Slaves at Home

Ezra and Nehemiah each provide their own distinct reports of the Jews’ return from Babylonian exile. Even if the portrayal of this return as a “second exodus” is not a particular, literary concern in these books,¹ the narrative’s inclusion of elements like captivity, release, land resettlement, and covenant establishment certainly echo important features in the narrative of Israel’s exodus from Egypt.² Even so, Ezra and Nehemiah include in their portraits of the people’s experience of some “reviving” (מחיה) a stroke in which the people also found themselves still to be slaves (Ezra 9:8–9; cf. Neh 9:36).³

As a prime example of the people’s slavery in “the land that you gave to our fathers to eat its fruit and its goodness” (Neh 9:36; הארץ אשׁר־נתתה לאבתינו לאכל את־פריה ואת־טובה), “its increase goes to the kings whom you have set over us because of our sins” (Neh 9:37; ותבואתה מרבה למלכים אשׁר־נתתה עלינו בחטאותינו). This observation situates even the returned community as being, to some extent, still subject to the covenant’s curses (e.g., Deut 28:33, 51). Yet, the promise still stood of a day when Abraham’s children would again freely enjoy the produce of the land (Deut 30; Isa 55; cf. John 4:35; Rom 4:13; 10:1–17).

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1. Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1st American ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 634.

2. Cf. P. M. Venter, “Canon, Intertextuality and History in Nehemiah 7:72b–10:40,” HvTSt 65, no. 1 (2009): 161.

3. G. K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 745–46; N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God 1; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 268–79, 299–301; N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God 2; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 125–31, 428–30.