Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther

Edwin Yamauchi, Elaine A. Phillips, Tremper Longman III, David E. Garland

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780310531821
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

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Text and Exposition

Ezra

I. THE FIRST RETURN FROM EXILE AND THE REBUILDING OF THE TEMPLE (1:1–6:22)

A. The First Return of the Exiles (1:1–11)

1. The Edict of Cyrus (1:1–4)

OVERVIEW

It had been nearly seventy years since the first deportation of the Jews by the Babylonians to Mesopotamia. Though the initial years must have been difficult, the second and third generation of Jews born in the exile had adjusted to their surroundings. Though some had become so comfortable that they refused to return to Judah when given the opportunity, still others, sustained by the examples and teachings of leaders such as Daniel and Ezekiel, retained their faith in the Lord’s promises and their allegiance to their homeland.

1In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing:

2“This is what Cyrus king of Persia says:

“‘The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. 3Anyone of his people among you—may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the Lord, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem. 4And the people of any place where survivors may now be living are to provide him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, and with freewill offerings for the temple of God in Jerusalem.’”

COMMENTARY

1 Ezra 1:1–3a is virtually identical with the last verses of Chronicles (2Ch 36:22–23). (For the implications of this correspondence, see Introduction: Literary Form and Authorship.)

“In the first year” means the first regnal year of Cyrus, beginning in Nisan 538, after his capture of Babylon in October 539 (cf. Introduction: Chronology). Cuneiform texts record the Persian king’s benefactions to Mesopotamian sanctuaries in the months following the capture of Babylon.

Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire and the greatest Achaemenid king, reigned over the Persians from 559 till 530 BC. He established Persian dominance over the Medes in 550, conquered Lydia and Anatolia in 547–46, and captured Babylon in 539.

Isaiah 44:28 and 45:1 speak of Cyrus as the Lord’s “shepherd” and his “anointed”; other passages refer to him implicitly (Isa 41:2, 25; 45:18; cf. Jer 51:11). Daniel (Da 1:21; 6:28; 10:1) was in Babylon when Cyrus captured it.

“The word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah” was the prophet’s prediction (Jer 25:1–12; 29:10) of a seventy-year Babylonian captivity. The first deportations began in 605 BC, in the third year of Jehoiakim, according to Daniel 1:1. The seventieth year would be 536. We know that the Persian kings paid close heed to prophecies: Cambyses to Egyptian oracles, Darius and Xerxes to Greek oracles (Herodotus 8.133; 9.42, 151).

“Proclamation” (qôl) was an oral proclamation in the native language in contrast to the copy of the decree in 6:3–5, which was an Aramaic memorandum for the archives. In the case of the famous Behistun Inscription, Darius had copies sent throughout the empire in other languages, as we have copies in Akkadian from Babylon and on a papyrus in Aramaic from Elephantine, Egypt.

2 “The God of heaven” (ʾ^elōhê haššāmāyim; cf. Aram. ʾ^elāh š^emayyā ʾ) is a phrase that occurs primarily in the postexilic books. Seventeen of the twenty-two occurrences are in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel. It appears also in apocryphal works (Tob 10:11–12; Jdt 5:8; 6:19; 11:17; cf. D. K. Andrews, “Yahweh the God of Heavens,” in The Seed of Wisdom [ed. W. S. McCullough; Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964], 45ff.).

The holy city and the house of God are both prominent subjects in Ezra-Nehemiah. “Jerusalem” occurs eighty-six times, and the phrases “temple,” “house of the Lord,” and “house of God” appear fifty-three times. The phrase “a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah” is literally, “a house for him in Jerusalem that is in Judah.” The formulation “Jerusalem that is in Judah” is characteristic of Persian bureaucratic style. The Elephantine papyri (Cowley, 30:6) have “the temple of Yaw [i.e., Yahweh], the god, which is in the fortress of Yeb.”

Cyrus instituted the enlightened policy of placating the gods of his subject peoples rather than carrying off their cult statues as the Assyrians, Elamites, Hittites, and Babylonians had done before. His generosity to the Jews was also paralleled by his benevolence to the Babylonians. Ultimately, however, it was the Lord who had “moved” his heart (v.1).

3 The religious orientation of the Achaemenid kings—Cyrus and his successors—is a controversial issue. Though we can be certain from his Behistun Inscription that Darius I was a follower of Zoroaster’s god, Ahura Mazda, we cannot be certain of the religion of his predecessors, Cyrus and Cambyses. Mary Boyce and other scholars have claimed that Zoroastrianism influenced Cyrus (see Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible, ch. 12).

4 “Survivors” (kol-hanniš ʾār, “everyone who remains over”) refers to those left over of the capture and deportation (cf. Ne 1:2). Regarding “may now be living,” the Hebrew word for “living” (gār) is cognate to the word for “resident alien” (gēr). The deportees continued to be regarded as aliens, as were the Susians and Elamites who were “settled” in Samaria years after their deportation (4:10, 17).

“The people of any place” could mean non-Israelite neighbors as in the case of the exodus (Ex 3:21–22; 12:35–36). More probably it designates the many Jews, especially of the second and the third generation, who did not wish to leave the land of their birth.

“Freewill offerings” (n^edābâ, lit., “freewill offering”) were voluntary giving (vv.4, 6; 2:68–69; 3:5; 7:13–16; 8:28) and voluntary service (v.5; 7:13), the keys to the restoration of God’s temple and its service. A cognate form of n^edābâ was used of those who volunteered to join the community at Qumran (1QS 1, 6, et al.).

NOTES

1 The name of Cyrus in Hebrew is

(kôreš; cf. Old Pers. kūruš, Akkad. kurašu, Gk. kyros). The title “king of Persia” in extant Old Persian texts appears first in the Behistun Inscription but is also found in the Nabonidus Chronicle. Because the Hebrew name for Cyrus is Koresh, Vernon Howell, the leader of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, changed his name to “David Koresh.” See J. D. Tabor and E. V. Gallagher, Why Waco? (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 40.

The Assyrian king Esarhaddon declared in an inscription that the god Marduk reduced an original seventy-year period of depopulation for the city of Babylon and ordered its rebuilding in the eleventh year (cf. R. Borger, Die Inschriften Asarhaddons Königs von Assyrien [Graz: Archiv für Orientforschung, 1956], 15). For a discussion of the seventy-year period, see J. Applegate, “Jeremiah and the Seventy Years in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Book of Jeremiah and Its Reception (ed. A. H. W. Curtis and T. Römer; Leuven: Leuven Univ. Press, 1997), 91–110.

There was also a return of Aramean exiles from the Syrian town of Neirab about 520 BC. See S. Timm, “Die Bedeutung der spätbabylonischen Texte aus Nērab für die Rückkehr der Judäer aus dem Exil,” in Meilenstein: Festgabe für Herbert Donner (ed. M. Weippert and S. Timm; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995), 276–88.

Earlier scepticism about the Cyrus decree was effectively countered by the citation of parallels from the decrees of Persian kings, most notably the Cyrus Cylinder (see E. J. Bickerman, “The Edict of Cyrus 1,” JBL 65 [1946]: 249–75) and by R. de Vaux (“The Decrees of Cyrus,” 63–96). It may also be argued from the analogy of the trilingual Xanthos Inscription that Jews could have aided the chancellery in adapting the king’s proclamation for the intended audience as the Lycians did. See Briant, 704–9, 995–96.

4 M. D. Knowles, “Pilgrimage Imagery in the Returns in Ezra,” JBL 123 (2004): 57–74, sees in Ezra 1 not an “exodus” but a “pilgrimage” motif.

2. The Return under Sheshbazzar (1:5–11)

5Then the family heads of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and Levites—everyone whose heart God had moved—prepared to go up and build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. 6All their neighbors ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Ezra and Nehemiah
• Introduction
• I. THE FIRST RETURN FROM EXILE AND THE REBUILDING OF THE TEMPLE (1:1–6:22)
• II. EZRA’S RETURN AND REFORMS (7:1–10:44)
• I. NEHEMIAH’S FIRST ADMINISTRATION (1:1–12:47)
• II. NEHEMIAH’S SECOND ADMINISTRATION (13:1–31)
• Esther
• Introduction
• I. HONOR AND SHAME: INSIDE, OUTSIDE, AND ON THE BOUNDARIES (1:1–2:23)
• II. THE CONFLICTS—“FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS” (3:1–4:17)
• III. REQUESTS, REVELATIONS, AND REVERSALS (5:1–7:8)
• IV. EFFECTING JUSTICE (7:9–9:17)
• V. ESTABLISHING THE FESTIVAL (9:18–9:32)
• VI. HONOR IN THE REALM OF AHASUERUS (10:1–3)