The Message of Ezra & Haggai

Building For God

Robert Fyall

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781789743999
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783596270
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

The Book of Ezra recounts the return of the Judeans to Israel after the Babylonian exile, and the rebuilding of the Temple. The Book of Haggai speaks about the rebuilding, where work ceased because of external opposition and internal failure of nerve. In this valuable study, Robert Fyall guides us through The Message of Ezra and Haggai, exploring how it is enhanced by reading these two books together rather than separately. With clear, compelling and accessible scholarship, he shows the continuing relevance of how Ezra and Haggai emphasise building for God, as well as the need for obedience to his Word and openness to his Spirt. Ezra is a vital and stimulating book in its revelation of God's purposes, and together with Haggai's brief prophecy offers encouragement to God's people in dispiriting times - encouragement that still speaks to the Christian life today.
A revised volume in the trusted Bible Speaks Today series of commentaries, The Message of Ezra and Haggai offers a thoughtful exposition of these two books, unpacking their meaning for both the original audience and for Christians in the twenty-first century. Used by Bible students and teachers around the world, the Bible Speaks Today commentaries are ideal for students and preachers who want to deepen their understanding of Scripture as it was first written as well how it can be applied to modern life. This beautifully redesigned edition has been sensitively updated to include modern references and use the NIV Bible text.The Message of Ezra and Haggai is perfect for anyone looking for commentaries on Ezra and Haggai that will help delve more deeply into the riches of these two books of the Old Testament.

Part 1

The message of Ezra

Introduction

Henry Ford famously said that ‘History is more or less bunk.’1 Many readers might be tempted to agree with him on first reading the book of Ezra. Not only does the history seem rather remote, an account of ‘old, unhappy, far-off things’,2 but the events lack the strong narrative drive of, say, 1 and 2 Samuel, and the forbidding lists of names do not help. Yet, as we shall see in the exposition proper, this is a superficial view and, if we make the initial effort, a rewarding and too often neglected part of biblical territory will show us startling vistas and reveal Ezra as a vital and stimulating book in its revelation of God’s purposes and God’s people. But we must first turn to the historical background.

1. When?

Ezra and Haggai must be understood against the background of the exile and the return. Both Kings and Chronicles end with God’s people taken off to exile in Babylon. The northern kingdom fell to Assyria in 722 bc and the ten tribes were deported. However, Zion, ‘the city of the Great King’ (Ps. 48:2), remained; its rescue by the Lord from Sennacherib in 701 bc probably created a false sense of security in some, and as long as Jerusalem and Judah remained there was hope. This abruptly came to an end in 587 bc when the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city’s defences, burned the temple and the royal palace, broke up and carried away the temple furnishings and devastated the surrounding countryside (2 Kgs 25:9–17; Jer. 32:43). The mood is well expressed in Lamentations 1, where the city is a widow; a mourner and an object of mockery (Lam. 1:1, 2, 7). To use the title of one of C. S. Lewis’s works, a ‘pilgrim’s regress’ had happened: the people were back in the place which Abraham had left, and the land flowing with milk and honey given to them at the exodus was a pitiful, depopulated and desolate wasteland.

Hope was indeed there for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, and had been long before it happened. Isaiah had warned against triumphalism by prophesying the exile (Isa. 39:5–7), but then from chapter 40 he prophesies the return which was going to happen by the agency of the Persian king Cyrus (Isa. 45:1), which would be a new exodus (Isa. 51:9–11). Ezekiel, in his great vision of the valley of dry bones, had spoken of how one day there would again be one nation ruled over by one king, ‘my servant David’ (Ezek. 37:15–24). Daniel had kept his windows open towards Jerusalem and pointed to the end of history with the triumph of the Son of Man (Dan. 6:10; 7).

The chronology of the return is as follows. The edict of Cyrus was issued in 538 bc and the first wave of exiles returned and began the slow process of rebuilding the temple, completing this in 516 bc, as described in Ezra 1 – 6. Then in 458, Ezra himself returned, sent by Artaxerxes (464–424 bc); this takes us from chapter 7 to the end of the book. However, that straightforward account has been challenged by many writers who argue for Nehemiah being followed by Ezra, rather than the traditional order. We shall return to that argument at the end of this section but in the meantime we need to reflect a bit more on the significance of the return from exile.

The atmosphere of the post-exile books seems bleak; the sky is grey and there is little sense of springtime and the freshness of new opportunities. But a little reflection shows the astounding nature of the return. To the onlooker the change from Babylon to Persia would appear to be simply the changing of one tyrant for another. No observer could have anticipated the policy of Cyrus of allowing captive peoples to return to their homeland. But while no-one could have anticipated this, the prophetic Scriptures, including the Isaiah passages already referred to, had anticipated just such a set of circumstances.

Yet the problem was that the glowing prophecies seemed to be unfulfilled. The desert was not blossoming like a rose, the nations were not coming to Zion, the throne of David was not re-established. It was a ‘day of small things’ (Zech. 4:10). It was, therefore, a day when faithful worship needed to be restored, faithful work undertaken and faithful living re-established for the day that would surely come when the sun of righteousness would rise with healing in his wings (Mal. 4:2).

The return was inevitably low-key. We need only compare the possible three million involved in the exodus from Egypt3 with the less than one hundred thousand who returned in the first stage. Moreover, the Abrahamic dimensions of the area between the Nile and the Euphrates had shrunk to a small province surrounding Jerusalem. To the north were the hostile Samaritans and to the south the inhospitable Negev and desert of Sinai.

The conditions in the land were far from appealing. The economy was basically agrarian and the weather could create havoc (see Hag. 1:5–11). Moreover, the lack of infrastructure and leadership during the years of exile would have left a desolate land with deserted towns and villages. Morale was low and faith and vision hard to come by. Scripture tells us little of life in the depopulated land during the exile. Most of those deported were from the leading classes and the cities. Jeremiah 41:5 speaks of grain offerings and incense being brought to the house of the Lord during the exile, suggesting that in the desolate temple area some kind of limited worship carried on. The emphasis in Ezra is overwhelmingly on those who returned, their rebuilding of the temple and the renewed emphasis on the Torah.

A further significant piece of background (although not directly mentioned in Ezra and Haggai) is the importance of the community who remained in the land of exile, which is the subject of the book of Esther. The Persian king Xerxes 1 (486–465 bc), or, in Aramaic, Ahasuerus, is the king who dominates that book, although he is mentioned only in passing in Ezra 4:6. He is memorable for his unsuccessful campaign against Greece (perhaps the background to the feast in Esth. 1) in 480 and his defeats at Thermopylae and Salamis.

The chronology would look as shown in the table below if we follow the conventional dating. I say ‘conventional’ dating because, as mentioned above, a strong body of opinion wants to reverse the traditional order of Ezra and Nehemiah and asserts that it was in fact Nehemiah who came first. Briefly, the advocates of this view draw attention to what they see as contradictions such as Nehemiah’s apparent lack of knowledge of Ezra’s proceedings over divorce; a thirteen-year gap between Ezra’s arrival and his reported reading of the law; and the apparent absence of much cooperation between the two reformers. Much of the argument depends on unproved and indeed unproveable hypotheses, and this volume (like its companion BST The Message of Nehemiah) takes the view which flows naturally from the biblical material that Ezra did indeed arrive in Jerusalem in 458 bc and was followed by Nehemiah some thirteen years later. The reader interested in a fuller discussion is particularly referred to Kidner’s lucid and magisterial treatment.4

2. What kind of book?

The overarching genre of Ezra is narrative. As such it fits into the grand narrative of the Bible from creation to new creation, and, along with Nehemiah and 1 and 2 Chronicles, more particularly into that recounting of Israel’s history which especially from the post-exile perspective shows us that God has not given up on his people or altered his purposes. As we shall see at various points in the exposition, the story of these dark days is linked with the story of the exodus and looks forward to the Messiah.5 To explore this further we shall look at three matters: sources, structure and style.

a. Sources

Plainly a number of materials have been used in the composition of Ezra (and Nehemiah) and these are of essentially two kinds: personal reminiscences and archives. These personal reminiscences, often called the ‘Ezra memoirs’, appear mainly in chapters 7–10 and, some would add, Nehemiah 8. They add an unusual vividness to the book, especially since some of them are in the first person. We have an unusually clear insight into Ezra’s character and motivation. Such phrases as ‘the hand of our God was on us’ (8:31) and Ezra’s own account of his dismay at hearing of the intermarriages (9:3–5) bring us close to the heart of the man. Further details such as ‘greatly distressed by the occasion and because of the rain’ (10:9) add to the eyewitness flavour of the account. There is a sense of drama and involvement in the writing.

The other material plainly comes from archives. The decree of Cyrus (1:2–4); the various letters to and from the Persian kings in chapters 4–7; the inventory of temple vessels in 1:9–11; and the extended lists of names in 2:1–66 and 10:18–44 form the historical and factual context. By that I do not mean that the ‘memoirs’ are fiction but rather we are being shown both the public and the private aspects of the return from exile. In the exposition the theological significance of these archival passages is discussed.

It cannot be conclusively proved that Ezra was the author of the whole book, although he speaks in the first person in chapters 7–10. Given the careful structure and unity of the book, the author was obviously someone of considerable skill and care. The picture given of Ezra in 7:1–6 suggests the kind of man who could easily have been responsible for the book as we have it. There is, therefore, no compelling reason to doubt the traditional attribution of the book to Ezra himself.

b. Structure

The book shows evidence of careful planning and of the highlighting of important themes. Some have drawn attention to the careful structure of Ezra and Nehemiah taken together.6 The outline of the structure of Ezra shown in the table below is the work of Dr Euan Dodds, one of my ­colleagues at St George’s Tron, Glasgow.7

A number of points emerge from this structure. Plainly the two parts of the book have been constructed to bring out that these two sets of events some eighty years apart are closely parallel, with similar dis­couragements, opportunities, temptations and remedies. One is the work of pioneers, the other of a consolidator; both similarities and differences are noted in the body of the exposition.

In both parts (2:1–70 and 8:1–14) the lists of individual...

Table of contents

• GENERAL PREFACE
• Author’s preface
• Chief abbreviations
• Select bibliography
• Part 1
• Introduction
• Ezra 1:1–11
• Ezra 2:1–70
• Ezra 3:1–6
• Ezra 3:7–13
• Ezra 4:1–24
• Ezra 5:1–17
• Ezra 6:1–22
• Ezra 7:1–10
• Ezra 7:11–28
• Ezra 8:1–36
• Ezra 9:1–15
• Ezra 10:1–44
• Part 2
• Introduction
• Haggai 1:1–2
• Haggai 1:3–11
• Haggai 1:12–15
• Haggai 2:1–9
• Haggai 2:10–19
• Haggai 2:20–23
• Notes
• The Bible Speaks Today: Old Testament series
• The Bible Speaks Today: New Testament series
• The Bible Speaks Today: Bible Themes series
• NIV Bible Speaks Today