“These Were Their Number”

Chapter 3 conducts a detailed study of the archival forms of the citations in Ezra-Nehemiah. It reviews the three major types of cited documents in these texts—imperial decrees, letters, and lists of people, places, and objects—arguing that through these citations, Ezra-Nehemiah takes on the look of an archive. This archival form explains the otherwise uneven and disruptive collection of documents that pervade the book, disrupting narrative coherence. The chapter argues that the act of citation is less about authorizing this account or symbolizing the fulfillment of imperial or prophetic promises and much more about the reestablishing a community through building an archive. Citation provides a way to assemble an archive made entirely out of text. This is a phenomenon termed “archival historiography.”

Archival Representations

Chapter 2 conducts a detailed analysis of how the act of collection works within the narrative portions of Ezra-Nehemiah, defining the archive by surveying various types of collections and their use in these texts. Of these, collections of documents are the most potent and politically vexed within the narrative. Archives arise in Ezra-Nehemiah as both formidable and malleable imperial institutions, contributing equally to the obstruction and advancement of Judean hopes. In Ezra-Nehemiah, and in Ezra 4–6 in particular, the imperial archive is a powerful tool that is wielded for and against the Judeans’ recovery efforts. This chapter establishes the archive as a cipher of the text’s complex and competitive relationship with imperial power.

Epilogue

This chapter examines the broader implications of the intersection between text and archive. It compares the term “archival historiography” with other iterations of the archiving styles in literature, considers other biblical literature that might be illuminated by the term, and explores how thinking critically about the connection between space and text might reshape the means by which we evaluate literature, ancient and modern.

Resisting Oblivion

Chapter 4 compares a phenomenon, termed “archival historiography,” with the historiographical forms exhibited by several versions of the story of Esther. This comparison, made more complex by Esther’s multiple Greek versions and significant later additions, shows that Esther approaches archival form, without fully imitating it. This similarity is more apparent in the extant Greek versions of Esther than in the Bible’s Hebrew text, as the former adds citations of documents that the Hebrew version lacks. The differences between Esther’s and Ezra-Nehemiah’s relationships with documents can be explained through each story’s disposition toward their colonial contexts. In short, while Ezra-Nehemiah imagines survival based on textual gathering and reclamation, Esther pins its hopes on textual counterclaim and dissemination.

Introduction

The style of Ezra-Nehemiah has confounded generations of readers. This chapter reviews the ways in which biblical scholars over the last century have maligned this text, and outlines the author’s argument that the concept of an archive forms an alternative way to encounter it.

Reading Scriptures as Spaces

Chapter 5 returns to the question of what may be accomplished by the performance, as it were, of archival historiography. This chapter argues that Ezra-Nehemiah’s archival historiography both signals and, by virtue of its collection, performs movement toward sociopolitical recovery after the losses of exile. The narrative of Ezra-Nehemiah deals heavily in loss. Through citation, however, its archival form becomes a dynamic tool in recovery efforts. Reassembling a collection through texts becomes a critical innovation on that path toward re-collecting—and, in some cases, re-creating—memory. In Ezra-Nehemiah, archive becomes the historiographical script that choreographs the recovery of memory and reveals a resuscitated political body after the losses of exile. In this way, the concept of archival historiography enables us to see modes of history writing beyond the binaries of narrative coherence and incoherence.

A Tear in the Fabric of Time

This chapter presents the archive as a critical feature of the ancient Near Eastern political landscape. The need to collect and preserve documents is endemic to many first millennium empires, not only for pragmatic purposes of organizing information, but in order to emblemize cultural power. This ancient symbolism of power through the archive is comparable, though not identical, to contemporary notions of archive, especially within literary and postcolonial discourses. The point is not that the communities that produced Ezra-Nehemiah replicated such power on an imperial scale but rather that archives—on a variety of scales and in a range of forms—preserve, and indeed produce, institutional memory and signal cultural vitality.