The Catholic Biblical Quarterly

Nehemiah is the second of Fried’s two-volume commentary, Ezra–Nehemiah. In Nehemiah, F. often refers to arguments that she made in Ezra: A Commentary (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2015), and the reader should be prepared to refer to the earlier volume with some frequency. The volumes distill decades of F.’s work on Ezra-Nehemiah into an easily accessible commentary format, though there is also much new material here, especially regarding the compositional history of Ezra-Nehemiah.

Perhaps the most controversial argument that F. offers in Nehemiah concerns her understanding of the so-called “Nehemiah Memoir.” F. agrees with recent scholarship that the first-person material in Nehemiah (chaps. 1–6, 12–13) is not of a single piece. However, rather than attributing the discontinuity in these chapters to generic differences, chronological gaps in composition, or gradual editorial activity, F. argues that this narrative unevenness is the result of an editor combining two distinct first-person accounts—what she calls “I” accounts—from two different individuals: the wall builder and the governor.

The first account, that of the wall builder, includes Nehemiah 2–4; 6:1–15; 12:27–43. “Nehemiah” is the protagonist of this narrative, though he is not named—the heading in Neh 1:1 is a late editorial addition. This “I” was never governor of Yehud, but only an official in the Persian court who was granted permission and resources to rebuild/restore Jerusalem’s city wall (Nehemiah 2). This account follows a traditional ancient Middle Eastern wall-building narrative (see Victor Hurowitz, I Have Built You an Exalted House: Temple Building in the Bible in the Light of Mesopotamian and North-West Semitic Writings [JSOTSup 115; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992]), but has been augmented by an editor to increase tension in the story. F. argues that this editor added scenes to make the wall builder more sympathetic to the audience and to increase drama prior to the completion of the wall-building project (e.g., the antagonism between the wall builder and local dignitaries in Neh 2:10, 19–20). These editorial additions were informed by Aristotle’s Poetics and by the Hellenistic poetic tragedy genre. F. does not provide an account for how a Judean might have encountered the Poetics, though her case for Ezra-Nehemiah reaching its final form during the Seleucid or Maccabean period perhaps assumes the possibility of this kind of interaction with Greek literary culture. Even if one is skeptical about the direct influence of the Poetics on Nehemiah, the turn to Aristotle allows F. to take the narratives in Nehemiah seriously as pieces of literature. This pushes her analysis of important scenes in Nehemiah beyond basic considerations of historical plausibility (though this is still an important element of her analysis) into productive conversations about the ideological goals of the work and potential effects for its intended audience. [End Page 371]

The second “I” account, essentially chaps. 5 and 13, details the actions undertaken by a governor of Yehud during the reign of Artaxerxes I. This figure, too, is unnamed in the text, but F. identifies him as Yeho‘ezer, a fifth-century Judean governor known from the Yehud stamp impressions (Oded Lipschits and David S. Vanderhooft, The Yehud Stamp Impressions: A Corpus of Inscribed Impressions from the Persian and Hellenistic Periods in Judah [Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011] 209–28). This narrative is not about wall building but about the reforms undertaken by the governor, including his relief of a significant tax burden on the population of Yehud (chap. 5) and his institution of new cultural and economic policies (chap. 13).

Fried’s new view of Nehemiah’s compositional history has the benefit of addressing several important interpretive cruxes in the text’s first-person narrative. These include the lack of an official gubernatorial appointment for the cupbearer/wall builder and the significant gap between the work of the wall builder in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes (2:1) and that of the governor in year 32 (5...