Ezra

Lisbeth Fried's commentary on Ezra is the first instalment of a projected
two-volume commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah. It is the first fulllength
scholarly commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah to be written since
1988 and takes advantage of recent results in archaeology, of recent
historical studies on the Persian Empire, and of recent studies of the
influence of Hellenistic textual and legal traditions on Judean
thought. It also draws extensively on the author's own research into
the mechanisms by which the Persian Empire dominated and controlled
its subject populations.
The present volume includes a new translation of the Book of Ezra,
plus annotations on each verse that compare and contrast the Greek,
Latin and Syriac variations, including the text of Greek Esdras A. It
also provides an extensive Introduction and chapter commentaries
that discuss larger historical and literary issues.
Fried concludes that Ezra-Nehemiah was written as one book at the
beginning of the Hellenistic period. Although written then, it was
formed from earlier texts: an Ezra memoir, a letter to Ezra from Artaxerxes
II, and a Nehemiah memoir. All of these have been heavily edited,
however. Fried concludes that both Ezra and Nehemiah were
Persian officials, Ezra a Persian episkopos, and Nehemiah a Persian
governor, and that both acted with the goals of their Persian overlords
in mind, not the goals of the subject Judean population. The
Judean author, writing under Hellenic domination, transformed
these men into Judean heroes in order to promote the novel idea of a
long tradition of foreign imperial support for local institutions-cultic,
legal and physical.
Fried's commentary promises to revolutionize how one reads the
book of Ezra.
This is the first volume in a new series of substantial works, Critical
Commentaries.