extant recensions in being in such an order that we can at least say that it was possible for an intelligent chronicler to write it so. For instance, it can be