New Books by Melody Knowles and Jacob Wright

Ralph W. Klein

Christ Seminary-Seminex Professor of Old Testament

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

 

The books under review, by Melody Knowles[1] and Jacob Wright,[2] are an encouraging promise of what the next generation will contribute to our knowledge of the history, literature, and theology of early Judaism in the Persian period.  Yet these revised dissertations differ substantially in methodology and on the question of the historical trustworthiness of the biblical accounts that have come to us in the Masoretic Text.[3]  I will treat each study individually.

            The Knowles’ study, which was originally her dissertation at Princeton Seminary, looks at God’s geographical location and the role of the temple in the physical expressions of the Yahwists of the Persian period in order to see how the centrality of Jerusalem was practiced.  The bases of her argument are, on the one hand, biblical texts—Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Third Isaiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the so-called Psalms of Ascent (120-134)—and archeology, in terms both of inscriptions and the material finds insofar as they can contribute to our understanding of these questions.  After an opening chapter in which she defines basic terms and describes her methodology, including the limitations of the evidence, successive chapters are devoted to the centralities of animal sacrifice, the use of incense and figurines, Jerusalem as a pilgrimage center in the Persian period, and paying taxes and tithes in Jerusalem.  A final chapter is entitled The Palimpsest of Jerusalem’s Centrality.

            In the chapter on animal sacrifice, in many ways the most important and the most convincing, Melody takes note of what we do not know and what we do know.  She remains undecided whether Joseph Blenkinsopp is right in proposing that sacrifices were carried on at Bethel during the exilic period, and it is not clear who used the temple or altar at Lachish in the Persian period—that is, were these people Yahwists and do they therefore contribute to our understanding of Israelite worship?  The “house of yahu” inscription, dated to the fourth century BCE and discovered south and west of Yehud, indicates at least that a temple of YHWH was located in this area.  But of course we do not know what kind of cultic practices were practiced at this temple.  Knowles believes that Ezra 4:3 implies that sacrifice took place in Jerusalem before the exiles came back from Babylon,[4] and that would seemingly be supported by Jer 41:5:  “Eighty men arrived from Shechem and Shiloh and Samaria, with their beards shaved and their clothes torn, and their bodies gashed, bringing grain offerings and incense to present at the temple of the LORD.”  Surprisingly there is no reference in the bibliography to the fine essay by Douglas Jones in 1963 about the cessation of sacrifice after the destruction of the temple in 586.[5]

         Several passages in Trito-Isaiah (57:5 and 65:3) contain polemics against animal sacrifice outside Jerusalem in locales that are now unidentifiable (p. 122[6]).  One could argue, I suppose, that the polemic in these passages is not so much about the locale as about the syncretistic character of these cultic actions.  In Malachi, although worship of the LORD in general transcends the borders of Yehud (1:11, 14), animal sacrifice is primarily/exclusively localized in the Jerusalem temple.  Hence the restrictions on animal sacrifice outside Jerusalem became increasingly important within the texts of the Hebrew Bible. 

We do know that animal sacrifice ceased at Elephantine in 407 BCE[7] although apparently this Jewish colony did practice grain sacrifice and the cultic burning of incense after that date (just as in Jer 41:5).  She agrees with the latest excavator of Mt. Gerizim that animal sacrifice took place there, due to the mention of  a “house of sacrifice” in an inscription in lapidary Aramaic for which she does not supply a date and because of the large number of animal bones in the recent excavation.   

            This excavation and the recent publications of Ingrid Hjelm have complicated the assessment of when the definitive split between Samaria and Jerusalem took place.[8]  Does the Chronicler’s plea for the central importance of Jerusalem and his more or less open invitation to the north to rally around the Jerusalem temple have Gerizim in mind as a contemporary rival to the exclusiveness of Jerusalem?  Until the rise of the Hasmonaean state, did Yehud have any way of enforcing its theological claims in Samaritan territory?  This is the question behind the question in the Knowles dissertation.  What authority did the Jerusalem temple have, and how was that authority exercised.  Neither in her bibliography nor in the text of the book does she address the challenge of Diana Edelman, who has recently redated the construction of the temple to the tenure of Nehemiah instead of 515.[9]  While this is not the place to discuss Edelman’s proposal, I wonder how Knowles would have to reframe her argument if the Edelman hypothesis were true, or is the data gathered by Knowles sufficient to call Edelman’s proposal into question.. 

            Knowles does not address the type of worship that was carried on by the Jews in Babylon during and following the exile.  She notes early on Ezekiel’s reference to God’s functioning “for a little while” or “to some extent” as a sanctuary there (Ezek 11:16), but does not discuss the meaning of this except for a reference to a chapter dealing with this question by Andreas Ruwe.  Was animal or grain sacrifice ever practiced in Babylon, and if so, when did it stop?  Perhaps we cannot know.  If the Elephantine colony could erect a temple in the “unclean land” of Egypt, could the Babylonian Jewish community have had some kind of cultic worship?  She also mentions “the place” Casiphia  (Ezra 8:17), but finds this designation too vague to identify this place as an area for animal sacrifice (p. 30).  Incidentally she errs in stating that Ezra recruited priests from there, since it was instead Levites and 200 Nethinim that Ezra acquired from this site.  

            I am not convinced by her conclusion that Zech 5:5-11, the woman in the ephah pot, means that any kind of worship involving iconographic representations of the deity in Babylon is unsanctioned and ultimately powerless (p. 38) or again that it offers a critiques of worship outside Jerusalem, that is, of nonsacrificial worship in Babylon.  Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers conclude that this vision means that foreign elements brought to Jerusalem must be thoroughly excised from the place of Yahweh in his restored temple.  Perhaps this vision is also an expression of the semi-independence of Yehud, with the Yehudite God alone residing in the land.[10]  David L. Petersen argues that Jerusalem is being purified and Babylon contaminated.  The Babylonians will fix and venerate this new cultic object.  Evil and impurity have been collected, and they must be removed from the land.[11]  If these commentators are correct, the discussion of this vision could have been omitted from this chapter. 

            It is unclear to me what Sanballat means in Neh 3:34 by asking “Will they sacrifice?”  Knowles takes it to imply that the community in Yehud was not sacrificing up to this point.  H. G. M. Williamson admits the obscurity of Sanballat’s questions, but translates “Will they commit their cause to God? Will they simply offer sacrifices?” and believes that Sanballat is ridiculing the suggestion that God can be cajoled into prospering the work as if by a magic wand.[12]  In general, I believe Knowles could have given more in-depth exegesis of many of the passages she cites.  (I also think that Knowles is unduly pessimistic about determining what the Chronicler’s source in Kings had to say).

            In her concluding chapter, Knowles notes that the Jerusalem authorities would have considered sites outside Jerusalem transgressive, whereas those who worshiped there held them to be honorable.  When did the time come that the Jerusalem authorities could enforce their point of view and not just criticize alternative practices? 

            Chapter 3 addresses the question of the cultic use of incense, noting that

Chronicles condemns the religious use of aromatics outside Jerusalem (pp. 55, 62); incense is acceptable only when offered by temple personnel in the temple itself.   Uzziah and Ahaz are condemned for their inappropriate use of incense, while Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah are commended for destroying (incense) altars outside Jerusalem.  Is the polemic in Chronicles against incense part of a wider rejection of syncretistic practices?   References in Malachi (1:11, where the deity speaks approvingly about incense offered among the nations) and Elephantine and the archeological recovery of incense burners from the Persian period at Tell en Nasbeh, Gezer, and Lachish indicate that use of incense was engaged in by Yahwists outside of the city.  Incense burners have also been found at Samaria and Shechem.  A conclusion might be drawn that the Chronicler’s prohibition of incense-burning outside the temple was not effective.

            Knowles concludes that the use of images or figurines was forbidden everywhere—in the temple and not in the temple.  Hence this neither contributes to nor detracts from her thesis about the practice of centrality, and perhaps could have been omitted.  Or it could have been used to document the authority of the Jerusalem temple throughout the community. Or does the prohibition of images indicate the authority of the  Ten Commandments throughout early Judaism?

            The discussion of Pilgrimages is taken up in chapter 4.  The returns of exiles from Babylon usher in a future pilgrimage from the diaspora and the nations in Zech 6:9-15, 8:7-8, 21-23.  . Haggai and Third Isaiah foresee the journeys of nations to the temple bearing rich offerings (Hag 2:6-8; Isa 56:6-7; 60:9, 13). The best part of her argument about pilgrimages to Jerusalem are the centralized celebrations of booths and unleavened bread in Ezra 3:1-4 (cf. Neh 8:13-18) and Ezra 6:19-22 respectively.  Less convincing to me as pilgrimages are the trips home from Babylon to Jerusalem reported in Ezra 1-2 and 7-8 (cf. Isa 51:9-11).  Melody notes the presence of Exodus and pilgrimage motifs in these passages and they surely underscore the importance of Jerusalem, but I am reluctant to call these one-way journeys pilgrimages.  In the Chronicler’s account of the Passovers of Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 30) and Josiah (2 Chronicles 35), pilgrims come from both Judah and Israel to the centralized celebration in Jerusalem.  The other evidence adduced by her for pilgrimage comes from Psalms 120-134, and Knowles calls attention to wording or editing in these Psalms that could indeed come from the Persian period.  It seems to me, however, that the pilgrimages implied here can hardly be limited to one period. 

            As far as taxing and tithing are concerned, Melody engages in a rare exercise of Literarkritik in distinguishing between an earlier text in Neh 10:36-38a, describing annual journeys to Jerusalem to pay tithes whereas the later layer in Neh 10:38b-40 demonstrates that this scenario was not practiced and that an alternative solution was designed, namely, that the Levites collected the tithes locally and transported them to Jerusalem.  She notes a wide variety of positions on financial support for the cult in literature from the Persian period.  Haggai expects the costs for reconstructing the temple to come from the community in Yehud, although additional treasure will come from the nations in the future.  In Zechariah the temple is funded by the returned exiles as well as the diaspora, while in Trito Isaiah it is the future diaspora and the nations who support the temple.  Malachi and Nehemiah report that the local community alone brings offerings to the temple. While the diaspora and the nations give some support for rebuilding the temple in Ezra, the cult is largely supported by the Persian kings.  She finds this unusual and historically doubtful.  Chronicles reports lavish and generous gifts of kings like David, whose example is intended to inspire lay people to be similarly generous.  

            The bottom line:  the practice of centrality was neither univocal nor consistent.  I hope that in future studies Knowles might attend to the question of the authority of the temple and its regulations—which is somewhat different than the question of religious practices.  If her interpretation of Gerizim is correct, the Jerusalem temple lacked authority in Samaria long before the definitive split and in fact achieved authority only through the Hasmonean rise to power.  Also the interface between centrality practiced and the authority of Deuteronomy 12 might be pursued further.  Her proposal of a palimpsest as a model for this period is only partially successful.  While centrality was constantly being rewritten and nuanced, the palimpsest metaphor does not encompass as well the competing voices that she has so clearly uncovered.      

 

The dissertation of Jacob Wright, written at Goettingen, under the supervision of Reinhard Kratz, is more dramatic in proposing a new hypothesis, and more radical, in my judgment, in its methodology.  His book is nearly three times as long as Knowles’, and that represents a reduction by 250 pages, from the original dissertation.

                The methodology from beginning to end is what Germans call Literarkritik, which has quite a different meaning, at least in some circles, than “literary criticism” does in English and in North America these days.  Jacob identifies all sorts of tensions—in content or in syntax within the Book of  Nehemiah (and Ezra for that matter) and divides the materials from Nehemiah up into at least seven strata, whose chronological sequence of composition can be reconstructed.  I say at least seven strata since he often identifies secondary supplements within the strata.  Wright does not discuss the method itself or what kinds of tension in content or syntax might have been tolerated in a work such as Nehemiah.  Such a discussion would be expected, I believe, in an American context, which has become increasingly skeptical of this method and doubtful about the ability to reconstruct something as complicated as seven plus sequential strata.  In general, the book is well written, although with quite a few typos, and the argument is advanced with both confidence and passion.  Frequent charts show how a given passage has been assigned to several strata, and a concluding survey, pp. 330-339, is followed by a final chart in which the judgments of the previous pages are summarized in a table entitled The Primary Compositional Layers of Neh 1-13 (p. 340).  The final chart is a somewhat simplified presentation of his findings since it does not indicate the supplementary elements within the strata, and the reader would be considerably helped by a chart indicating the sequence of the strata in Ezra.  While he considers Ezra 10 subsequent to Ezra 9, it is not clear to me when Ezra 10 was added to the process. 

I will concede at the start that an exhaustive and fair review of this proposal would involve testing and debating each of the dozens and dozens of cases of Literarkritik, which he proposes.  Since that is clearly impossible  within our limited time period, we will have to settle for test cases and more general criticisms of his fresh and creative proposal.

            It may be well to begin with a brief review, from a more centrist position, of the introductory problems of Nehemiah.  Scholars normally identify a first-person Nehemiah Memoir, consisting of most of 1:1-7:72a, followed by Nehemiah’s account of the dedication of the wall in 12:27-43, and concluding with at least some of the materials in 13:4-31.  The materials in ch. 13 are dated in the received text at least twelve years after Nehemiah’s initial coming to Jerusalem, in his so-called second term in office. Within these parameters, the list of workers on the wall in 3:1-32 is generally recognized as secondary, or at least not written by Nehemiah himself, and there is a bewildering range of opinions on the relationship of Ezra 2 to Nehemiah 7 (the list of those who returned)—was it incorporated first in Ezra or first in Nehemeiah, which is the better text, etc.?  There are supplementary materials within 7:72b—Neh 12:26 and 12:44-13:3, and perhaps elsewhere, and it is generally agreed that Nehemiah’s spirited defense of himself in 5:14-19 belongs historically with the materials in chapter 13.  In my own commentary in the New Interpreter’s Bible, while conceding with most scholars that Nehemiah 8 was once part of the Ezra account, I proposed that now it has become part of a new unit in which Ezra’s reading of the law in Nehemiah 8, is followed by a confession of sin in Nehemiah 9, and concluding with “the firm agreement” in Nehmiah 10, and this unit is designed to portray an ideal response to the law.  While Tamara Eskenazi has given a highly influential reading of the final form of Ezra-Nehemiah,[13] almost everyone would agree, including Eskenazi, that the canonical text arose through a complicated evolutionary process.  Where Jacob Wright diverges from this consensus is his dissection of the Nehemiah Memoir itself into multiple layers, leaving us with a very brief “original” Nehemiah Memoir, dealing only with the building of the wall, and consisting of some thirteen verses, and five clauses within these verses are identified as secondary.  1:1, 11b, 2:1-6, 11, 15, 16a, 17, 18b, 3:38 and 6:15.  He conjectures that this original document may have been a building inscription. 

            This first wall-building stratum is followed by a second, not attributable to Nehemiah himself, consisting largely of the list of builders from ch. 3 and related verses.  Because Eliashib commenced the work in ch. 3, Wright assigns to the high priesthood the redactional efforts contained in this second stratum.  The role of the high priest and his colleagues in initiating the work in 3:1 creates a tension that will propel the composition of Ezra Nehemiah from its origins to its culmination.  That is, there emerges a conflict between a pro temple faction and a pro-Torah (anti-temple) faction, and these two factions  jockey back and forth in stating their cases..

A third stratum introduces Nehemiah’s conflict with Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem.  This supplementary material illustrates the positive implications of the building project by way of the negative reactions of the enemy.  It is only in the fourth stratum that Nehemiah is identified as the governor.  In a fifth stratum “Nehemiah” undertakes the reforms mentioned in chs. 5 and 13 although these materials “originally,” that is, in this fifth stratum, were done during Nehemiah’s first 52 days in Jerusalem, before the completion of the wall..  It is in this stratum that the “Remember me, O my God, for good” motif was introduced into the book.  The original building report, according to Wright, has now become a report of the general restoration of Judah.

            At this point Wright proposes that Ezra 1-6 was composed, largely in response to the criticism of Eliashib and the priesthood in general in Nehemiah 13 although he also reconstructs an earlier version of Ezra 1-6 in which the friction with Nehemiah’s account is minimal.  The erection of the altar in Ezra 3:1-6 is one of the latest texts in Ezra-Nehemiah (note 68, p. 335) but it is not clear to me exactly when it was introduced into the work.  Ezra 1-6 (7-8) concede that Nehemiah may have been correct in pointing out the corruption of the priesthood at the time of Nehemiah, but insist that the first repatriates followed the decrees of the Persian kings and initiated the reconsolidation of Judah with the construction and glorification of the temple.  The sixth stratum of the Nehemiah Memoir was then composed, with additions related primarily to the population and dedication of the city.

            Next come the composition of Ezra 7-8, 9-10.  Stylewise, the first person Ezra account in Ezra 7 and 8 eases the transition to the first person Nehemiah account.  Content-wise, Artaxerxes tells Ezra to make Aliyah and take funds to Jerusalem to glorify the temple.  The subsequent addition of Ezra 9 to the growing Ezra-Nehemiah book treats Nehemiah’s work much more positively.  Instead of the tension with the wall detected by Wright in Ezra 1-6, the addition of Ezra 9 recognizes the wall and the subsequent reforming acts of Nehemiah as the only solution to the community’s problems. 

The seventh stratum of Nehemiah advocates firm adherence to the Torah, to the neglect of any mention of the temple, especially in Nehemiah 8-10.  Because Ezra in Ezra 9 had acknowledged the importance of Nehemiah’s ethnic wall, he can now join the builders in preparation for the dedication ceremonies in Nehemiah 8.  Study of the Torah and the confession of the sins of fathers are interpreted as an alternative to the temple and sacrifices performed by a high priest, who was allegedly in league with the enemies of the restoration.  Nehemiah 8-10 intends to portray a cultic service in which the temple and high priest are dispensable and have been replaced with the Torah and a scribe ( p. 336 and n. 72).  In Nehemiah 9, the land, Moses, and Torah have replaced the temple.  Final supplements to the seventh stratum (Neh 10:31-40; 13:30b-31a) redress this “imbalance” and introduce once more cultic concerns.  Without these secondary additions to the seventh stratum, Wright observes:  “We wonder whether the temple had fallen into complete oblivion.”  (p. 338).  In short, there was a dialectical process between laity/wall and priests/temple that produced the book of Ezra-Nehemiah.  Instead of the events involving the rebuilding of the temple and the missions of Ezra and Nehemiah, Wright has reconstructed a social history, in which tradents score political and theological points by alternate expansions to the book that became Ezra-Nehemiah, but that originated in a Nehemiah Memoir of about 13 verses.

Case Studies in Literarkritik Practiced by Wright

I.  One argument for the secondary character of chapters 5 and 13, is its use nine times[14] of the Qal waw consecutive with the imperfect of the form “and I said.” with a paragogic he.  That is unusual for Nehemiah, who uses “and I said” seven times without a paragogic he in the rest of the book although those forms appear in five different strata!  (Neh 1:5 (7th), 2:3,5 (1st); 4:8 (3rd), 13 (3rd); 5:9 (5th); 7:3 (6th)).  The only attested use of  “and I said” with the paragogic he elsewhere in Nehemiah is in  6:11, which Jacob Wright also identifies as secondary.  Wright denies that the addition of the paragogic he can be attributed to copyists.  But in the Masoretic text of the book of Isaiah, the form “and I said” occurs five times (Isa 6:5, 8, 11; 24:16; 41:9), all without the paragogic he, but in the great Isaiah scroll from Qumran, in three cases—60% of the time—the copyists replaced this with a form of the waw consecutive with a paragogic he.  Hence I believe Wright does not make a convincing case that the forms with paragogic he in Nehemiah must of necessity be secondary and cannot result from changes introduced by copyists.  I cite this example only to illustrate the precarious basis on which I feel many of his observations are built.   

II.         According to Wright’s understanding, the original version of Nehemiah 8-10 expresses a temple-critical, or at least temple-avoiding, particularistic viewpoint, focused on the Torah.  The temple focus in Ezra 1-6, on the other hand, represents the universalistic and cosmopolitanism of the priests and aristocracy.  Wright claims that Ezra according to Nehemiah 8 is a scribe rather than the priest he is in Ezra 7 (where there is a genealogy going back, with a significant gap, to Aaron).  One could argue that intertextuality would identify Ezra as a priest in any case also in Nehemiah 8.  But even more embarrassing is Neh 8:2 where Ezra is explicitly called “the priest.”  Wright  dismisses this verse as secondary for a number of reasons.  In fact, he writes that this verse is quite easy to identify as a later insertion (p. 321).  “All the people” from v. 1 has been replaced by “the assembly” in v. 2..  Ezra is not called a scribe in v. 2 as he is in vv. 1, 4, 9, and 13, but a priest.  The reference to the first day of the seventh month in Neh 8:2 forms a doublet with Neh 7:72.  The description of the audience in Neh 8:2 overlaps with the description of the people in 8:3. The masculine suffix in v. 3 referring to what Ezra read--he read in it-- does not agree with the feminine noun torah in v. 2.  Rather, it refers to the book of torah of Moses in v. 1. Without v. 2, as Wright admits, the transition from v. 1 to v. 3 is rough.  Although we are told that v. 2 is probably not original, we are also told by Wright that the information it provides is exactly what the reader desires.  This dissonance between vv. 1 and 3 is why the verse was added according to Wright.   Or, I would propose, this alleged dissonance is why Neh 8:2 must be original.  If so, Ezra is identified as a priest in Nehemiah 8.  And he is called Ezra the priest the scribe in Neh 8:9—deleted by Wright.

III.       A similar observation might be made about Neh 10:31-40.  In Neh 10:1-30 the community ratifies a new covenant to abide by the Torah.  According to Wright the authors of Nehemiah 8-10 present Torah-reading and confession as an alternative to the temple cult-promoted in Ezra 1-6 (7-8).  Final supplements to the book, 10:31-40 and 13:30b-31a, counterbalance the concentration on Torah-study and penitence in 8:1-10:30 by redirecting the reader’s attention back to the temple.    . 

            Nehemiah 10:1-30 is part of the seventh stratum written in Hellenistic times according to Wright.  If we would assume for the sake of argument that vv 31-40 were secondary, would not the Torah by this time include virtually all of what we call the Pentateuch, including all the cultic regulations in the broad Sinai account?  Would not Torah-reading inevitably include stipulations from the last third of the book of Exodus and nearly all of Leviticus.  I’m not at all sure that it is legitimate to pit torah-reading or torah allegiance over against the temple cult since so much of the Torah deals with cult.

            But would a “firm agreement” be so lacking in definite content and specificity if the original account ended with v 30.?  If Wright therefore is wrong, and vv. 31-40 are in fact original to the firm agreement, then its stipulations against mixed marriage, its ban of commerce on the sabbath, its legislation of a temple tax of one third of a shekel, of the wood offering, of the offering of first fruits and the firstborn of humans and livestock, all in support of the temple, make his proposal to consider Ezra 9 and Nehemiah 8-10 as an intentional neglecting of the temple in favor of a society centered on the Torah unconvincing.  In short he creates his hypothesis about a group that urged neglect of the temple by deleting contrary evidence, especially in Neh 8:2 and 10:31-40 and 13:30b-31a.   

IV. My fourth case study deals with Wright’s  removal of the chronological data concerning the length of Nehemiah’s service in Jerusalem and in fact the complete separation of Nehemiah from the office of governor.  Wright contrasts Nehemiah’s cautious efforts to win the support of the rulers in 2:16, whose support he desperately needed to build the wall, with his attitude in 13:4-9 where he was not at all concerned to make friends with the ruling classes as he arrived in Jerusalem (p. 2020.  Wright argues that the criticism of Eliashib implicitly involved the entire Jerusalem priesthood (13:28) and that it creates an incongruity with 2:16ff where Nehemiah attempted to secure the approval of the priests for his wall-building project.  He writes:  “One finds it difficult to believe that he both needed the approbation of the priesthood and at the same time overruled their decision with respect to the use of the temple chambers….[T]he violation of the priesthood’s sphere of sovereignty would certainly have precluded their cooperation in building the wall.”(p. 203).  Of course a lot can happen in twelve or more years to sour the relationship between Nehemiah and the rulers of the people.  Most of the difficulty Wright describes here, however, is self-created since he has eliminated the twelve year term of Nehemiah by literary critical judgments. 

V. In his reconstruction of the literary history of chapter 5, which together with chapter 13 was not in his judgment an original part of the Nehemiah’s Memoir and not written by Nehemiah, Wright proposes that vv. 14-18 antedate vv. 1-13, and v. 19.  He also proposes that vv 16-18 are the earliest part of this chapter (part of his third stratum) and are parallel to 4:15ff, which they may have originally followed.  4:15ff report how people worked all day and stayed in Jerusalem overnight, working so hard in fact that they never took of their clothes at night.  Neh 5:18 reads:  Yet with all this I did not demand the food allowance of the governor, because of the heavy burden of labor on the people.  Verses 14-15 in Wright’s judgment have been secondarily prefaced to 16-18 since v. 14 and 16 both begin with the word gam and because Nehemiah’s waiver of the governor’s allowance in 15 is based on the fear of God whereas the waiver in v. 18 is based on the heavy load on this people.  But cannot both motives be true and complementary?  From a humanitarian or even political point of view Nehemiah did not want to impose additional burdens on his hard-working people, but from a religious point of view he did this out of fear of God.  Even in v. 15 that ends with the reference to the fear of God, the first half of the verse reads:  “The former governors laid heavy burdens on the people and took food and wine from them.”  Thus both motivations are actually contained in that one verse!  Wright implies that Nehemiah’s not taking the food allowance of the governor in v. 18 does not mean that Nehemiah was governor (an argument of desperation in my opinion), since the explicit claim that Nehemiah himself was governor arose only in vv. 14-15 which Wright assigns to his fourth stratum. 

Verse 14 in the Masoretic text reads:  “Moreover from the time that I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, from the twentieth year to the thirty-second year of King Artaxerxes, twelve years, neither I nor my brothers ate the food allowance of the governor.”  Wright judges that the chronological information in bold face is not directly relevant to the interpretation of the context and hence appears to stem from a foreign hand (appealing to Kurt Galling for support).  He also feels that the syntax is smoother without this information (p. 174). Wright argues that the date in 13:6b (his fifth stratum)—noting that Nehemiah had left Jerusalem in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes and returned to the king and then came back to Jerusalem some time afterward for a second term—is itself based on this very secondary information in 5:14 that he assigns to his fourth stratum..  The bottom line is that by literary critical judgment he dismisses the notion of Nehemiah’s governorship itself and its chronological data.  This makes it possible for him to locate the dispute with Eliashib in ch. 13 during the wall-building activities.  Only after all of these changes and deletions has he created a Nehemiah who simultaneously seeks the support of the leaders of the community in ch. 2 and severely criticizes them in ch. 13.  Nevertheless Wright argues that the reference to  12 years may be authentic, but indicating only the time of Nehemiah’s death.  In Wright’s reconstruction, the additions made by various redactors in chapters 5, 6 and 13 put the blame on the Judeans themselves for the situation of affliction and reproach that necessitated the building of the wall, and not the threat from foreign nations, as was true in chs. 2-4 (p. 176).  Moreover Wright argues that it was the nobles, rulers and the rest of the people in 4:8 and 13 who appointed Nehemiah governor and not Artaxerxes.  Would these people have dared to make such a move that could be construed as subverting the authority of Artaxerxes?  Wright concedes this objection but insists that the Hebrew text allows for several interpretations and “one cannot be certain that the Persian court appointed him.”  Nehemiah’s charge that his predecessors had laid heavy burdens on the people and Nehemiah’s generous provision of food are both taken as allusions to the reign of Solomon and are without historical importance.  Nehemiah’s acting out of the fear of God is construed as an allusion to the last words of David (2 Sam 23:3).  Wright therefore concludes:  “The institution of governor—if it ever existed before Nehemiah—was not firmly established in Judah until after Nehemiah, and he himself did not serve in this capacity” (p. 179).  Wright does not discuss the extensive epigraphic evidence assembled by Avigad and others that there were in fact governors of Yehud long before Nehemiah.

There is no question that Jacob Wright has made many astute observations about Nehemiah throughout this book, and no one can study Nehemiah in the future without attending to his work.  Nevertheless the case studies I have presented suggest that a number of his literary critical judgments might be called into question, and with them the sequencing of the seven strata in Nehemiah with the sections in Ezra that represent various attempts to work out the balance between Torah and Temple. 

Nevertheless, if early Judaism in the fifth and fourth centuries needed to work out the tensions between temple and Torah, the Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah Section of SBL should pay continued attention to the divergent methods practiced on both sides of the Atlantic and attempt to work out a modus vivendi in order to assess the potentially complementary contributions of our divergent methods  Perhaps this synthesis could be pursued with as much passion as Jacob Wright has detected in the composition history of Ezra-Nehemiah. 


[1] Centrality Practiced:  Jeruslem in the Religious Practice of Yehud and the Diaspora in the Persian Period (Atlanta;  Society of Biblical Literature, 2006).

[2] Rebuilding Identity.  The Nehemiah Memoir and its Earliest Readers.  (BZAW 348; Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter, 2005).

[3] This is a better name for the canonical text than the term Leningrad Codex that Melody Knowles occasionally uses.

[4] Less convincing, in my judgment, is the claim, p. 30.  that the Jewish builders in this verse asserted that they worshiped a different god than their adversaries from Judah and Benjamin

[5] Douglas Jones, “The Cessation of Sacrifice after the Destruction of the Temple in 586 B.C.,” JTS N.S. 14 (1963) 12-31.

[6] See also Hag 2:14.

[7] How they would have correlated animal sacrifice with Deuteronomy 12 before 407 is unclear.

[8] Ingrid Hjelm, The Samaritans and Early Judaism.  A Literary Analysis. ( JSOTSup 303; (Sheffield:  Sheffield Academic Press, 2000) and “What Do Samaritans and Jews Have in Common?  Recent Trends in Samaritan Studies,” CBR 3 (2005) 9-59.

[9] Diana Edelman, The Origins of the ‘Second’ Temple.  Persian Imperial Policy and the Rebuilding of Jerusalem. (London:  Equinox, 2005).

[10] Haggai, Zechariah 1-8 (AB 25B; Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1987), 316.

[11] Haggai and Zechariah 1-8 (OTL; Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984), 261-262.

[12] Ezra, Nehemiah (WBC 16; Waco, Tx:  Word Books, 1985), 216.

[13] In an Age of Prose:  A Literary Approach to Ezra-Nehemiah (Atlanta:  Scholars Press, 1988).

[14] Neh 5:7, 8, 13, 17; 13:9, 11, 19, 21, 22