Lisbeth Fried\'s Commentary on Ezra is the first instalment of a projected two-volume Commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah.
Fried\'s Commentary promises to revolutionize how one reads the book of Ezra..
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 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.
All of these have been heavily edited, however.
Although written then, it was formed from earlier texts: an Ezra memoir, a letter to Ezra from Artaxerxes II, and a Nehemiah memoir.
Fried concludes that Ezra-Nehemiah was written as one book at the beginning of the Hellenistic period.
It also provides an extensive Introduction and chapter commentaries that discuss larger historical and literary issues.
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 draws extensively on the author\'s own research into the mechanisms by which the Persian Empire dominated and controlled its subject populations.
It is the first full-length 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.
Lisbeth Fried\'s Commentary on Ezra is the first instalment of a projected two-volume Commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah
