Sunday, 25 January 2015

Judaism, the First Phase: the Place of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Origins of Judaism,
Joseph Blenkinsopp, Eerdmans, 2009, page 115

Did the people co-operate with this golah group grab for rights and status? The degree of intermarriage, family-linkage, patronage and othe connections were very much the norm in the Jewish world of the time.

The priests and laymen, lowly born and aristocrats, goldsmiths, apothecaries and merchants who worked, voluntarily or otherwise, on repairing the wall (Neh 3:1-32), the common people and their wives who complained about their desperate economic conditions (5:1-5(, the Jews whose children couldn't speak Hebrew (13:23-24) remind the reader that the majority of Jewish people in the province at that time had very different ideas from those of Ezra and Nehemiah about what was or was not essentially implied in being Jewish.

Not perhaps the picture that the normal reading of Ezra and Nehemiah would suggest.