Bibliography
| Title: Die heilige Stadt in Esdras a und Esra-Nehemia: Zwei Konzeptionen der Wiederherstellung Israels Type: Book Year: 1997 Abstract: Begg, Christopher T. in: OTA 21.3 (1998), 537: "Like Jeremiah, Proverbs and Daniel, the Book of Ezra has been transmitted in two recensions: Ezra-Nehemiah (EN) and 1 Esdras (1E or Esdras a) in the LXX. Both editions overlap in the account of Zerubbabels Temple building and Ezra's mission. In addition to this common material, both versions contain Sondergut: IE prefixes 2 Chronicles 35-36 and includes the so-called guardsmen story, while EN contains the Nehemiah account about the reconstruction of Jerusalem, lacking in 1E. Another major difference is found within the common text: the Artaxerxes correspondence (Ezra 4:7-24) and Zerubbabels return from exile appear in reverse order in IE. For 200 years the question has been debated whether 1E represents an older stage in the literary development of EN, or whether it is a secondary compilation. The guardsmen story is an obvious interpolation in 1E, but this does not necessarily mean that the interpolator used EN as his basic text. He could just as well have used an edition of the book which was still attached to Chronicles and/or did not yet contain the Nehemiah Memoirs (NM). Scholars have always found it intriguing that IE offers a text sequence which does not split up the Ezra story into two parts (Ezra 7-10 and Nehemiah 8), via the intrusive NM, but makes Nehemiah 8 follow Ezra 10 directly. Josephus, who used IE in his Antiquities, is a crown witness for the fact that the Ezra story and the NM circulated for a long time independently of each other. Still, no conclusive evidence has been brought forward to prove whether 1E was original or secondary in omitting the NM. B's study limits itself to the problem of the original text sequence in the Ezra story and the original location of the Artaxerxes correspondence. A close look at the texts of 1E and MT Ezra reveals a number of significant variants in textual details between the two versions. These differences show that E offers a version of the Temple building and Ezra story which excludes the possibility of a following Nehemiah account. Moreover, the Ezra MT variants can, on text-critical grounds, be shown to be secondary adaptations motivated by the insertion of the NM. The same motivation brought about the displacement of the Artaxerxes correspondence in MT Ezra. Whereas the older edition of the restoration account (1E, excluding the guardsmen story) considered Temple and Torah as the essential things for Israel, the new edition (EN) added the claim for political sovereignty. The latter reworking seems to have taken place in the times of the Maccabees". |