The Hellenistic World and Rome
licly displayed throughout his kingdom: ‘‘Cyrus king of Persia says this
‘Yahweh, the God of Heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the
earth and has appointed me to build him a Temple in Jerusalem, which
is in Judah. Whoever there is among you of all his people, may his God
be with him! Let him go up.’ ’’^8As is evident, Chronicles could not have been written as it stands before the
Achaemenid period, and it is sometimes argued that it was written, or edited,
as late as the early Hellenistic period. The same must apply to the books
of Ezra (which begins with a slightly extended version of the same procla-
mation by Cyrus) and of Nehemiah, which between them relate, within a
structure which is chronologically confused and not mutually related as be-
tween the two books, the restoration of the Temple and the re-establishment
of Jewish worship and observances under the Achaemenids, thus taking the
story to some (now indeterminable) point in the fifth century.^9
An alternative version of the same story (but equally confused in its con-
ception of the sequence of Persian kings) was constructed at some time in
the Hellenistic period, using material found also in Chronicles, Ezra, and
Nehemiah, and provides a continuous narrative going from Josiah to Ezra.
This is the important and highly puzzling text called Esdras, which may
have been composed originally in Hebrew or Aramaic, but certainly existed
in Greek by the time of Josephus, who used it for hisAntiquities.^10
Its significance in this context is simply as another sign of awareness within
Jewish culture of the national tradition as a historical narrative, and as one
whose course had been dependent on the attitudes and actions of a succes-
sion of external rulers. Such an awareness was quite compatible with a lack of
complete clarity as to which ruler had succeeded which, or even as to which
empire had been which. It was this sometimes confused impression of a se-
quence of empires and rulers which provided the framework for a group of
three religiously inspired historical novels, one of which, Esther, was to be
incorporated in the Hebrew Bible, while Tobit and Judith appeared in the
Christian Bible in Greek, which we refer to for convenience as the Septua-
gint.^11 (In consequence, all three appear in Roman Catholic Bibles, but only
. Chron. :–, trans.New Jerusalem Bible.
. See O. Eissfeldt,The Old Testament(), – (Chronicles); – (Ezra and
Nehemiah); H. G. M. Williamson,The New Century Bible Commentary: and Chronicles
(); and by the same author,World Biblical CommentaryXVI:Ezra, Nehemiah().
. For a detailed survey of the problems, see Schürer, Vermes, and Millar,HistoryIII.,
–.
. See the fundamental article by M. Hengel, to which I am extremely indebted, ‘‘Die