Friday, 6 February 2015

Judaism, the First Phase: the Place of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Origins of Judaism,
Joseph Blenkinsopp, Eerdmans, 2009, page 162

Evaluating what happened in Israel during the late Persian period is difficult. Documentary evidence is relatively hard to come by. Once Josephus ran out of biblcal material to paraphrase, his dates and ascriptions become suspect by scholarship. Blenkinsopp summarises:

Ideallly, we would trace a continuous interpretive trajectory originating in the book and extending through the subsequent centuries, but ... for most of that period ... about two and a half centuries, we are traversing a bleak and mostly silent landscape as far as the history of Judaism is concerned.