historical criticism is faced with the established literary conclusions
which, it should be noticed, place the Deuteronomic and priestly
compilations posterior to the great changes at and after the fall of
the northern monarchy, and, to some extent, contemporary with
the equally serious changes in Judah. There were catastrophes
detrimental to the preservation of older literary records, and vicissitudes
which, if they have not left their mark on contemporary
history—which is singularly blank—may be traced on the representations
of the past. There are external historical circumstances
and internal literary features which unite to show that the application
of the literary hypotheses of the Old Testament to the course of
Israelite history is still incomplete, and they warn us that the
intrinsic value of religious and didactic writings should not depend
upon the accuracy of their history.[1] Future research may not be
able to solve the problems which arise in the study of the period now
under discussion; it is the more necessary, therefore, that all efforts
should be tested in the light of purely external evidence (see further
§ 24; and Palestine: History).
21. Nehemiah and Ezra.—There is another remarkable gap in the historical traditions between the time of Zerubbabel and the reign of Artaxerxes I. In obscure circumstances the enthusiastic hopes have melted away, the Davidic scion has disappeared, and Jerusalem has been the victim of another disaster. The country is under Persian officials, the nobles and priests form the local government, and the ground is being prepared for the erection of a hierocracy. It is the work of rebuilding and reorganization, of social and of religious reforms, which we encounter in the last pages of biblical history, and in the records of Ezra and Nehemiah we stand in Jerusalem in the very centre of epoch-making events. Nehemiah, the cup-bearer of Artaxerxes at Susa, plunged in grief at the news of the desolation of Jerusalem, obtained permission from the king to rebuild the ruins. Provided with an escort and with the right to obtain supplies of wood for the buildings, he returned to the city of his fathers’ sepulchres (the allusion may suggest his royal ancestry). His zeal is represented in a twofold aspect. Having satisfied himself of the extent of the ruins, he aroused the people to the necessity of fortifying and repopulating the city, and a vivid account is given in his name of the many dangers which beset the rebuilding of the walls. Sanballat of Horon, Tobiah the Ammonite, and Gashmu the Arabian (? Edomite) unceasingly opposed him. Tobiah and his son Johanan were related by marriage to Judaean secular and priestly families, and active intrigues resulted, in which nobles and prophets took their part. It was insinuated that Nehemiah had his prophets to proclaim that Judah had again its own king; it was even suggested that he was intending to rebel against Persia! Nehemiah naturally gives us only his version, and the attitude of Haggai and Zechariah to Zerubbabel may illustrate the feeling of his partisans. But Tobiah and Johanan themselves were worshippers of Yahweh (as their names also show), and consequently, with prophets taking different sides and with the Samaritan claims summarily repudiated (Neh. ii. 20; cf. Ezra iv. 3), all the facts cannot be gathered from the narratives. Nevertheless the undaunted Judaean pressed on unmoved by the threatening letters which were sent around, and succeeded in completing the walls within fifty-two days.[2]
In the next place, Nehemiah appears as governor of the small district of Judah and Benjamin. Famine, the avarice of the rich, and the necessity of providing tribute had brought the humbler classes to the lowest straits. Some had mortgaged their houses, fields and vineyards to buy corn; others had borrowed to pay the taxes, and had sold their children to their richer brethren to repay the debt. Nehemiah was faced with old abuses, and vehemently contrasted the harshness of the nobles with the generosity of the exiles who would redeem their poor countrymen from slavery. He himself had always refrained from exacting the usual provision which other governors had claimed; indeed, he had readily entertained over 150 officials and dependants at his table, apart from casual refugees (Neh. v.). We hear something of a twelve-years’ governorship and of a second visit, but the evidence does not enable us to determine the sequence (xiii. 6). Neh. v. is placed in the middle of the building of the walls in fifty-two days; the other reforms during the second visit are closely connected with the dedication of the walls and with the events which immediately follow his first arrival when he had come to rebuild the city. Nehemiah also turns his attention to religious abuses. The sabbath, once a festival, had become more strictly observed, and when he found the busy agriculturists and traders (some of them from Tyre) pursuing their usual labours on that day, he pointed to the disasters which had resulted in the past from such profanation, and immediately took measures to put down the evil (Neh. xiii. 18; cf. Jer. xvii. 20 sqq.; Ezek. xx. 13–24; Isa. lvi. 2, 6; lviii. 13). Moreover, the maintenance of the Temple servants called for supervision; the customary allowances had not been paid to the Levites who had come to Jerusalem after the smaller shrines had been put down, and they had now forsaken the city. His last acts were the most conspicuous of all. Some of the Jews had married women of Ashdod, Ammon and Moab, and the impetuous governor indignantly adjured them to desist from a practice which was the historic cause of national sin. Even members of the priestly families had intermarried with Tobiah and Sanballat; the former had his own chamber in the precincts of the Temple, the daughter of the latter was the wife of a son of Joiada the son of the high priest Eliashib. Again Nehemiah’s wrath was kindled. Tobiah was cast out, the offending priest expelled, and a general purging followed, in which all the foreign element was removed. With this Nehemiah brings the account of his reforms to a conclusion, and the words “Remember me, O my God, for good” (xiii. 31) are not meaningless. The incidents can be supplemented from Josephus. According to this writer (Ant. xi. 7, 2), a certain Manasseh, the brother of Jaddua and grandson of Joiada, refused to divorce his wife, the daughter of Sanballat. For this he was driven out, and, taking refuge with the Samaritans, founded a rival temple and priesthood upon Mt Gerizim, to which repaired other priests and Levites who had been guilty of mixed marriages. There is little doubt that Josephus refers to the same events; but there is considerable confusion in his history of the Persian age, and when he places the schism and the foundation of the new Temple in the time of Alexander the Great (after the obscure disasters of the reign of Artaxerxes III.), it is usually supposed that he is a century too late.[3] At all events, there is now a complete rupture with Samaria, and thus, in the concluding chapter of the last of the historical books of the Old Testament, Judah maintains its claim to the heritage of Israel and rejects the right of the Samaritans to the title[4] (see § 5).
In this separation of the Judaeans from religious and social intercourse with their neighbours, the work of Ezra (q.v.) requires notice. The story of this scribe (now combined with the memoirs of Nehemiah) crystallizes the new movement inaugurated after a return of exiles from Babylonia. The age can also be illustrated from Isa. lvi.-lxvi. and Malachi (q.v.). There was a poor and weak Jerusalem, its Temple stood in need of renovation, its temple-service was mean, its priests unworthy of their office. On the one side was the grinding poverty of the poor; on the other the abuses of the governors. There were two leading religious parties: one of oppressive formalists, exclusive, strict
- ↑ One may recall, in this connexion, Caxton’s very interesting prologue to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and his remarks on the permanent value of the “histories” of this British hero. [Cf. also Horace, Ep. 1. ii. and R. Browning, “Development.”]
- ↑ It is noteworthy that Josephus, who has his own representation of the post-exilic age, allows two years and four months for the work (Ant. xi. 5, 8).
- ↑ The papyri from Elephantine (p. 282, n. 1, above) mention as contemporaries the Jerusalem priest Johanan (cf. the son of Joiada and father of Jaddua, Neh. xii. 22), Bagohi (Bagoas), governor of Judah, and Delaiah and Shelemiah sons of Sanballat (408–407 B.C.) They ignore any strained relations between Samaria and Judah, and Delaiah and Bagohi unite in granting permission to the Jewish colony to rebuild their place of worship. If this fixes the date of Sanballat and Nehemiah in the time of the first Artaxerxes, the probability of confusion in the later written sources is enhanced by the recurrence of identical names of kings, priests, &c., in the history.
- ↑ The Samaritans, for their part, claimed the traditions of their land and called themselves the posterity of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh. But they were ready to deny their kinship with the Jews when the latter were in adversity, and could have replied to the tradition that they were foreigners with a tu quoque (Josephus, Ant. ix. 14, 3; xi. 8, 6; xii. 5, 5) (see Samaritans).
