Assessing Historical Authenticity of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible

Many biblical scholars argue that biblical historical narratives (think things like Kings) were written, or for some scholars made up, years after the fact. Certainly in their current form, they can date no earlier than "the thirty-seventh year of the captivity of Jehoiachin" (2 Kings 25:27) about 561 B.C. Some scholars, nevertheless date them to the Persian period or Hellenistic period rather than the Neo-Babylonian period. The claim is that Kings presents a fictive narrative made up years after the fact to provide Judah with a national history that it never had.

What does a fictive narrative put together years after the fact look like? The apocryphal book of 1 Esdras is a good candidate. I am comfortable with a Hellenistic date for 1 Esdras but am willing to consider other options. I will briefly summarize the narrative adding actual historical dates in parentheses.

• The narrative begins when "Josiah (640-609 B.C.) conducted the Passover to his Lord in Jerusalem." (1 Esdras 1:1).


• Then "Pharaoh, king of Egypt, came to wage war in Carchemesh on the Euphrates" and Josiah was killed (1 Esdras 1:23-29). The source for this is the book of Kings (1 Esdras 1:31).


• Then Jehoahaz (609 B.C.) became king of Judah (1 Esdras 1:32).


• Then Jehoiakim (609-598 B.C.) became king of Judah (1 Esdras 1:37).


• "Against him arose Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon" (1 Esdras 1:38).


• So Zedekiah (597-586 B.C.) was appointed king over Judah (1 Esdras 1:44).


• In the first year of the reign of Cyrus (585-550 B.C.) as king of Persia (1 Esdras 2:1).


• Then came the reign of Artaxerxes I (465-424 BC) as king of Persia (1 Esdras 2:12).


• Then Darius (550-486 B.C.) ruled over the Persian empire (1 Esdras 3:1).

The author of 1 Esdras cannot get the reigns of the Persian rulers in proper order. The only place where he gets the rulers in the right order is when he is relying on the book of Kings, which he cites as a source.

This can be contrasted with the order of Assyrian rulers in the books of Kings:

• First comes the reign of Pul who is also called Tiglath-pileser (745-727 B.C.) (2 Kings 15:19, 29; 16:7, 10).


• Second comes Shalmaneser V (727-722 B.C.) (2 Kings 17:3; 18:9).


• Third comes the reign of Sennacherib (705-681 B.C.) (2 Kings 18:13; 19:16, 20, 36; cf. Isaiah 36:1; 37:17, 21, 37).


• Then comes the reign of Esarhaddon (681-669 B.C.) (2 Kings 19:37; cf. Isaiah 37:38).

The book of Kings gets the Assyrian rulers in the correct order even though, when its final form was written, the Assyrian empire no longer existed (and had not for at least a couple of generations), nor did its records (which were discovered over two millennia later in situ). Given the hash of history that 1 Esdras presents us with, why would we expect that the writer of Kings would get the order of an earlier dead empire correct if he did not have access to more or less accurate historical records?

Sorting Out the Ezras

The nomenclature of the various Ezras can be confusing. This is because the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, and the Vulgate all use similar names in different ways to refer to the same set of texts.

From the Hebrew Bible point of view
Ezra is 2 Esdras 1-10 in the Septuagint and 1 Ezra in the Vulgate.
Nehemiah is 2 Esdras 11-23 in the Septuagint and 2 Ezra in the Vulgate.

From the Septuagint point of view
1 Esdras is 3 Ezra in the Vulgate.
2 Esdras 1-10 is Ezra in the Hebrew Bible and 1 Ezra in the Vulgate.
2 Esdras 11-23 is Nehemiah in the Hebrew Bible and 2 Ezra in the Vulgate.

From the Vulgate point of view
1 Ezra is Ezra in the Hebrew Bible and 2 Esdras 1-10 in the Septuagint.
2 Ezra is Nehemiah in the Hebrew Bible and 2 Esdras 11-12 in the Septuagint.
3 Ezra is 1 Esdras in the Septuagint.

Working among the Bible versions in Ezra is thus particularly confusing.

Unusual Marriage Arrangements

At the end of 1 Esdras is a remarkable passage. A group of people, including many priests, approaches Ezra and says:

We are sinning against the Lord and we have married foreign wives for the nations of the land (1 Esdras 8:89).

The problem is actually with the word I have translated as married in the quotation. The word is συνῳκίσαμεν which actually means to cohabit or to shack up.

Later Ezra tells them:

You have worked iniquity by cohabiting (συνῳκίσατε) with foreign wives and added sin to Israel (1 Esdras 9:7).

The author (I am not certain that 1 Esdras was translated) refuses to acknowledge that the individuals were married (although it slips through in 1 Esdras 9:12), and so uses the verb to cohabit instead in an effort to portray the relationship as illegitimate. The sin is having any sort of relationship with a Gentile rather than the nature of the relationship. The author of 1 Esdras views being a Gentile as a greater sin than having illegitimate sexual relations. The solution proposed is for the men to divorce the women and disown their children (1 Esdras 9:9, 17-36). Even the priests are pardoned if "they divorced them and their children" (1 Esdras 9:36).

The Book of Mormon takes a different view of this sort of situation (Jacob 2:23-35; Alma 39:5).

From the apocryphal Ezra's point of view mass divorce was a better arrangement. Somehow I doubt that the wives and children thought so.

Lector

The scribe Ezra (or Esdras in Greek) makes his first appearance in the Septuagint book bearing his name in the eighth or penultimate chapter. There is introduced as a "priest and reader of the law of the Lord" (1 Esdras 8:8).

The phrase "reader of the law of the Lord" is of some interest. The term translated here as reader is ἀναγνώστην. This same term is used hundreds of years later by the Christians as an ecclesiastical term for an office in the Church. The Latin word is the one used for the duty, lector. The lector then had very much the same task that Ezra himself had: to read scripture to the people.

So here is another early Christian institution that has its roots in the Old Testament.

I am a Child of God in the Septuagint

When the Samaritan authorities asked the returning Jews why they were building a temple, the Jews, according to 1 Esdras, responded:

We are the children of Jehovah who built heaven and earth (1 Esdras 6:12).

The Greek actually has an ambiguous term, παῖδες, in this passage. In English we have to choose how to translate this ambiguous term. Do we choose children or servants? The original authors probably understood it as servants rather than sons, but by the time of Jesus such passages were often understood as sons rather than servants. The Greek supports either understanding.

The Battle of the Rhetoricians

In 1 Esdras 3-4, Darius who had been eating and drinking, sets up a contest of rhetoricians:

Each of us will present an argument about what is most compelling, and the one whose account appears the wisest, Darius will give him a great gift (1 Esdras 3:5)

The whole trope of a rhetorical contest has deep roots in ancient Mesopotamia, being a popular genre for both Sumerian and Akkadian rhetors, but it is most known from Greek and Roman uses and abuses. The contest in Esdras seems to owe more to the Greco-Roman style contests.

The first rhetor insists that the most powerful influence over men is wine (1 Esdras 3:17-24). His arguments sound like a advertisement for the Word of Wisdom:

All men who drink it err in judgment (1 Esdras 3:18).

And when he wakes from wine, he cannot remember anything he has done (1 Esdras 3:23).

The second rhetor argues that the most powerful influence over men is the king (1 Esdras 4:1-12). After all, whatever he commands just or unjust is done.

The third rhetor argues that the most powerful influence over men is women (1 Esdras 4:13-32). For those who think that the ancient world was filled with misogynist brutes, This passage is well worth the read.

Zerubbabel argues that the most powerful influence over men is the truth (1 Esdras 4:34-41). His argument is that:

Wine is unjust; kings are unjust; women are unjust; all the children of men are unjust; and all their works are unjust; such are all things. But the truth is not among them, and they are destroyed in their iniquity (1 Esdras 4:37).

(The Greek uses the same term for both iniquity and unjust.)

Zerubbabel wins the contest. His gift for winning is to be transferred to Coile-Syria and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.

The choice of things that influence men is interesting: wine, women, rulers, and truth. Darius is depicted as an idealist because truth probably has the least actual practical influence in human affairs.

Cry "Apostasy!" and Let Slip the Dogs of War

The second chapter of Esdras in the Septuagint is remarkable for its compression of history. It begins with Cyrus (585-550 B.C.) allowing the Jews to return and build a temple (1 Esdras 2:1-11 = Ezra 1:1-11). Then it shifts to events in the reign of Artaxerxes I (465-424 BC) about a century later (1 Esdras 2:12-26 = Ezra 4:6-24). The third chapter of Esdras begins with the reign of Darius (550-486 B.C.) leaping backward in time. The chronological jumps are disorienting unless one is familiar with some basic Persian history.

During the reign of Artaxerxes, attempts to build the temple were delayed when Rehum and Shimshai wrote to the king saying, among other things:

The Jews have come up from you to us, coming to Jerusalem they have founded the apostate (ἀποστάτιν) and wicked city (1 Esdras 2:14 = Ezra 4:12).

The Aramaic term translated by Greek ἀποστάτιν is mārādtā', which means rebellion or disobedience. The Samaritan leaders accused the Jews of being apostate, when they were actually following an old and established decree of the Persian king. But just as there arose a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph (Exodus 1:8), so these rulers either did not know about the decree (it had been nearly a century) or refused to recognize it and hoped everyone else had forgotten about it. They were temporarily successful and got the work on the temple to stop until the ruler changed (1 Esdras 2:26). The interesting thing is that the Samaritans were actually in rebellion against the earlier royal decree but managed to persuade the powers that be that the Jews were the ones in apostasy rather than themselves. It worked for a time but not in the long run.

Esdras 1

Because of the promise that extra scripture would be forthcoming in 2 Nephi 29, Latter-day Saints sometimes cast about for additional scripture. I have dealt with some of the places that they search elsewhere, but sometimes instead of far off locations, they need only look closer to home.

The Septuagint version of Ezra has an extra chapter at the beginning of the text that is not in the Hebrew Bible. It is a historical overview that covers from Josiah through the Babylonian captivity.

Of course, the sections that are in the Septuagint that are not in the Hebrew Bible are usually called the apocrypha so I suppose that D&C 91 applies to the first chapter of Esdras in the Septuagint too.