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103-648: Iain William Provan (born 6 May 1957) is a British Old Testament scholar, now living in Canada. He was Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College in Vancouver from 1997 until his retirement on December 31, 2022. Provan holds degrees from the University of Glasgow , London Bible College (now London School of Theology), and the University of Cambridge . His PhD thesis at Cambridge

206-754: A Festschrift for his Cambridge PhD supervisor, Hugh G. M. Williamson . His other books include Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World That Never Was (2013), Discovering Genesis: Content, Interpretation, Reception (2015), The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (2017), Seeking What is Right: The Old Testament and the Good Life (2020), and Cuckoos in our Nest: Truth and Lies about Being Human (2023). The 2003 co-authored volume A Biblical History of Israel (with V. Philips Long and Tremper Longman III)

309-637: A 'double' book. Jerome , writing in the early 5th century, noted that this duplication had since been adopted by Greek and Latin Christians. Jerome himself rejected the duplication in his Vulgate translation of the Bible into Latin from the Hebrew; and consequently all early Vulgate manuscripts present Ezra–Nehemiah as a single book, as too does the 8th century commentary of Bede , and in the 9th century bibles of Alcuin and Theodulf of Orleans . However, from

412-718: A Lilly Foundation Theological Research Grant. He was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 1993, and has been a Life Member of the college since that time. He is a member of the Society for Old Testament Study, the Society of Biblical Literature, the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, and the Humboldt Association of Canada. He is also a minister of the Church of Scotland. He is married with four adult children. His hobbies include fly-fishing. For

515-647: A different order for the books in Nevi'im and Ketuvim . This order is also cited in Mishneh Torah Hilchot Sefer Torah 7:15. The order of the books of the Torah is universal through all denominations of Judaism and Christianity. The disputed books, included in most canons but not in others, are often called the Biblical apocrypha , a term that is sometimes used specifically to describe

618-570: A different stance on the expulsion of the Gentiles in Ezra–Nehemiah. According to Heger, Ezra's motive for expelling Gentile women and their offspring was because at the time leaders believed that the identity of the Israelites did not depend of the ethnicity of their mothers, but depended on the seed of their fathers. The motive behind prohibiting intermarriage with all Gentile women was due to

721-866: A few historic Protestant versions; the German Luther Bible included such books, as did the English 1611 King James Version. Empty table cells indicate that a book is absent from that canon. Several of the books in the Eastern Orthodox canon are also found in the appendix to the Latin Vulgate , formerly the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. Some of the stories of the Pentateuch may derive from older sources. Scholars such as Andrew R. George point out

824-523: A full list of all book chapters and journal articles, see iainprovan.ca . Old Testament The Old Testament consists of many distinct books by various authors produced over a period of centuries. Christians traditionally divide the Old Testament into four sections: the first five books or Pentateuch (which corresponds to the Jewish Torah ); the history books telling the history of

927-404: A professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh , identifies the Old Testament as "a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing." He states that it is not a magical book, nor was it literally written by God and passed to mankind. By about the 5th century BC, Jews saw the five books of

1030-588: A purified Jewish community. It is the only part of the Bible that narrates the Persian period of biblical history. In the early 6th century Judah rebelled against Babylon and was destroyed (586 BCE). The royal court and the priests, prophets and scribes were taken into captivity in Babylon. There the exiles blamed their fate on disobedience to God and looked forward to a future when a penitent and purified people would be allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild

1133-608: A school known as biblical minimalism rejected the historical value of the Hebrew Bible for the study of ancient Israel during the Iron Age, "but this extreme approach was rejected by mainstream scholarship." The first five books— Genesis , Exodus , Leviticus , book of Numbers and Deuteronomy —reached their present form in the Persian period (538–332 BC) , and their authors were the elite of exilic returnees who controlled

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1236-531: A set period and be followed by the other-worldly age or World to Come . Some thought the Messiah was already present, but unrecognised due to Israel's sins; some thought that the Messiah would be announced by a forerunner, probably Elijah (as promised by the prophet Malachi , whose book now ends the Old Testament and precedes Mark 's account of John the Baptist ). However, no view of the Messiah as based on

1339-410: A study by Lester Grabbe indicates that while genuine Persian documents may underlie a number of them, they have been reworked to fit the purposes of later writers. The narrative is highly schematic, each stage of the restoration following the same pattern: God "stirs up" the Persian king, the king commissions a Jewish leader to undertake a task, the leader overcomes opposition and succeeds, and success

1442-467: A variety of different reasons. In either case, these two viewpoints on intermarriage with exogamous groups have differences, but ultimately, each is trying to promote and protect the ethnicity of their own group. Southwood goes on to discuss that both Ezra and Nehemiah display a "consciousness of ethnicity', though Southwood focuses primarily on Nehemiah's case, and the importance of the relationship between ethnicity and language. In Nehemiah specifically,

1545-567: Is Esdras, and there are two versions of the Greek Ezra–Nehemiah, Esdras alpha (Ἔσδρας Αʹ) and Esdras beta (Ἔσδρας Βʹ). Esdras beta, which is still used in churches of the Greek-speaking and other Orthodox Christian traditions, is close to the standard Hebrew version, but Esdras alpha (or 1 Esdras ) is very different: it reproduces only the material that pertains to Ezra, and ignores Nehemiah; while including additional material in

1648-453: Is Zerubbabel) "the prince of Judah", to rebuild the Temple; 40,000 exiles return to Jerusalem led by Zerubbabel and Joshua the high priest. There they overcome the opposition of their enemies to rebuild the altar and lay the foundations of the Temple. The Samaritans , who are their enemies, force work to be suspended, but in the reign of Darius the decree of Cyrus is rediscovered, the Temple

1751-580: Is a transgression, and Nehemiah emphasizes that marriage to non-Jews is a sin. Even though this book says specific groups, the book of Ezra prohibits all exogamy. According to Christine Hayes, Ezra is concerned about the holy seed being profaned since he believes God has chosen his people as being holy. Since anyone that is not inside of the chosen group is considered not holy, it would be sinful to marry and reproduce with them, according to Ezra. Scholars also believe that there were further political reasons behind Nehemiah's protest against intermarriage, and Ezra had

1854-642: Is based on the belief that the historical Jesus is also the Christ , as in the Confession of Peter . This belief is in turn based on Jewish understandings of the meaning of the Hebrew term Messiah , which, like the Greek "Christ", means "anointed". In the Hebrew Scriptures, it describes a king anointed with oil on his accession to the throne: he becomes "The L ORD 's anointed" or Yahweh's Anointed. By

1957-606: Is commonly misconceived that the expulsion of the Gentile wives was a result of Judaean exceptionalism and nationalism. Hayes points out that the theory is not correct arguing that the root cause is largely a fundamental and core belief found within the religious laws of the Judaeans. Ezra, Hayes explains, imagined Israel as divinely ordained to remain pure and holy, set apart and without the influence of other nations in Canaan, just as

2060-431: Is completed, and the people celebrate the feast of Passover . God moves king Artaxerxes to commission Ezra the priest and scribe to return to Jerusalem and teach the laws of God to any who do not know them. Ezra leads a large body of exiles back to the holy city, where he discovers that Jewish men have been marrying non-Jewish women. He tears his garments in despair and confesses the sins of Israel before God, then braves

2163-530: Is known, though there is plenty of speculation. For example, it is speculated that this may have provided motivation for canon lists and that Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are examples of these Bibles. Together with the Peshitta and Codex Alexandrinus , these are the earliest extant Christian Bibles. There is no evidence among the canons of the First Council of Nicaea of any determination on

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2266-408: Is marked by a great assembly. Ezra–Nehemiah is made up of three stories: (1) the account of the initial return and rebuilding of the Temple (Ezra 1–6); (2) the story of Ezra's mission (Ezra 7–10 and Nehemiah 8); (3) and the story of Nehemiah, interrupted by a collection of miscellaneous lists and part of the story of Ezra. God moves the heart of Cyrus to commission Sheshbazzar (whose other name

2369-610: Is neither read nor held among the Hebrews, but does not explicitly call it apocryphal or "not in the canon". The Synod of Hippo (in 393), followed by the Council of Carthage (397) and the Council of Carthage (419) , may be the first council that explicitly accepted the first canon which includes the books that did not appear in the Hebrew Bible ; the councils were under significant influence of Augustine of Hippo , who regarded

2472-573: Is perhaps the most debated issue regarding the book. Ezra 7:8 records that Ezra arrived in Jerusalem in the seventh year of king Artaxerxes, while Nehemiah 2#Verses 1–8:1–9 has Nehemiah arriving in Artaxerxes' twentieth year. If this was Artaxerxes I (465–424 BCE), then Ezra arrived in 458 and Nehemiah in 445 BCE. Nehemiah 8 – 9 , in which the two (possibly by editorial error) appear together, supports this scenario. In 1890, however, it

2575-588: Is probably later, possibly even as late as 336–331 BCE (the reign of Darius III , the last Persian king); it probably circulated as an independent document before being combined with Ezra. There are seven Persian documents embedded in Ezra–Nehemiah, six in Ezra and one in Nehemiah. All but one are in Aramaic language , the administrative language of the Persian empire. Many scholars accept these as genuine, but

2678-516: Is that of Bede in the early 8th century. The fact that Ezra–Nehemiah was translated into Greek by the mid-2nd century BCE suggests that this was the time by which it had come to be regarded as scripture. It was treated as a single book in the Hebrew, Greek and Old Latin manuscripts. The duplication of translations of Ezra was rejected by Jerome in his Latin Vulgate translation, who did not translate 'Esdras alpha'. In later medieval manuscripts of

2781-423: Is to worship , or the one "true God", that only Yahweh (or YHWH ) is Almighty. The Old Testament stresses the special relationship between God and his chosen people , Israel, but includes instructions for proselytes as well. This relationship is expressed in the biblical covenant (contract) between the two, received by Moses . The law codes in books such as Exodus and especially Deuteronomy are

2884-605: The Septuagint (Latin for 'Seventy') from the supposed number of translators involved (hence its abbreviation " LXX "). This Septuagint remains the basis of the Old Testament in the Eastern Orthodox Church . It varies in many places from the Masoretic Text and includes numerous books no longer considered canonical in some traditions: 1 Esdras , Judith , Tobit , the books of Maccabees ,

2987-482: The Babylonian exile ) upon his people. The theme is played out, with many variations, in books as different as the histories of Kings and Chronicles, the prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah , and in the wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiastes. The process by which scriptures became canons and Bibles was a long one, and its complexities account for the many different Old Testaments which exist today. Timothy H. Lim,

3090-576: The Book of Wisdom , Sirach , and Baruch . Early modern biblical criticism typically explained these variations as intentional or ignorant corruptions by the Alexandrian scholars, but most recent scholarship holds it is simply based on early source texts differing from those later used by the Masoretes in their work. The Septuagint was originally used by Hellenized Jews whose knowledge of Greek

3193-643: The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches comprise up to 49 books; the Catholic canon comprises 46 books; and the most common of the Protestant canons comprises 39 books. There are 39 books common to essentially all Christian canons. They correspond to the 24 books of the Tanakh , with some differences of order, and there are some differences in text. The greater count of books reflects

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3296-513: The Hellenistic time (332–198 BC), though containing much older material as well; Job was completed by the 6th century BC; Ecclesiastes by the 3rd century BC. Throughout the Old Testament, God is consistently depicted as the one who created the world. Although the God of the Old Testament is not consistently presented as the only god who exists , he is always depicted as the only God whom Israel

3399-539: The Ketuvim section, originally with the Hebrew title of Ezra (Hebrew: עזרא , 'Ezrā ), called Esdras B (Ἔσδρας Βʹ) in the Septuagint . The book covers the period from the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE to the second half of the 5th century BCE, and tells of the successive missions to Jerusalem of Zerubbabel , Ezra , and Nehemiah , and their efforts to restore the worship of the God of Israel and to create

3502-750: The Pentateuch (Torah) , the historical books , the "wisdom" books and the prophets. The table below uses the spellings and names present in modern editions of the Christian Bible, such as the Catholic New American Bible Revised Edition and the Protestant Revised Standard Version and English Standard Version . The spelling and names in both the 1609–F10 Douay Old Testament (and in the 1582 Rheims New Testament ) and

3605-682: The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition ) use the same "standardized" (King James Version) spellings and names as Protestant Bibles (e.g. 1 Chronicles as opposed to the Douaic 1 Paralipomenon, 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings instead of 1–4 Kings) in those books which are universally considered canonical: the protocanonicals . The Talmud (the Jewish commentary on the scriptures) in Bava Batra 14b gives

3708-578: The Temple at that time. The books of Joshua , Judges , Samuel and Kings follow, forming a history of Israel from the Conquest of Canaan to the Siege of Jerusalem c.  587 BC . There is a broad consensus among scholars that these originated as a single work (the so-called " Deuteronomistic History ") during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BC. The two Books of Chronicles cover much

3811-760: The Torah (the Old Testament Pentateuch) as having authoritative status; by the 2nd century BC, the Prophets had a similar status, although without quite the same level of respect as the Torah; beyond that, the Jewish scriptures were fluid, with different groups seeing authority in different books. Hebrew texts began to be translated into Greek in Alexandria in about 280 BC and continued until about 130 BC. These early Greek translations – supposedly commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus – were called

3914-449: The "Holy seed", rather than on physical difference such as skin and hair color, which in any case do not really differ between these two populations. Thus the term "ethnicity" may be best in relation to the people in general, but in relation to intermarriage Southwood feels that "nationalism" and "ethnicity" both do justice. She claims that the term "race" is not needed and is used in a negative manner. Like Southwood, Hayes also talks about

4017-598: The "gentiles" in Ezra-Nehemiah were actually indigenous Judeans who "emulated" the Canaanites. The foreign women, in particular, symbolized the "foreignness" of female impurity, which was "powerful enough to impart ritual havoc". Venter cites verses such as Ezra 9:1 and notes that only the Ammonites, Moabites and Egyptians existed as separate ethnicities during the times of Ezra-Nehemiah. Nehemiah 13:23–27 adds

4120-461: The "holy seed." According to Hayes, Ezra and Nehemiah appear to promote the ban of intermarriage with all Gentiles. According to Hayes, Ezra is not a racial ideology that is concerned with purity of blood, but rather a religious notion of Israel as a "holy seed". With intermarriage the holy seed of Israel becomes mixed with the profane seed. In other words, intermarriage violates the holy seed of Abraham and Israel. Pieter M. Venter argues that most of

4223-651: The 1749 revision by Bishop Challoner (the edition currently in print used by many Catholics, and the source of traditional Catholic spellings in English) and in the Septuagint differ from those spellings and names used in modern editions which are derived from the Hebrew Masoretic Text . For the Orthodox canon, Septuagint titles are provided in parentheses when these differ from those editions. For

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4326-471: The 19th century and for much of the 20th was that Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah made up a single "Chronicler's History" by an anonymous " Chronicler ". This consensus was challenged in the late 1960s in an important article by Sara Japhet , and today three positions dominate discussion: first, an affirmation that a Chronicler's History existed and included all or part of Ezra–Nehemiah; second, a denial that Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah were ever combined; and third,

4429-500: The 5,000 or so who accompanied Ezra. Nevertheless, there are counter-arguments to each of these and other arguments, and the 398 date has not replaced the traditional one. A proposal that the reference to the "seventh year" of Artaxerxes ( Ezra 7:7 – 8 ) should be read as "thirty-seventh year", putting Ezra's return in 428 BCE, has not won support. Hayes, in her article on impurity in Ancient Jewish society, states that it

4532-540: The 9th century onwards, Latin bibles are found that for the first time separate the Ezra and Nehemiah sections of Ezra–Nehemiah as two distinct books; and this became standard in the Paris Bibles of the 13th century. It was not until 1516/17, in the first printed Rabbinic Bible of Daniel Bomberg that the separation was introduced generally in Hebrew Bibles. The order of the two figures, Ezra and Nehemiah,

4635-705: The Catholic canon, the Douaic titles are provided in parentheses when these differ from those editions. Likewise, the King James Version references some of these books by the traditional spelling when referring to them in the New Testament, such as "Esaias" (for Isaiah ). In the spirit of ecumenism , more recent Catholic translations (e.g. the New American Bible , Jerusalem Bible , and ecumenical translations used by Catholics, such as

4738-470: The Deuteronomic text in their narratives, and believe intermarriage to be a type of transgression. There are other similar nuances that lead some scholars to believe that they are from a similar source. However, there are also differences in the two sources that should not be forgotten. Firstly, the intermarriage debate is between different classes of people, each of which is trying to reserve their sense of ethnicity. Ezra argues that marriage with non-exilic Jews

4841-497: The Hebrew Bible, and are also Jewish in origin. Some are also contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls . In general, Catholic and Orthodox churches include the deuterocanonical books in the Old Testament. Most Protestant Bibles do not include them in their canon, but some versions of Anglican and Lutheran Bibles place such books in a separate section called Apocrypha . The Old Testament contains 39 (Protestant), 46 (Catholic), or more (Orthodox and other) books, divided, very broadly, into

4944-488: The Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Hebrew Bible are the best known Old Testaments, there were others. At much the same time as the Septuagint was being produced, translations were being made into Aramaic, the language of Jews living in Palestine and the Near East and likely the language of Jesus : these are called the Aramaic Targums , from a word meaning "translation", and were used to help Jewish congregations understand their scriptures. For Aramaic Christians, there

5047-426: The Israelites, from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon ; the poetic and " Wisdom books " dealing, in various forms, with questions of good and evil in the world; and the books of the biblical prophets, warning of the consequences of turning away from God. The books that compose the Old Testament canon and their order and names differ between various branches of Christianity . The canons of

5150-405: The Old Testament predicted a Messiah who would suffer and die for the sins of all people. The story of Jesus' death, therefore, involved a profound shift in meaning from the Old Testament tradition. The name "Old Testament" reflects Christianity's understanding of itself as the fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecy of a New Covenant (which is similar to "testament" and often conflated) to replace

5253-400: The Old Testament. Of the remainder, the books of the various prophets— Isaiah , Jeremiah , Ezekiel , and the twelve " minor prophets "—were written between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, with the exceptions of Jonah and Daniel , which were written much later. The "wisdom" books— Job , Proverbs , Ecclesiastes , Psalms , Song of Songs —have various dates: Proverbs possibly was completed by

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5356-406: The Philistines from Ashdod. This implied that the other ethnicites were "symbolic". Despite this, there are verses such as Ezra 6:21 which indicate that these "gentile Judeans" abandoned their pagan background to join Ezra-Nehemiah's exclusive community. Ezra begins with Cyrus entrusting the Temple vessels to Sheshbazzar , "prince of Judah"; this apparently important figure then disappears from

5459-455: The Priestly division were commanded, by God, to practice marriage exclusivity. In reaction to contemporaries, such as Hayes and Klawans, who argue that Ezra–Nehemiah's purity ideology is a product of conservative "ritual" and "moral" purity, independently; Olyan claims that Ezra–Nehemiah's alien expulsion mandate was a result of a melding ideology taken from the two seemingly independent ideas of, "moral" and "ritual" purity and remains exclusive to

5562-451: The Septuagint ( 3 Ezra and 3 and 4 Maccabees are excluded); the Anglicans after the English Civil War adopted a compromise position, restoring the 39 Articles and keeping the extra books that were excluded by the Westminster Confession of Faith , both for private study and for reading in churches but not for establishing any doctrine, while Lutherans kept them for private study, gathered in an appendix as biblical apocrypha . While

5665-459: The Septuagint's, and Theodotion's. The so-called "fifth" and "sixth editions" were two other Greek translations supposedly miraculously discovered by students outside the towns of Jericho and Nicopolis : these were added to Origen's Octapla. In 331, Constantine I commissioned Eusebius to deliver fifty Bibles for the Church of Constantinople . Athanasius recorded Alexandrian scribes around 340 preparing Bibles for Constans . Little else

5768-437: The Temple. (These ideas are expressed in the prophets Jeremiah (although he was not exiled to Babylon), Isaiah, and, especially, Ezekiel). The same period saw the rapid rise of Persia, previously an unimportant kingdom in present-day southern Iran, and in 539 BCE Cyrus the Great , the Persian ruler, conquered Babylon. In the 19th century and for much of the 20th, it was believed that Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah came from

5871-416: The Vulgate, especially the Paris Bibles of the 13th century onwards, the single book of Ezra (corresponding to Ezra–Nehemiah) is increasingly split in two, so that the two-books tradition became fixed in the Western church. Jewish bibles continued to treat as a single work, with the title "Ezra," until the 15th century AD, but modern Hebrew bibles still print the Masoretic notes at the end of Nehemiah listing

5974-419: The Western Church, specifically as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate , while the Churches in the East continued, and continue, to use the Septuagint. Jerome, however, in the Vulgate's prologues , describes some portions of books in the Septuagint not found in the Hebrew Bible as being non- canonical (he called them apocrypha ); for Baruch , he mentions by name in his Prologue to Jeremiah and notes that it

6077-429: The archaeology of Jerusalem and Yehud during the Persian period. Finkelstein found that these passages better reflect the Hasmonean period —a time when Jerusalem and its surround region were much more populated and prosperous—suggesting that Hasmonean authors added them to earlier Persian-era texts. The Hebrew Ezra–Nehemiah was translated into Greek by the mid-2nd century BCE. The Greek and Roman rendering of Ezra's name

6180-407: The books in the Catholic and Orthodox canons that are absent from the Jewish Masoretic Text and most modern Protestant Bibles. Catholics, following the Canon of Trent (1546), describe these books as deuterocanonical, while Greek Orthodox Christians, following the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) , use the traditional name of anagignoskomena , meaning "that which is to be read." They are present in

6283-417: The canon as already closed. In the 16th century, the Protestant reformers sided with Jerome; yet although most Protestant Bibles now have only those books that appear in the Hebrew Bible, the order is that of the Greek Bible. Rome then officially adopted a canon, the Canon of Trent , which is seen as following Augustine's Carthaginian Councils or the Council of Rome , and includes most, but not all, of

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6386-417: The canon. However, Jerome (347–420), in his Prologue to Judith , claims that the Book of Judith was "found by the Nicene Council to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures". In Western Christianity or Christianity in the Western half of the Roman Empire , Latin had displaced Greek as the common language of the early Christians, and in 382 AD Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome ,

6489-607: The city and the friction between Temple and Torah were added to produce the final book of Nehemiah. Lester Grabbe (2003), based on various factors including the type of Aramaic used in the youngest sections and the ignorance of Ezra–Nehemiah as a single book displayed by other Hellenistic Jewish writers, suggests that the two texts were combined, with some final editing, in the Ptolemaic period, c. 300 – c. 200 BCE. Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein has argued extensively that large portions of Ezra–Nehemiah (as well as Chronicles) include content not supported by

6592-442: The danger of assimilation resulting from the influence of social interaction with the surrounding nations. The expulsion of the foreign women and their offspring was directed in order to preserve the purity of the Israelite "holy seed". Thus, Ezra did not introduce the idea of matrilineal identity. Katherine Southwood emphasizes that Ezra and Nehemiah are similar in their views of intermarriage in that both Ezra and Nehemiah allude to

6695-555: The enslavement of the Jews, and enter into a covenant to keep the law and separate themselves from all other peoples. Nehemiah takes measures to repopulate the city and returns to Susa after 12 years in Jerusalem. After some time in Susa he returns, only to find that the people have broken the covenant. He enforces the covenant and prays to God for his favour. The Mercer Bible Dictionary notes three notable theological themes in Ezra and Nehemiah: God's use of foreign rulers for Israel's sake; opposition to Israel from foreign neighbours; and

6798-421: The existing covenant between God and Israel ( Jeremiah 31:31 ). The emphasis, however, has shifted from Judaism's understanding of the covenant as a racially or tribally based pledge between God and the Jewish people, to one between God and any person of faith who is "in Christ". Ezra%E2%80%93Nehemiah Ezra–Nehemiah ( Hebrew : עזרא נחמיה , 'Ezrā-Nəḥemyā ) is a book in the Hebrew Bible found in

6901-485: The eyes of ancient Judaean Priests, could turn Yahweh worshippers towards foreign deities and hedonism. Ritual purity stresses the importance of keeping to sacred practices dictated by revered predecessors and the Holy Scriptures. Olyan believes that Ezra's expulsion of the gentiles could also be linked with the idea that outside lineage would initially pollute the priestly bloodline, acting as an apparatus to destroy "right" ritual practice. Another scholar, Paul Heger, takes

7004-448: The form of the 'Tale of the Three Guardsmen' (1 Esdras 3:4 to 4:4). When Early Christian authors cite the 'Book of Ezra" it is always 'Esdras alpha' to which they refer. 'Esdras beta' (Ezra–Nehemiah) supplemented 'Esdras alpha' in Christian bibles from the 4th century onwards, but appears rarely to have been read as scripture; and only the 'Nehemiah' sections are ever cited in patristic texts. The earliest Christian commentary on Ezra–Nehemiah

7107-520: The layers in Ezra. He sees the account of the rebuilding of the Temple (Ezra 5:1–6:15) and the core of the "Ezra memoir" (Ezra 7–10/Nehemiah 8) developing separately until they were combined by an editor who wished to show how Temple and Torah were re-introduced into Judah (known to Persian rulers as Yehud Medinata ) after the exile. This editor also added Ezra 1–5. The combined text was then further developed by priestly circles who stressed Temple over Torah, transformed Ezra from scribe to priest, and stressed

7210-414: The leading scholar of the day, to produce an updated Latin Bible to replace the Vetus Latina , which was a Latin translation of the Septuagint. Jerome's work, called the Vulgate , was a direct translation from Hebrew, since he argued for the superiority of the Hebrew texts in correcting the Septuagint on both philological and theological grounds. His Vulgate Old Testament became the standard Bible used in

7313-402: The legitimacy of their groups in relation to the experience of the exile, though Nehemiah's concern specifically emphasizes language as a potential means by which ethnicity seemed to be defined. Southwood makes some points in her article in how the terms "race", "ethnicity", and "nationalism" can be used in translations of Ezra 9–10. She points out that there are multiple problems not only inside

7416-880: The middle verse as Nehemiah 3:32, indicating that a complete work of Ezra–Nehemiah is in view. (To confuse the matter further there are other quite distinct works in the name of Esdras , largely dealing with visions and prophecies.) The Masoretic Text of Ezra–Nehemiah is largely in Late Biblical Hebrew , with significant sections in Biblical Aramaic there are occasional reflections of Old Persian vocabulary, but little significant influence from Greek. Ezra 1 (the Edict of Cyrus ) and Ezra 2 (the list of returnees) are presented as Persian documents; Ezra 3 – 6 , which contains further supposed Persian documents mixed with third-person narrative, may be based on

7519-536: The need to separate Israel from foreign neighbours to preserve the purity of the people of God. In the last half of Nehemiah the emphasis shifts to the joint role of Ezra and Nehemiah in instructing the people in the Law and in the dedication of the wall, these two activities together forming the reconstitution of Jewish life in Jerusalem; Dillard and Longman describe this as the moment when "the whole city becomes holy ground." The single Hebrew book "Ezra–Nehemiah", with

7622-473: The opposition of some of his own countrymen to purify the community by dissolving the sinful marriages. Nehemiah , cup-bearer to king Artaxerxes, is informed that Jerusalem remains without walls. He prays to God, recalling the sins of Israel and God's promise of restoration in the land. Artaxerxes commissions him to return to Jerusalem as governor, where he defies the opposition of Judah's enemies on all sides—Samaritans, Ammonites, Arabs and Philistines—to rebuild

7725-421: The original "Nehemiah memoir" was an account of the rebuilding of the city walls. Successive layers were then added to this, turning the building report into an account of Judah's restoration and depicting Nehemiah as a Persian governor who reforms the community of Israel. Finally, after Ezra had come into existence through the combination of Ezra 1–6 with Ezra 7–10, the accounts of the repopulation and dedication of

7828-409: The particular narrative of Ezra–Nehemiah. Moral purity has familial implications, which the lack of may cause disruption in the cohesiveness of the family unit. Transgressing Israelite moral structure was feared to cause violations of the commandments, which ordained by God, must be followed to maintain ethnical identity. The influence of gentile women and culture upon Israelite men and posterity, through

7931-465: The patriarchs" and "the unified conquest of the land" were widely accepted in the United States until about the 1970s. Contrarily, Grabbe says that those in his field now "are all minimalists – at least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. ... [V]ery few are willing to operate [as maximalists]." In 2022, archaeologist Avraham Faust wrote that in the 1990s

8034-520: The primacy of the Babylonian returnees over those who had remained in the land, a distinction that had not appeared in the original Ezra material. Still later, Levitical editors combined Ezra and Nehemiah to produce the final form of the book, reintroducing interest in Torah and stressing the primacy of the Levites. Jacob Wright (2004) has carried out similar work on Nehemiah. According to his study

8137-410: The prophetic works of Haggai and Zechariah , who were active at the time; Ezra 7–10, partly in the first-person, is sometimes called the "Ezra Memoir", but has been so heavily edited that the source, if it exists, is very difficult to recover. There is widespread agreement that a genuine memoir underlies Nehemiah, although it has clearly been edited. It can be no earlier than about 400 BCE, but

8240-442: The same author or circle of authors (similar to the traditional view which held Ezra to be the author of all three), but the usual view among modern scholars is that the differences between Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah are greater than the similarities, and that Ezra–Nehemiah itself had a long history of composition from many sources, stretching from the early 4th century down to the Hellenistic period . The accepted view throughout

8343-470: The same material as the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic history and probably date from the 4th century BC. Chronicles, and Ezra–Nehemiah , was probably finished during the 3rd century BC. Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments contain two (Catholic Old Testament) to four (Orthodox) Books of the Maccabees , written in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. These history books make up around half the total content of

8446-518: The similarity of the Genesis flood narrative and the Gilgamesh flood myth . Similarities between the origin story of Moses and that of Sargon of Akkad were noted by psychoanalyst Otto Rank in 1909 and popularized by 20th-century writers, such as H. G. Wells and Joseph Campbell . Jacob Bronowski writes that, "the Bible is ... part folklore and part record. History is ... written by

8549-627: The splitting of several texts ( Samuel , Kings , Chronicles , Ezra–Nehemiah , and the Twelve Minor Prophets ) into separate books in Christian Bibles. The books that are part of the Christian Old Testament but that are not part of the Hebrew canon are sometimes described as deuterocanonical books . These books are ultimately derived from the earlier Septuagint , the earliest extant Greek translation of

8652-520: The story almost entirely, and Zerubbabel is abruptly introduced as the main figure. Both are called governors of Judah and are both credited with laying the foundation of the Temple. A number of explanations have been proposed, including: (1) the two are the same person; (2) Sheshbazzar was in fact Shenazzar, Zerubabbel's uncle (mentioned in Chronicles); (3) Sheshbazzar began the work and Zerubbabel finished it. Ezra's mission according to Nehemiah 8

8755-424: The suggestion that the two were by the same author but written at different times and issued as separate works. Of the three, it is generally accepted that Ezra–Nehemiah forms a unified work separate from Chronicles: the many scholars who agree on this include H. G. M. Williamson, Sara Japhet, and Gary Knoppers. H. G. M. Williamson (1987) sees three basic stages to the composition of Ezra–Nehemiah: (1) composition of

8858-544: The term to refer to a pledge. Further themes in the Old Testament include salvation , redemption , divine judgment , obedience and disobedience, faith and faithfulness, among others. Throughout there is a strong emphasis on ethics and ritual purity , both of which God demands, although some of the prophets and wisdom writers seem to question this, arguing that God demands social justice above purity, and perhaps does not even care about purity at all. The Old Testament's moral code enjoins fairness, intervention on behalf of

8961-495: The terms of the contract: Israel swears faithfulness to God, and God swears to be Israel's special protector and supporter. However, The Jewish Study Bible denies that the word covenant ( brit in Hebrew) means "contract"; in the ancient Near East, a covenant would have been sworn before the gods, who would be its enforcers. As God is part of the agreement, and not merely witnessing it, The Jewish Study Bible instead interprets

9064-402: The text but in work of the scholars as well. Although it is evident that the terms "ethnicity" and "race" have similarities, one is just a secondary term of another. This however does not make the text easily translated and makes the expression of those terms as Southwood puts it not "appropriate" on any level. She argues that the text focuses on the distinction between the "people of the land" and

9167-534: The time of Jesus, some Jews expected that a flesh-and-blood descendant of David (the " Son of David ") would come to establish a real Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem, instead of the Roman province of Judaea. Others stressed the Son of Man , a distinctly other-worldly figure who would appear as a judge at the end of time . Some expounded a synthesised view of both positions, where a messianic kingdom of this world would last for

9270-446: The title "Ezra", was translated into Greek around the middle of the 2nd century BCE. Slightly later a second, and very different, Greek translation was made, commonly referred to as 1 Esdras . The Septuagint includes both 1 Esdras and the older translation of Ezra–Nehemiah, and names the two books as Esdras A and Esdras B respectively. The early Christian scholar Origen remarked that the Hebrew 'book of Ezra' might then be considered

9373-419: The various lists and Persian documents, which he accepts as authentic and therefore the earliest parts of the book; (2) composition of the "Ezra memoir" and "Nehemiah memoir", about 400 BCE; and (3), composition of Ezra 1–6 (the story of Zerubabbel) as the final editor's introduction to the combined earlier texts, about 300 BCE. More recently Juha Pakkala (2004) has carried out an extensive analysis of

9476-484: The victors, and the Israelis , when they burst through [ Jericho ( c.  1400 BC )], became the carriers of history." In 2007, a historian of ancient Judaism Lester L. Grabbe explained that earlier biblical scholars such as Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) could be described as 'maximalist', accepting biblical text unless it has been disproven. Continuing in this tradition, both "the 'substantial historicity' of

9579-457: The vulnerable, and the duty of those in power to administer justice righteously. It forbids murder, bribery and corruption, deceitful trading, and many sexual misdemeanours . All morality is traced back to God, who is the source of all goodness. The problem of evil plays a large part in the Old Testament. The problem the Old Testament authors faced was that a good God must have had just reason for bringing disaster (meaning notably, but not only,

9682-507: The walls. He enforces the cancellation of debts among the Jews, and rules with justice and righteousness. The list of those who returned with Zerubbabel is discovered. Ezra reads the law of Moses to the people and the people celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days; on the eighth they assemble in sackcloth and penitence to recall the past sins which led to the destruction of Jerusalem and

9785-471: The women that the Jews have married are named specifically as from 'Ashod, Ammon, and Moab' (Neh. 13:23). The concern is then expressed that the Ashodites were connected to Nehemiah's statement of outrage when he says that 'half of their children spoke the language of Ashod... and they were not able to speak the language of Judah' (Neh. 13:24). There is some debate as to how different the language of Ashod

9888-510: Was a Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Peshitta , as well as versions in Coptic (the everyday language of Egypt in the first Christian centuries, descended from ancient Egyptian ), Ethiopic (for use in the Ethiopian church , one of the oldest Christian churches), Armenian (Armenia was the first to adopt Christianity as its official religion), and Arabic . Christianity

9991-439: Was being put at stake. Southwood makes the point that Nehemiah's objection to intermarriage with foreign women, especially those aforementioned, relates to language being the symbol of ethnicity; therefore, it is not the language itself that is the problem, but rather the preservation of language is a "symptom of deeper concern about protecting ethnic identity." Thus, Southwood holds that both Ezra and Nehemiah are concerned about

10094-538: Was better than Hebrew. However, the texts came to be used predominantly by gentile converts to Christianity and by the early Church as its scripture, Greek being the lingua franca of the early Church. The three most acclaimed early interpreters were Aquila of Sinope , Symmachus the Ebionite , and Theodotion ; in his Hexapla , Origen placed his edition of the Hebrew text beside its transcription in Greek letters and four parallel translations: Aquila's, Symmachus's,

10197-417: Was from the Hebrew. However, if the languages were similar, according to Southwood, the problem at stake would be the purity of the language. If this were an entirely different language altogether, the purity of the language would be concern, as well as the concern for the threat of the extinction of the Hebrew language. In either case, the religious and ethnic identity that is encapsuled with the Hebrew language

10300-440: Was proposed that Ezra's Artaxerxes was Artaxerxes II , and that the sequence should be reversed, with Nehemiah arriving in 445 and Ezra in 398 BCE. The argument has some persuasive evidence; for example: Nehemiah's mission is to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, and Ezra 9 :9 notes that Ezra found the walls in place when he arrived, and while Nehemiah lists the returnees who came back with Zerubbabel he seems to know nothing about

10403-804: Was published as Hezekiah and the Books of Kings (BZAW 172; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988). He previously lectured at King's College London and then, after holding a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wales, at the University of Edinburgh . Provan has written numerous academic essays, many of the earlier of which are included in his Against the Grain: Selected Essays (ed. Stacey L. Van Dyk; Vancouver: Regent Publishing, 2015). He has also published commentaries on Lamentations, 1 and 2 Kings, and Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, as well as co-editing (with Mark Boda) Let Us Go Up To Zion (2012),

10506-676: Was the winner of the 2005 Biblical Archaeology Society prize for the best popular book on archaeology; it has now appeared in a second edition (2015). Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says, and Why It Matters (2014) won the 2016 R. B. Y. Scott Award from the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, recognizing an outstanding book in the areas of Hebrew Bible and/or the Ancient Near East. Provan has been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship on five occasions, and (once)

10609-462: Was to apply "the law of Moses " in Jerusalem , which he does by reading a "book of the law of Moses" (a "scroll" in Hebrew) in a marathon public session. Scholars disagree on what the law-book precisely was. Some have suggested it was some form of Deuteronomy , since Ezra's laws are heavily skewed towards that book; others have proposed that it was the " Priestly Writing ", which probably dates from

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