2. The Contents. — These point to a time when Ch, Ezr, and Neh formed one continuous work, and the division into sections had not yet been made. Es A passes without a break from one book to another, and does not contain the redupli- cation whereby the last two verses of Ch are repeated as the first two of Ezra.
3. The Use of Es A by Jose/thus. — There is no certain evidence of his acquaintance with the other Gr. book, or of its existence before his time. This looks as if he were usin^ the only Gr. materials available to him ; that is, that m the LXX aa known to him this part of the Bible was repre- sented by Es A.
4. During the first five centuries the Christian Fathers quote the book with respect as canonical. It was included in Origen's Hexapla.
5. As shown above, it has in many places pre- served a better Heb. text than the LXX Ezra.
The Original Section (3'-5«).— The source of the story of the tliree pages at the court of Darius is unknown. In what language it was originally written is also doubtful ; but Ewald is prob. right in holding that while the main body of the book is a tr. from Heb., 'on the other hand the work from which he took the story about Zerubbabel was originally composed in Gr.' At any rate there are
ESDRAS, FIRST BOOK OF
ESDKAS, FIRST BOOK OF
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no clear traces of Hebraisms (Fritzsclie a»Iiluces 4* rd SUaia Totet dwit TdKTwv tuiv d5iKujv = i:2 Dp;;'? ■"'rV)* and the paronomasia ir{<riy Kui i<p«ny in 4*^ points to a Gr. original. The compiler seems to have been acquainted with traditions of Persian history. The account of Darius and Apame the dau};ht«r of Bartacus (4*, Jos. pives his name as 'PajStj'dicTjs, so the Latin versions Bezaces) is perhaps derived from some book of Persian court stories.* The presence of Zerubbabel at the court of Diirius is, of course, an anachronism : it was Cyrus who despatched him to Jerusalem. It is noticeable that in 5°, ace. to the most natural construction, it is Joachim the Bon of Zerubbabel wlio spake wise words before Darius. In 4°* the speaker is merely called 4 rawleKot {a name hardly suitable to i.), and at his first introduction in 4" the third speaker is identified in a parenthesis only 6 rplroj . . . oirbt /m-ir Zopo^ci,i(\, which is certainly a lat«r addition. This has led to the conjecture that Joachim was the hero of the story, and that there were two ex- peditions— one in tlie time of Cyrus led by Zerub- babel, one under Darius led by Joachim (Fritzsche and Keuss). But no Joachim is mentioned among the sons of Z. in 1 Ch 3". These inconsistencies certainly show the composite nature of the book. It would appear that an earlier Pers. story was adopted by the Jews of Alexandria and became attached to Zerubbabel ; the speakers in the original story were Persian courtiers (3* ol aiii)uiTo- <t>v\aK(t). Tue second of the theses maintained by the third speaker — the superiority of the truth — may al.so be a Jewish addition to the original, thougli the eulogy of truth would not be out of place in a Persian story, since the Persians were taught from boyhood ' to ride, to use the bow, and to ipeak the truth ' (Hdt. L 136).
The story !s told in what perhaps was tbonght a more pUaiible way in Josephns {Ant. xi. iii, 2). There Darius, onable to sleep, proposes a reward to that one of his three pajfea who StuJl i)€at prove his thesis : to the flrst he pives the tliesis, that * wine is the stronijest '; to the second, ' the king is the strongest '; to the third, * whether women are the strongest or truth ts stronger than they'T The speeches are held on the following day. In Es the king makes no promise of rewards ; the three pages su^'gest the idea to each other, and while he sleeps they each write the subject which he means to maintain, and put It under the king's pillow for him to find in the morning. The speeches l)efore the Pers. monarch are not unlike the answers of the 72 translators at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus, as described in the letter of Aristeas. The applause which CTeets the thlrtl speech (4*'), and the feo-iting for seven days
with music and ^ladneiw* (4i3), may be illustrated from that work. But there is hardly suflicient ground for saying, with Ewald, that * the book of Aristeas must have t)een already known to the author.' The story in Es is a composition of the same class, and probably of the same time as the Aristeas letter.
It shotild be noted that in the third speech there is an allusion to Gn2"(Es 4''" iydpurot Tdi- ^oin-oD warifxi irKaToXelrti . . . xal rpis Tr)v ISlav yvratxa coXXaroi).
Object of thk Book.— The body of the book appears, as has been shown, to be the earliest version of the work of the Chronicler. It was written to render Gr. -speaking Jews acquainted with the favour which through the Divine Provi- dence was once shown to their nation by foreign monarchs. The original section (3-4) is perhaps the nucleus of the whole, round which the rest is grouped. One object of the compiler was to give currency to this story, from whatever source, Persian or Jewish, he had derived it. He may also have hod an ulterior object in view. The exaggerated accounts of the munificence of Cyrus and Darius lead us to suppose that he aimed at