Settling the Land a Second Time—Ezra–Nehemiah

IN SOME WAYS, Ezra–Nehemiah is a companion piece to Esther, another story of Jews living as vassals of the Persian Empire, although it has none of the patent absurdity of Esther. Nehemiah’s story, like Esther’s, starts in a Persian court, but most of the composite story takes place in Jerusalem. Cyrus “the Great,” the first ruler from the Achaemenid dynasty, in the first year after his conquest of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE issued a decree that allowed Jews to rebuild the temple (Ezra 1:1–4). The decree marked a policy of granting provinces a greater measure of local and regional control in exchange for cooperation with imperial economic and political goals. The book covers a period that exceeds the life of the two individuals for whom Ezra–Nehemiah is named. Four or five Persian kings are mentioned—Cyrus, Darius, Ahasuerus/Xerxes, Artaxerxes I, and maybe Artaxerxes II (Ezra 4:5–7; 6:14)—whose reigns span more than a century (c. 538–400 BCE). The book makes no consistent attempt to specify the chronology. The so-called Nehemiah memoir is considered by some the oldest and most accurately historical part of the book, recording the experience of a highly placed imperial agent. It suggests that some twenty years into the reign of Artaxerxes I (445 BCE), Jerusalem was still largely in ruins (Neh 2:3), even if the temple had been reconstructed two or three generations earlier (c. 515 BCE) at the urging of the prophet Haggai....

The Wisdom of Lament—Psalms

MANY READERS WHO first encounter the book of Psalms in its entirety—and not just isolated psalms in worship—are unprepared for the predominance of lament. Although the book as a whole bears the Hebrew title Tehilim, “Praisings,” the first half is dominated by cries of pain and appeals for deliverance. Many of these psalms are not carefully modulated expressions of agony and outrage, and for that reason, they tend not to be part of the functional theology of either church or synagogue. This is a sad irony, since the angry psalms are among those that may be most useful for pastoral ministry, as well as for spiritual growth and healing. As Calvin observed, the emotional honesty of psalms is a protection against and remedy for “that most baneful infection, hypocrisy”;...

Justice and Intimacy—Micah and Hosea

LIKE AMOS, HOSEA AND MICAH were independent prophets, making public statements in poetic form, saying things that people did not want to hear but could not forget. Hosea was apparently a native of the northern kingdom; he began to prophesy during the reign of Jeroboam II (c. 750 BCE) and evidently continued until approximately the time of the fall of Samaria in 722....

The Sovereignty of the Prophetic Word—1 Kings 13–21

STARTING AT THE very end of Solomon’s reign, the center of gravity shifts from kings to prophets; the narrative refocuses attention away from palace intrigue and royal enterprises, including even war, as primary shapers of history. Rather, what comes to the fore is the sovereignty of the prophetic word itself, operating in ways that may go beyond the intentions and hopes of the prophet and sometimes run directly counter to them. The large body of narrative from Joshua to Kings is traditionally known as the ...

At-Onement with YHWH and with Land—Leviticus 16–27

THE GOAL OF Leviticus is that Israel should live out its Sinai-based vocation to be a “holy people” (Exod 19:6). Its many ritual prescriptions and regulations for ordering daily living, punctuated with just one narrative (Lev 8–10), are a social imaginary, a highly concrete way of conceiving how Israel might organize itself as a community capable of hosting in its midst the radical holiness of God. From the perspective of this book, God’s immediate presence to Israel is a daily reality, not just in the wilderness but for all time: “I will go about in the midst of you . . . ” (26:12). Living with YHWH in its midst is both opportunity and threat. This is the condition of Israel’s own holiness, yet it is a highly volatile condition that can turn, suddenly or gradually, in the direction of disaster. The core problem with which this book contends is the potential incompatibility between God and Israel, the incommensurability between divine holiness and Israel’s own capacity to overcome human frailty—be it unwitting error, deliberate sin, or the tendency toward death that is ever-present in our bodies—and enter fully into the holy life of God....

Exodus

Together the two parts of Exodus—Israel in Egypt and in Sinai—form one of the master narratives of the Bible. The first part pits against each other two opposite responses to YHWH’s self-revelation: while Moses yields to God’s will, Pharaoh consistently resists manifestations of God’s presence and power. The second part introduces three elements of Israel’s formation as a people. The gift of manna establishes a godly food economy. The treatment of covenant provides theological reflection on divine sovereignty, divine dangerousness, the goodness of creation, and the problem of slavery. Finally, the instructions for the building of the tabernacle and its completion show Israel’s initial resistance to God’s commands and their eventual obedience; it also provides a humanizing counterpoint to Israel’s slave labor in Egypt.

Complementarity and Rupture—Genesis 2:4–11:32

AS THE GENESIS narrative unfolds, things become more complicated, both literarily and humanly. The literary complication is that readers must attend to the interactions among multiple plot lines and strands of tradition, discerning patterns that stretch across multiple chapters. The human complication is that the first large-scale pattern that emerges entails widespread rupture, instigated by humans, of the initial harmony in God’s creation....

Reading the Story Once More—1–2 Chronicles

NARRATIVELY SPEAKING, 1–2 Chronicles moves back in time, long before Ezra–Nehemiah—indeed, to the beginning of biblical time, to Adam, whose name is the first word in the book. At the other end, Chronicles draws to a close with exactly the same event and even the same words with which Ezra–Nehemiah begins: Cyrus’s decree that YHWH has charged him to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem (2 Chr 36:22–23; cf. Ezra 1:1–3). Accordingly, the Talmud asserts that Ezra wrote most of Chronicles, and Nehemiah finished it (Bava Batra 15a). In 1832, Leopold Zunz, the first scholar of Jewish studies as a modern academic discipline, argued that Ezra–Nehemiah and Chronicles are two parts of a single work. Although that view prevailed for more than a century, in the last fifty years it has been forcefully challenged. On the basis of the two books’ different linguistic usages and theological perspectives, most would now see them as separate compositions. Ezra–Nehemiah may have been among the literary sources used by the author of Chronicles, and likely both were subsequently reworked as they were synchronized into the final account of people and events running from Adam to the restoration community in Jerusalem....

Surviving the Furnace of History—Daniel

LIKE THE SCROLL of Esther, Daniel is a “hidden transcript”1 within the Bible—a serious yet playful piece of literature that speaks from the perspective of those on the underside of harsh political, military, and cultural domination. Following in a pattern of biblical history that begins with Pharaoh and reaches its acme with Haman, the enemy of Queen Esther and the Jews, the book of Daniel shows how the empire’s subjugation of this particular people turns, with remarkable ease and no clear logic, into determination to wipe them out. This book has the overt theological dimension that Esther lacks; rather than showing the mobilization of the Jews against those who seek to kill them, the book of Daniel envisions how “the Most High God” (Dan 5:18, 21; cf. 4:21, 22, 29 Heb., 4:24, 25, 32 Eng., etc.) and the heavenly powers will intervene—at some not clearly specified time in the future—on behalf of the threatened people....

Isaiah

Isaiah is the most literarily complex of the prophetic books, and the one with the richest afterlife in both Jewish and Christian traditions. First Isaiah asserts the radical implications of YHWH’s sovereignty—a core political concept for Judah and “many peoples.” The canonical “vision of Isaiah” expands vastly in Second and Third Isaiah, which differ drastically in their tones. Second Isaiah represents a new mode of prophecy, designed specifically to counter the despair of the Judean exiles. Third Isaiah, addressed to the disillusioned and divided community that is reestablishing itself in Judah and Jerusalem under Persian oversight, is prophecy for the in-between times, and that may be its value for contemporary preachers.