A STUDY COMMENTARY ON EZRA-NEHEMIAH
By Gregory Goswell
EP Books. 456 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978 0 852 349 861
This is a scholarly book; note it is ‘Ezra-Nehemiah’, not ‘Ezra and Nehemiah’. Following the ancient sources – the Babylonian Talmud, the Septuagint, Josephus – Goswell treats them as one book.
However, even this combined title, he maintains, ‘subverts the teaching of the book that would focus on the part played by the people rather than the leaders’.
Ezra-Nehemiah is the heroic story of how a relatively small number of returning exiles rebuilt the temple, then the walls of Jerusalem, amidst much hostility. Gosling demonstrates convincingly how the people are the real heroes: ‘This book is about them and about what ordinary men and women can do when God is motivating them’. He points out, for example, that in Nehemiah 2.18 it is the people who say, ‘Let us arise and build’. In Nehemiah 8.1 it is the people who ask Ezra to read the Law. Ultimately, however, they fail to live up to their own promises.
Many other themes are also dealt with, including the relationship of Israel with the Persian kings, and the nature of Jerusalem as a holy city. Gosling regards the book as ‘non-messianic’ in the sense that it gives no hint of a Davidic King who is yet to come. He nonetheless makes many excellent applications to the church today.
