Retrofitting Jerusalem: Conceptions of Space, Identity, and Power in Ezra-Nehemiah

Ezra-Nehemiah appears as a single book in the Jewish canonical tradition, and scholarly consensus since Tamara Cohn Eskenazi's In an Age of Prose has likewise leaned toward treating the book as a literary and ideological unity. I challenge this consensus. I argue that Ezra and Nehemiah, though they are compositionally interrelated, present largely incommensurate representations of Judah's restoration. I use spatial theory to highlight the ideological fissures in Ezra-Nehemiah. By studying the conceptual spatiality of Ezra-Nehemiah, I am able to compare and contrast the representations of Jerusalem in relation to the world around it across the book of Ezra-Nehemiah. The two devices that unify Ezra-Nehemiah are the book's conceptions of the city of Jerusalem in relation to empire and the book's articulations of the boundaries of the community that inhabits the city. Four distinct and internally coherent conceptual spatialities emerge, and these correspond roughly with the four major compositional strata proposed in the redactional analyses of Kratz and Wright: Ezra 1-6, Ezra 7-10, Neh 1-6, and Neh 7-13.;The book of Ezra limits the cultic community around Yhwh's temple to returnees from the Babylonian Judean diaspora, and it idealizes open-ended imperial domination. Through their written edicts, Persian emperors act as Yhwh's agents, sponsoring the reconstruction and beatification of Yhwh's temple, ensuring that its cult is performed according to his standards, and protecting the Judean community from outside interference. The Judeans, by relinquishing any claim to political autonomy, guarantee the sanctity of their temple and their community. The book of Nehemiah, by contrast, reasserts Judean sovereignty over Jerusalem and its environs. In Neh 1-6, autochthonous Judeans rebuild Jerusalem's wall, and in so doing they achieve local autonomy for Judah as a province within the Persian Empire. The wall, however, proves incapable of excluding foreign influence from the province, and that influence, in turn, threatens Judean autonomy. The introduction of Babylonian Judeans in Neh 7 and the fusion of the autochthonous and diaspora communities around Torah in Neh 8-10 sets the stage for the sanctification of Jerusalem's wall and the possibility of Judean sovereignty over Judean territory in the future.