Ezra
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Summary
The historical Ezra was a priestly scribe who is thought to have led about 5,000 Israelite exiles living in Babylon to their home city of Jerusalem in 459 BCE. Many scholars credit him as the author of the Book of Ezra and the Book of 1 Chronicles in the Bible.
Sources
Unless otherwise specified, all historical information about Ezra in this article is derived from the last four chapters of the Book of Ezra, and Chapter 8 of the Book of Nehemiah. More general historical information about the people and places Ezra would have interacted with is available at Israelites.
Ezra's accomplishments
Ezra was either the son or grandson of the Biblical character Seraiah (2 Kings 25:18-21) and a lineal descendant of Phinehas, the son of Aaron (Ezra 7:1-5). In the seventh year of the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus (see also Darius I of Persia), Ezra obtained leave to go to Jerusalem and to take with him a company of Israelites (Ezra 8). Artaxerxes showed great interest in Ezra's undertaking, granting him "all his requests," and giving him gifts for the house of God. Ezra assembled a band of approximately 5,000 exiles to go to Jerusalem. They rested on the banks of the Ahava for three days and organized their four-month march across the desert.
No record exists for the fourteen years between 459 BCE, when Ezra is thought to have organized the ecclesiastical and civil affairs of the Israelite nation, and 445 BCE, when Nehemiah first appears in the Bible's chronology. Nehemiah's first recorded act was to rebuild the ruined wall of the city. After this reconstruction, a great group of people gathered in Jerusalem to dedicate the wall. On the appointed day, Ezra and his assistants read the Torah aloud to the whole population. According to the text, a great religious awakening occurred. For successive days, beginning on Rosh Hashanah, the people rejoiced in the holy days of the month of Tishri. Ezra read the entire scroll of the Torah to the people, and he and other scholars and Levites explained and interpreted the deeper meanings and applications of the Torah to the assembled crowd. These festivities culminated in an enthusiastic and joyous seven-day celebration of the Festival of Sukkot, concluding on the eighth day with the holiday of Shemini Atzeret. On the twenty-fourth day, immediately following the holidays, they held a solemn assembly, fasting and confessing their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. Then, they renewed their national covenant to follow the Torah and to observe and fulfill all of the Lord's commandments, laws and decrees (Neh. 10:30). Abuses were rectified, and arrangements for the temple service were completed.
Relation to the Book of Ruth
According to many scholars, the Book of Ruth was originally a part of the Book of Judges, but it was later made into a separate book. Its opening verse explicitly places it during the time period of the Judges, and its language and description seem to make the authorship contemporary with that period. On the other hand, the message of the book, which shows acceptance of marrying converts to Judaism, has been used to suggest that the book was written during the early days of the Persian period. At that time, Ezra condemned intermarriages and, according to his eponymous book, forced the Israelites to abandon their non-Jewish wives who did not convert. According to this theory, the Book of Ruth was written in response to Ezra's reform and in defense of these marriages. More likely, the book was a response to critics of King David, who contested his qualifications as a Jew due to his Moabite ancestry. In that context, the book uses the precedent set by a Jewish court, led by Boaz, to demonstrate that a Moabitess could convert and be a member of the Children of Israel.Place in editing the Torah and Bible
According to Rabbinic Jewish tradition, Ezra collected and arranged some relatively minor books that today form part of the canon of the Hebrew Bible. Traditional Jewish sources do not mention any process of fundamental editing or redacting of the Chumash, or Five Books of Moses. Rather, the aggada suggests that Ezra and the Men of the Great Assembly edited such works as Daniel, Esther and Ezekiel (Bava Batra 14b). The Apocryphal book of II Esdras (the Apocalypse of Ezra, which is also known as IV Ezra) tells us that Ezra wrote 94 Books in 40 days; 24 of those Books were to distributed among the people and the other 70 were to given to the wise alone.According to some Biblical scholars, Ezra did play a fundamental role in the compilation of nearly all parts of the Hebrew Bible, including the Five Books of Moses. According to this theory, the documentary hypothesis, Ezra is thought to have interspersed various primary texts with occasional additions of his own that were intended to help reconcile apparent contradictions among the original texts. Discussion of the merits of the documentary hypothesis can be found in works by Rabbi David Weiss Halivni such as Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (Westview Press, 1997), and Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (Oxford University Press, 1998), as well as in works such as "Who Wrote the Bible?" (Harper San Francisco, 1997 reprint) by Richard Elliot Friedman.
Ezra in the Qur'an
Ezra is also mentioned in the Muslim Qur'an as Uzair "9:30: The Jews call 'UZAIR a son of Allah, and the Christians call Jesus the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah's curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!" There is historical evidence that some Jews may have referred to Ezra as the son of Allah: the Encyclopaedia Judaica states, "H. Z. Hirschberg proposed another assumption, based on the words of Ibn Hazm, namely, that the 'righteous who live in Yemen believed that 'Uzayr was indeed the son of Allah.' According to other Muslim sources, there were some Yemenite Jews who had converted to Islam who previously had believed that Ezra was the messiah.Ezra is also mentioned in the Hadith of seeing God as clear as the sun.
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