ABSTRACT
My study of Ezra and Nehemiah has had two main aims: (1) to ask what the books say, and (2) to investigate how their message—their picture of the actions of the Jewish people and their leaders in the first part of the Persian period—relates to history as reconstructed by a critical historian. In some ways, this has been done many times before, but in other ways it is a fairly radical departure from previous studies. Most studies have not tried to achieve both aims. It is traditional for commentaries to discuss the relationship of Ezra and Nehemiah to history, but they often do this by first trying to reconstruct the literary and textual history of the book. Thus, the question of what the books actually say in their present form is often by-passed. Those who concentrate on the final form of the books, on the other hand, are usually not interested in the historical question (or they read history directly from the texts according to a naive fundamentalist perspective, which is much the same thing).
