Ezra-Nehemiah
in Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary
Publisher
Smyth & Helwys
Published
11/1/2014
ISBN-13
978-1-57312-750-9
Ezra-Nehemiah describes events that occurred between 539 and 432 BCE, but the book itself was written between that latter date and about 200 BCE. Though it describes early events and perhaps incorporates authentic “memoirs” of Nehemiah, it also contains later lists, narratives, and thinking about that crucial century in the life of post-exilic Judah (or Yehud) and its neighbors. Ezra-Nehemiah dutifully records both the successes and the excesses of three waves of returnees. It opens with the efforts of early returnees to rebuild the altar at the site of the Jerusalemite temple in 538/7 and the rebuilding and dedication of the temple in 520 BCE. It records a second return under Ezra perhaps in 458, and it reaches its saddest moment in Ezra 9–10, when Ezra himself demands the divorce of returned exiles who had married local Yehudite women. Nehemiah completes the narrative of the reestablishment of exiled Jews with its discussion of the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem and other actions in 445/4 and 432 by the returnees to solidify their control over the temple, Jerusalem, and post-exilic Yehud.
Reviews
DavidH
June 2, 2026
June 2, 2026
Paul L. Redditt’s Ezra-Nehemiah is learned, readable, and often useful, especially in its attention to historical-critical issues and its willingness to face the ethical difficulty of Ezra 9–10 and Nehemiah 13. Yet compared with Williamson, Blenkinsopp, Eskenazi, and Harrington, its major weakness is that Redditt too often lets a modern ethical-theological verdict control the exegesis. He is right to be troubled by the expulsion of foreign wives and children, and right that the identity of these women may have included local Judeans or Israelites rather than simply pagan outsiders; but he overstates the case by branding the reform “heartless,” “morally repugnant,” even “sin,” and by reducing the book’s concern to returnee privilege, ethnic exclusion, or xenophobia. The better commentaries show that Ezra-Nehemiah is dealing with a fragile post-exilic community struggling to survive after catastrophe, preserve covenant identity under Persian rule, rebuild temple, people, and city, and guard against idolatrous assimilation in a world where religion, kinship, land, language, and child-rearing were inseparable. Harrington’s priestly reading of intermarriage as maʿal, a sacrilege against the holiness of the community, and Eskenazi’s larger reading of Ezra-Nehemiah as a carefully structured account of rebuilding “YHWH’s house” — temple, people, and Jerusalem — make Redditt’s interpretation look too narrow. His appeal to Isaiah 56, Ruth, and universal inclusion also risks a category error: those texts welcome foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, whereas Ezra-Nehemiah addresses marriages perceived to threaten covenantal identity and the next generation’s allegiance. Likewise, Redditt’s late Maccabean dating of the book’s final form seems too strong; later updating of lists does not require making the whole work a second-century composition. Most seriously, his Christian critique sometimes approaches a canon-within-the-canon method in which Ezra-Nehemiah is judged from above rather than interpreted within the full biblical witness; indeed, his language risks reviving the old Christian caricature of Second Temple Judaism as narrow, legalistic, and exclusivist. Redditt’s commentary is therefore stimulating and pastorally provocative, but it should be used with caution: it highlights real moral tensions, yet too often underreads the book’s holiness logic, covenantal urgency, communal agency, historical setting, and theological architecture.