Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther for Everyone

By John Goldingay

This latest volume in the Old Testament for Everyone series contains a look at the Second Temple period in Israel as well as the story of Queen Esther, who saved the Jewish people from extermination.

In this popular and ambitious series, John Goldingay covers Scripture from Genesis to Malachi and addresses the texts in such a way that even the most challenging passages are explained simply. Perfect for daily devotions, Sunday school preparation, or brief visits with the Bible, the Old Testament for Everyone series is an excellent resource for the modern reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Nov 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611642674

John Goldingay

John Goldingay is David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. An internationally respected Old Testament scholar, Goldingay is the author of many commentaries and books.

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life).

EZRA 1:1–4

On Not Settling Down as a Refugee

My wife’s daughter and her husband have just returned from a visit to camps in eastern Chad occupied by 175,000 Darfuri refugees from western Sudan. They go there to make it possible for the voice of the Darfuri refugees to be heard in the West. They take computers and cameras with which the Darfuris can upload pictures of their life in the camps via satellite, and Darfuri young people can exchange text messages with young people in the United States. But one of the tragedies of the camps is that, year-by-year, they become more like permanent townships, as has happened with refugee camps in Palestine. People fled from the threat of genocide to the camps in Chad thinking and hoping that they might be there for just a few months, but years pass and they find themselves still there. Darfuri children and teenagers can no longer remember what it was like in the villages from which they came, and of course the younger children were born in the camps and have no memory of or connection with their family’s original home.

The Judahite community in Babylon went through an analogous experience; hence the strongly expressed commitment in Psalm 137 never to forget Jerusalem, and the self-curse if one should do so. To punish Jerusalem for its rebelliousness against Babylon, in 597 the Babylonian king transported a number of people from Jerusalem to exile in Babylon—leaders such as the person who was then king, Jehoiachin; members of his administration; priests; and prophets. The people left behind in Jerusalem in 597 who escaped this deportation had good reason (or thought they had good reason) to heave a sigh of relief, to congratulate themselves on their good fortune, and to assume that the worst of Babylonian oppression was over. They had theological reason for making that assumption; they knew that God was committed to Jerusalem, to its temple, and to its line of Davidic kings. There was no way God could finally abandon them. The exiles would surely soon be back home. The exiles themselves would think the same.

They needed to see that they were wrong. Jeremiah 29 tells how, sometime after the deportation in 597, the prophet wrote to the deportees to contradict that idea and to tell them to settle down. They are not coming home soon. They might as well build houses to live in, plant gardens and eat their produce, marry and start families, identify with the Babylonian cities where they were located and pray for them (evidently these deportees were not in refugee camps), and not believe prophets who tell them they will soon be going home. Jeremiah knows that the rebellious state of the Judahites in Babylon and the Judahites in Jerusalem who escaped the deportation (not merely rebelliousness against Babylon, but rebelliousness against God) means that God has not finished with them yet. Yet the people who believed that God could not finally abandon them were not wrong. Jeremiah goes on to promise that in seventy years’ time God will indeed bring the deportees back to their homeland. God does ultimately intend the Judahites’ life to go well, not badly. God has plans to give them hope and a future. Jeremiah 51 then speaks of God arousing the spirit of the Median kings to take redress on Babylon for the temple’s subsequent destruction in 587.

One way God squares the circle of a commitment to faithfulness and a commitment to justice is to let justice have its way in the short term but to let faithfulness have its way in the long term. Cyrus’s proclamation evidences that Jeremiah was right. But from 597, it was to be quite a long term. When Jeremiah said that the exile in Babylon would last seventy years, the point was not that it would last seventy rather than sixty-nine or seventy-one but that it would last a lifetime. Virtually no one who left Jerusalem in 597 would be alive to go back. It would be their children and grandchildren who would be able to go back, people who had never seen Jerusalem and who knew only their life in Babylon; hence, no doubt, the fact that not so many of them were interested in moving to the back-of-beyond country that they had never seen. Cyrus’s proclamation that they may now make the move to Jerusalem implicitly recognizes that fact. On one hand, it expresses the wish that God may aid the people who are willing to make this brave move. On the other, it lays down the expectation that the people for whom staying in Babylon is fine, thank you very much, must offer financial support to the people who are prepared to make the move.

In 587 there had been another rebellion against Babylon—that led to the destruction of the temples and the city—and another deportation. For decades nothing much happened to change the situation, but then in the 550s things began to move. Persia had been a part of the Median Empire, but the Persian king Cyrus led a rebellion that reversed this arrangement and made Persia top dog in its region. He set about extending Medo-Persian authority much more broadly across western Asia and into Turkey. He then moved south to add to his empire the ailing Babylonian empire so that the Judahites in Babylon and in Judah itself came under his sovereignty. Prophecies in Isaiah 40–47 had declared it would happen; Yahweh the God of Israel was behind these political and military events. They would be the means of Yahweh’s restoring Israel itself. You could say that the declarations in Isaiah 40–47 are dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of Jeremiah’s promise in his letter and his other prophecies.

It is those promises in Jeremiah that the book of Ezra sees Cyrus fulfilling when he encourages the Judahites to leave Babylon for their homeland to rebuild the temple that the Babylonians had destroyed. It was the God of Israel who had aroused Cyrus’s spirit. Now Cyrus’s conscious intention in carving out his empire was hardly to respond to a prompting from the God of the Judahites. The God of who? you can imagine him asking. He created his empire for the same selfish reasons as Greece or Rome, Britain or the United States. But without Cyrus realizing, there was a divine initiative behind his action. It is always worth asking whether there is a divine initiative behind the actions of political powers, even if they are not aware of it.

Of course Cyrus is prepared to make a politician’s somewhat cynical acknowledgment of the deity recognized by his underlings. He says that Yahweh, the God of the heavens, has given him his power over the entire known world and has charged him to build the temple in Jerusalem. He would be glad to be known politically as the emperor who made it possible for the Judahites to make offerings there, even though he was not someone actually committed to Yahweh. In a document called the Cyrus Cylinder (because it is cylindrical in shape) he speaks of himself as a worshiper of Marduk—the Babylonian god—because he claims Marduk’s support in his conquering of Babylon. The irony is that Yahweh really is the God of the heavens, the lord of the whole cosmos. It really was Yahweh who gave Cyrus power. Although he did not realize, he really was Yahweh’s agent in making it possible for the Judahites to move back to Babylon and rebuild the temple.

Yesterday I had a random e-mail and then a follow-up phone call from a man who wanted to know how I understand some verses in the Old Testament that he thinks refer to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Many Christians have assumed that material in the prophecies of people such as Jeremiah refer to events in our own day. It’s not exactly wrong, in the sense that these prophecies do say something about God’s eternal purpose, and so they enable us to see something about how God’s purpose is being worked out—or is not being worked out—in our day. But (I tried without success to explain to my caller) there is something wrong with the idea that a prophet such as Jeremiah spoke directly about specific events in the twentieth century. That makes the prophet’s visions or prophecies of no immediate significance for the people to whom they were given. In Scripture, God speaks to people where they are. Our privilege is then to overhear that speaking in order to see how God may be speaking to us where we are as we ask what may be the implications of the prophet’s words for us.

The opening of Ezra presupposes the assumption that prophets speak to people where they are and make it possible for them to see what God is doing with them. Prophets do speak about the future, but it is the future that affects the people to whom the promises and the warnings are given, or that affects their children and grandchildren, and works out how God is thus being faithful to them. Yet maybe the opening of Ezra gives us a basis for praying for the refugees of Darfur and Palestine and other forgotten peoples. God can be involved in world politics, inspiring countries such as Britain and the United States to implement selfish policies that actually serve needy peoples for whom God is concerned.

EZRA 1:5–11

Precious Possessions Unexpectedly Restored

A woman I know once had to flee from a marriage that had become abusive. She was more fearful for her daughter’s safety than for her own. After an incident that convinced her it was unsafe to stay a moment longer, she hustled her daughter into the car one afternoon and simply got out of there in the clothes they were wearing and drove in a direction where she could assume her husband would not find her. She was right about the danger and about the action that was needed; but one of the most painful aspects of the hasty flight was that she had to leave behind nearly all the things that reminded her of her own youth and her daughter’s childhood. She has virtually no mementoes or photographs of those years.

To judge from the way the Old Testament tells the story, one of the most agonizing aspects of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 was the destruction of many of the precious and holy accoutrements of the temple, and the Babylonian king’s appropriation of what he did not destroy. In the account of the city’s fall and destruction in 2 Kings 25, you can feel the pain in the lines as it lists the pots and shovels and dishes and censers and bowls that were seized. For people left behind in Judah, the temple was an empty, defiled hulk. Paradoxically, the fact that the items that were appropriated and not destroyed did accompany the exiles to Babylon actually made things worse, because Nebuchadnezzar did what victors regularly did with such things. He deposited them in his own god’s temple. They became things dedicated to Marduk. They sat there as a taunting reminder of the plausible Babylonian claim that Marduk had defeated Yahweh. Of course a prophet such as Jeremiah knew that this was not so and that actually the destruction issued from Yahweh’s own action in abandoning the city, the temple, and its accoutrements, because of Judah’s rebelliousness; but a Babylonian would laugh at that piece of theological interpretation, and we know from the book of Jeremiah that many Judahites were unconvinced by it.

Unintentionally, however, by putting these objects into his god’s temple Nebuchadnezzar had made sure they would be kept safe and would not end up on the Babylonian antiquities market and eventually in the British Museum. Cyrus is in a position to produce them and to get the temple treasurer to give them to the man who will lead the Judahites back to Jerusalem so that they can again enter into Yahweh’s service in the temple. Cyrus will again have done this for his own reasons, as part of encouraging the Judahites to stay subservient to him, but we might again see Yahweh’s inspiration behind his action. The accoutrements will constitute one of the markers of the fact that the so-called Second Temple continues the worship of the First Temple. The people of God in Judah will continue the worship that their ancestors had offered. Their story is one with the story of Solomon and David and Moses.

The man to whom the objects are entrusted, Sheshbazzar, appears only in Ezra 1 and 5, and we know nothing about him except what is said there. His name is Babylonian, but it was quite common for Judahites to have Babylonian names (Daniel and his friends are examples), and he is identified as a Judahite. He is later identified as governor, which would seem to imply that his responsibility involved not merely seeing that the accoutrements did find their way back to the temple rather than mysteriously disappearing on the way to Jerusalem. It would suggest he had some continuing responsibility to the Persian authorities for looking after their interests in Judah. Yet he soon disappears from the story, and Ezra 3 will attribute the initiation of the temple restoration work to one Zerubbabel, who is also later described as governor. So whatever Sheshbazzar’s precise position, it seems that for one reason or another his work was confined to the beginning of the restoration of the community in Jerusalem.

God’s direct involvement in this episode of the story is expressed in the same terms that had been used in the opening verse of the book. As God aroused the spirit of Cyrus, so God aroused the spirit of the Judahites to make them want to make the journey to rebuild the temple. We have noted already that it is not surprising that God needed to do some arousing. The Judahites in Babylon were not like people in a refugee camp who were itching to get back to the land where they were born. They had taken Jeremiah’s encouragement to heart and built themselves houses and started families. It is thus not remarkable that many of them had no desire to leave Babylon, and the fact that many of them were willing to do so, like the amazing commission of Cyrus that encourages them to go, makes one think, God must have been involved in moving their hearts in this direction. On the other hand, the story emphasizes how even the people who did not make the move supported the people who did. The word for voluntary offering is the term traditionally translated freewill offering. In the Torah there are some offerings that Israel is expected to make, such as community sacrifices made each morning and evening, and sacrifices made by individuals in connection with purity or in fulfillment of a vow. There are other offerings made for no reason than to express devotion to God, and references in Ezra 1 to such voluntary offerings presuppose that the rebuilding of the temple is going to need generous voluntary offerings of this kind.

The Old Testament regularly talks about going up to Jerusalem, because the city is a thousand meters or three thousand feet above sea level; from almost any direction, you have to go up to get there. The temple objects thus likewise get taken up to the city. Even today, Jews say that someone makes aliyah (makes a going up) when speaking of making the move to live in Israel; the group Sheshbazzar leads is the first aliyah.

It seems to have been not just fellow Judahites who supported the people who made the journey. Cyrus apparently referred simply to an expectation that Judahites who decided to stay in Babylon would support their kinfolk in practical ways. In the event, this support came from the people’s neighbors more generally. While referring now to these people as neighbors might mean nothing, this motif recalls the exodus story. The move from Babylon to Judah is a repetition of the exodus, and when the Israelites left Egypt, Yahweh made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward them so that they gave them objects of silver and gold to take with them, which facilitated the making of the dwelling for God in the wilderness. The Judahites’ Babylonian neighbors, like Cyrus himself, are likewise making a contribution to the worship of Yahweh.

Life in Judah in the Persian period was often tough and it might have been tempting for people to wonder whether Yahweh really was present and active in the community. The story of the Second Temple community’s beginnings emphasizes Yahweh’s involvement and points to the way Yahweh is doing again what Yahweh did in bringing Israel out of Egypt into the land in the first place. What Yahweh thus did in bringing people back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple is not to be underestimated by their descendants.

EZRA 2:1–67

Who We Were

When we decided we would get married in the December just past, I naively assumed that this implied a honeymoon somewhere tropical such as Bali, but I found myself honeymooning in Scotland at a time when the temperature never rose above freezing. My fiancée knew that her ancestors had come to the Americas from Scotland in the seventeenth century and she was longing to visit the area where they came from. Worry not, we had a great time, and one reason was that it was a delight to see and share her reaction to this opportunity to connect with her past. It enabled me to get a little more understanding of what has always seemed a quaint American preoccupation with tracing one’s ancestors and connecting with where they came from. I knew I didn’t have the same impetus to put in the kind of effort involved in researching my family history, and I realized that this was because I could take it for granted; I knew where I came from. I was born in the city where my family had lived for generations.

The Judahites for whom Ezra–Nehemiah is written are in a position that has parallels both with mine and with my wife’s. They are in a position like mine in the