Judaism
Ezra and Nehemiah III.2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 09 August 2005
Abstract
The Founder of Judaism
Whether Zerubabel is Ezra or not, the whole of Ezra-Nehemiah is vital to understanding the historical origins of Judaism. Even though the judicious mixing up of the text and the confusion of characters make it hard to understandand, it is usually ignored by Christian teachers and sunday schools. The truth is that Ezra laid the foundation of Judaism from a ministry of the Persian empire, apparently in the reign of Darius II. The rest of it was built backwards in time from then, firstly perhaps by bilocating Ezra himself, then using the Assyrian king lists, and lastly using fiction.
For centuries, biblical scholars have noted the absence of references to Moses in large swaths of the scriptures, and explain him as “presupposed” by the writers! It is as preposterous as explaining the absence of Christ in the New Testament because he was presupposed. He might have been presupposed but was not absent. The absence from the scriptures of Moses—the founder of the Jewish nation and the founder of their religion, the giver of their laws and, for a Jew, the greatest Jew that has ever lived—except in Exodus and Numbers is so profound that it has huge significance. It means that he is an afterthought in the Jewish bible, and Exodus and Numbers are among the last of the Jewish canon. These books were written long after the law and long after Yehud had been set up—to justify and explain them!
R F Person has attributed the work of the Deuteronomist to the Persian period. Moses is a variant of Mazda, and therefore a name of God, from the beginning when Ezra read out Deuteronomy—the law of Mazda. Moses was not a title of God and so the law of Moses looked incongruous to later Jews who puzzled about it or sought to cover up its true meaning. The Persian word “data” meaning “law”, appears in Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther and Daniel as DT when “torah” (TWRH) might be expected, and the Persian word “databara” translated as “judge” but literally a “law bearer” appears in the list of officials in Daniel 3:2. Moses was therefore mortalized as the man to whom God had given his law for presentation to the people. Later still, a myth was invented to explain this and the right of the Jews to be in the hills of Palestine. Genesis was added before the end of the Persian empire.
The Chronicler, if he was not as late as the Maccabees, wrote in the time of Ptolemy II Philadephus or Ptolemy III Euergetes, from 285 to 222 BC. Both were keen supporters of Judaism and its temple. This will be when the Priestly Code was written. Ptolemy Philadephus undertook to add the Torah to his new library in Greek translation, so the priests were inspired to codify their laws in Leviticus, and polish up the Pentateuch. Added myths justifying the ambitions of the Maccabees gave Jews the right to what had been the whole of Abarnahara—the united empire of David and Solomon.
Ezra is the true founder of Judaism.Rev J H Box Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible
The later tendency, under the Greeks and Maccabees, was to eliminate Ezra from the bible. Nehemiah 8 and Nehemiah 9-10 seem to be the same event, but with Ezra omitted from the second, fuller and later account. Our bibles note that the Hebrew texts no longer have “And Ezra said” in Nehemiah 9:6. It is one small suggestion that Ezra was a persona non grata in the Jewish scriptures, and was being gradually written out in favour of Nehemiah. Ben Sira mentions Nehemiah but not Ezra. People influenced by the Greeks would have wanted to reduce the dependence of their myths on the Persians, and once the mythological saga of Moses had been elaborated, presumably under the Ptolemies, Ezra rather gave the game away. In 2 Maccabees 1:18-36, Nehemiah was the founder of the second temple and Ezra was no longer in view.
The same things were reported in the writings and commentaries of Nehemiah, and how he founding a library gathered together the acts of the kings, and the prophets and of David, and the epistles of the kings concerning the holy gifts.2 Maccabees 2:13
In 2 Maccabees, the founding of a library is attributed to Nehemiah. It could have been Ezra, in fact, who founded it, though it might have been named after Nehemiah, if he was the governor at the time. Temples and royal palaces in the ancient near east had libraries, and so the dedication of the temple of Jerusalem ought logically have meant the founding of a library too. It was Ezra who brought the the holy gifts and the law, and so he is the one who would have started a library by depositing the law—Deuteronomy—the local propaganda which supported it—the prophets—and the decrees which authorized it—the epistles and acts of the kings—in the temple library.
The kings mentioned are Persian kings, not Jewish ones, because, as Diodorus says, the Jews had never had a king, but one man is mentioned, David, and David is Darius! The law itself is not mentioned explicitly but it will be in the acts of the kings. Now 1 Maccabees 1:56 explains that the Greeks rent in pieces the books of the law and burnt them, and 2 Maccabees 2:14 says that Judas Maccabee gathered together the pieces and put them back together as best he could. It explains why much of the bible is a mess, different versions of the same events often stuck together by gum, but it also was the chance for the Jewish priests to rewrite the books to suit themselves.
That Ezra still appears today in the Jewish scriptures is undoubtedly an oversight, probably caused by the disruption of the civil war, the Jewish War (66 AD) and the Bar Kosiba revolt (132 AD).
Was Ezra a Fiction?
There is another hypothesis to explain the absence of Ezra, and it is put by Giovanni Garbini, a firm disbeliever in the Persian idea of Jewish origins. He denies that Ezra and Nehemiah in the Jewish scriptures tell real history. Ezra therefore never did come from Persia with the law. He argues that Ezra is pure fiction. The character, Ezra, came out of a second century dispute between Jewish factions over a trellis-like wall in the courts of the temple that separated the holy priests from the profane Israelites. He says that:
No Jewish work whether in the bible or not shows knowledge of the great Ezra before Flavius Josephus.
He is speaking of the specific form “Ezra” of the name but there are other expressions of it, including very probably in the bible, Zerubabel. Criticisms of the sequence of Persian kings in the biblical Ezra, do show that the account was far from contemporary, but what biblical books are? The only problems in the sequence are that the author does not know of Cambyses, who only reigned a short time, and he does not realise there are two Dariuses. He refers in fact to the reign of Darius II, but he thinks that this is the Great Darius.
Why was the account then not contemporary? It stands to reason that neither the Persians nor the Jewish priesthood wanted to advertise the fact that the religion had been set up by the Persians. The Persians said that they were merely “restoring” the Jewish religion and applying the proper law that Josiah had already discovered and applied 200 years before. Moreover, in the years intervening from the fifth century to the second century, the Jewish priests in cahoots with the Ptolemaic priests and royalty of Egypt had been remoulding the religion to put Jewish origins in Egypt. Even if there had been some document explaining Ezra’s mission, it would have been suppressed. Moses had been invented as the Egyptian Ezra. RIP, Ezra!
Garbini’s hypothesis about Ezra is that he is the personification of the word “azarah” meaning, in identifiably late biblical books and the writings of the Rabbis, the inner court of the temple. Such explanations suffer from the “chicken and egg syndrome”. The wall under consideration could well have represented the original Persian religion which was neurotic about keeping apart the good creation and the wicked creation, in their fight against Ahriman. Thus the wall to separate the priesthood might have been associated with Ezra from the outset, because Persian priests had to take scrupulous care to remain “clean”, and therefore to avoid contact with anything potentially unclean like people. The Essenes, who derived from the Hasids, kept up this extreme of separation right into the time of Jesus.
Another chicken and egg problem is Garbini’s observation from the Babylonian Talmud (Baba Qamma 82a) that Ezra made ten ordinances. Garbini sees this as copying Moses, but who is to positively deny that the original ten commandments were not Ezra’s, and copied by the Egyptian priests who devised Moses and the exodus? The association of Ezra with the law has to be simply dismissed on Garbini’s theory. It was a mistake for his prescribing a canon of religious books! In evidence, Garbini cites the Apocalypse of Ezra dated to about 100 AD!
There is no denying that the Ezra of Garbini’s hypothesis followed the myth of Moses by about 100 years. Why then would any Jews be inventing a man who had to read out the law because Jews had forgotten it? It is far fetched to imagine that another Moses could have been invented only a hundred years after the original and set in competition with him. Unlikely stories, ones that seem to run contrary to the trend of history, have to be taken seriously, so it seems more likely, considering all the evidence that Judaism is Persian, that Ezra is a historical character, even though his memory has been tried to be expunged.
Bearing this in mind, Garbini is quite possibly correct in his theory abnout factionalism, but it was a factionalism that involved the Puritans of the Persian form of the religion, many of whom still lived in Babylon and Syria and called themselves Hasids (Kasdim, Chaldaeans), and the establishment of Graeco-Egyptian Hellenized priests, who eventually became Sadducees. It was all about the time of the Maccabees, when the rebels promised a return to pure ways of worship, inviting the support of the Hasids, but in fact sought the practical support of the Egyptians and the Romans against the Seleucid Greek kings of Syria.
The original Ezra is 1 Esdras, the mythical basis for the second century reform. Evidence for late authorship came from Nehemiah 7:70, which tells us the governor gave “100 drachmas of gold” to the work in Jerusalem. The drachma was a Greek coin and Greek civilization was not found in the Middle East until after 300 BC. How could Nehemiah be trading in Greek coins in 450 BC if Greek civilization wasn’t found in widespread fashion in the Middle East until after 300 BC? Yet it is alleged that south of Bethlehem archeological excavations found six drachmas dating to Nehemiah’s era. Ezra was never known as a Jewish name before the composition of 1 Esdras, according to Garbini. It is rationalised as “He is help”, “He” being God, a bit demeaning to the old finger stirrer for a Jew, one might think. When God is written in explicitly, the outcome is Azariah or Jehoazar and Joazar. Curiously, seals of the fifth century BC, the very time of Ezra and Nehemiah, found in Yehud, presumably of a leader or man of some importance, identify him as Yehoazar, apparently a Hebraized form of Zoroaster.
The reform was to allow the priests to mingle with the Israelites—even women—in the court before the temple where they had always previously been separated. This reform was advocated by a faction called the “sons of Aaron” and opposed by the “sons of Zadok”. The “sons of Aaron” were Pharisees, or supported by them, and the “sons of Zadok” were Sadducees and Essenes, in Garbini’s view.
One wonders whether Garbini has identified the factions correctly. Pharisee is thought by some to mean Persian (cf Parsi), and some see the Hasidim as later splitting into the factions of Pharisees and Essenes. There is no doubt though that Essenes considered themselves Zadokites, and that seems to be the meaning of Sadducees. The whole period is obscure in respect of these factions.
The Persians, it seems, set up the temple state of Jerusalem as a nation of priests, and assuming that the whole nation could not literally have been priests, the reference must have been to the colonists, who formed the ruling class of priests. The locals who were the Am ha Eretz were excluded. By the second century, 300 years on, one could imagine that some of the people objected that the nation as a whole were not priests, and indeed were separated from them. This must have seemed like a gross injustice, and violation of what seemed to have been the Persian intention. Perhaps, at this point the left wing faction formed itself into Pharisees, who believed they were defending the spirit of the Persian reform of Ezra by desegregating priests and people in the temple court. The factions that still defended the segregation were actually upholding what the Persians had instituted, so Pharisee was a misnomer in terms of original Persian intent, but it explains why the Pharisees became the people’s party.
The priestly party were the traditionalists who called themselves Zadokites, the proper priesthood of the temple, and embodied that in their text called Ezekiel. But even Ezekiel, which promoted the exclusive rights of the Zadokites, gave no genealogy. Wellhausen described the Zadok of Samuel as a “new man”, without precedent and without genealogy. The long genealogy (1 Chr), of the Hellenistic period, rectified the omission. The Chronicler composed, incorporating existing fragments, a lineage of high priests in Jerusalem back to the time of the founding of the first temple, legitimizing the Zadokites as high priests in Jerusalem, with Zadok invented as an eponymous ancestor contemporary with Solomon. Plainly these Zadokites themselves eventually split, over proper sacerdotal practice in the temple, into Sadducees and Essenes.
The sons of Zadok of Ezekiel 40-48, Garbini considers to be the traditional pro-separation party, and the sons of Aaron the desegregationist party of the people, spoken for briefly in Chronicles. The Aaronites expelled the Zadokites from power in this view, and started a polemic against their opponents, who complained in return in the Damascus Document:
They justified the wicked and condemned the just, and transgressed the Covenant, and violated the Precept. They banded together against the life of the righteous and loathed all who walked in perfection.QD 1:19-20
More explicitly, they set about…
…abolishing the ways of righteousness and removing the boundary with which our forefathers had marked out their inheritance.QD 1:16; 5:20; 19:15
Moreover, they profane the temple because they do not observe the distinction in accordance with the law.QD 5:6-7
They have not kept apart from the people and their sin.QD 8:8, 19-20
Unfortunately, the same polemic reiterates Ezekiel 13:10 to denote false prophets who have deluded the people—“builders of the wall” (QD 4:19; 19:31) and “builders of the wall and daubers of whitewash” (QD 8:12; 19:24-25). So, says Garbini, though this seems a perverse use of an expression what could have been precisely used of their own stance, Ezekiel says false prophets build walls, but the Zadokites believed in walls, not their opponents. We have to convince ourselves here that false prophets are building metaphorical walls not real ones despite the daubing of them with mortar. The general belief is that these metaphorical walls are walls built to prevent inadvertant violation of the law. It is the Pharisaic oral law.
Notwithstanding this problem, breaking the wall offended those priests who called themselves Zadokites causing them to abandon the now desecrated temple, and even Jerusalem, to go live in the wilderness of Judaea, apparently at Qumran. They were called, by Josephus, Essenes. B Z Wacholder, using Ya’aqub al Qirgisani, identifies Zadok, the disciple of Antigonus of Socoh, as the founder of the Essenes, though Qirgisani actually says he founded the Sadducees, along with Boethus, the Egyptian. This Zadok died about 170 BC, but the open differences only started with the act of the High Priest Alcimus (1 Macc 9:54-56; 159 BC).
Garbini identifies the reform with this action of Alcimus, who actually pulled down the dividing wall, and when Herod rebuilt the temple another hundred years later, there was no wall here in the temple forecourt. Even so, Rabbinic sources speak of the “entrance” to the court of the priests marked by a dais. There was only a single court, but the ditinction was retained by the priestly court being paved whereas the court of the people was not. The Rabbis have a direct record of the wall being pulled down:
On the twenty third of Marheshwan, the dividing wall of the inner court was broken down.Megillat Taanit
This marked the beginning of the Essene’s Qumran community, matching the archaeological evidence. When Demetrius was summoned to Jerusalem by the “men of lies” (Garbini thinks a summary of 1 Macc 7:1-25), Alcimus is identified as the “man of lies” who opposed the teacher of righteousness, and he is associated with “the assembly of those who persue lies and are at Jerusalem”, and “the assembly of the arrogant who stand at Jerusalem”.
The Maccabees also opposed the demolition of the wall but later the sons of Zadok fell out with them when they did not resort to the Zadokites but kept the priesthood for themselves. Thus the common belief that Jonathan Maccabee was the wicked priest might also be true. Because the Zadokites fell out with the Maccabees, there is no copy of the Hebrew original of 1 Maccabees at Qumran. Interestiungly, Garbini notes that no copies of Ezra or Chronicles were found either and that reports that they had have never been substantiated.
Despite all this, Garbini says the Temple Scroll is the law read out by the supposedly fictional Ezra. The account of Ezra is all myth but not the law he read out! Even so, the Temple Scroll does provide for the separation of Israel from its priests. Nor does it use “azarah” for court. Garbini is not convincing enough overall but he seems to be on to something.
