National and religious identity in crisis – Ezra & Nehemiah
If it wasn’t for the names of the biblical books, the title of this piece could look awfully like a contemporary headline. Yet in many other respects, neither Ezra nor Nehemiah feel particularly relevant for the contemporary world. Perhaps that’s why only one reading from these books crops up in the Sunday lectionary. Gustave Doré’s woodcut of the scene (1843: Public Domain) He imagines Ezra as a second Moses with stone tablets, rather than the scroll described in the story. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are heavily edited stories relating various aspects of how things went when people began returning from exile to the land they still saw as the focus of God’s promises. Although the books have been written together on a single scroll, and are therefore often treated together, it remains a matter of much speculation among historians and biblical scholars how they (and their different parts) interrelate. 1 These books are concerned with the restructuring of society, in ...