What's EZRA and NEHEMIAH about?

Summary

These two books were originally one book that described how the Israelites rebuilt the temple and the city of Jerusalem after the people had been released from slavery in Babylon. Because the first part features Ezra's work and the second part features Nehemiah's work, over many centuries they became treated as two separate books, Ezra and Nehemiah, which is how we now have them in modern Bibles.

The original book was written about a hundred years after the return to Jerusalem from Babylon and is the last historical description of events in Jewish history included in the Bible. (Later events under the Greek and Roman empires are included in the Apocrypha.)

Jump to Nehemiah here.

What's EZRA about?

Ezra was a leader in re-building the temple which the Babylonians ruined when the people were taken into exile. The first half of the book describes how Cyrus released the people from Babylon and how they returned. They start to re-build the temple, but the people of Samaria, who had a rival temple on their mountain, complain to the emperor who stops the rebuilding of the temple. However Cyrus rescinds this order and the reconstruction starts again.

The second half of the book describes how the king in Babylon provides gold and silver for the temple, and how Ezra finds Levites in Babylon and brings them back to Jerusalem to become the priests and perform the sacrifices in the temple.

Toward the end of the book Ezra discovers that the Israelites who had not been taken into slavery had married non-Jewish women, and he has then divorce those women, so as to return the people to the original purity they had when they first arrived in the land after their escape from Egypt.

How does Ezra help us?

Greek rule was starting to be imposed on the Israelites around the time this book was written and so its themes relate to conflict with other Jews such as Samaritans and to trust that foreign rulers will be influenced by God to support Judaism, and that followers of God must have different standards than the surrounding cultures. We might read this book as a way of seeing how the ancient Jews approached those problems and it may inspire us to imagine how we could respond to parallel pressures in our time.

What's NEHEMIAH about?

Nehemiah, living in the Babylonian empire, hears that Jerusalem has no wall, and is therefore vulnerable to attack and to the temple being destroyed again. Nehemiah returns to Jerusalem and supervises the re-building of the walls. He discovers many of the people who had not been enslaved in Babylon had become lax in their commitment to the faith of the God of Israel, and he supervises their return to faithful living and worship.

How does Nehemiah help us?

Nehemiah is concerned that the Jewish faith be kept safe for the future and that the people be committed to the character of God, that we might describe as the priority of justice and inclusion for all. In our day his commitment to this task might suggest to us ways in which we might keep the faith secure for the future and help people be faithful in life and worship to the God whose death and resurrection we know in Jesus.