Chapter 1 - WHEN GENERATIONS REALLY COUNT: DATING ZERUBBABEL AND NEHEMIAH USING GENEALOGICAL INFORMATION IN THE BOOK OF NEHEMIAH

Summary

Introduction

The genealogical material in Nehemiah and 1 Chronicles 1–9 closes the gap considerably between the missions of Zerubbabel and of Nehemiah as portrayed in the book of Ezra. Rather than being in power some sixty-five years apart, according to this material, the two were at most a generation apart in age. Nehemiah either succeeded Zerubbabel as governor in Yehud, or he worked as a special envoy during Zerubbabel's governorship. Partial information about six generations is provided, beginning with the three generations who returned from exile to Yehud with Zerubbabel until or through the reign of Darius III (335–330 BCE) and the end of Persian rule (Neh. 12.22). But we need first to confirm the chronological end-point of the list.

While it is the case that the wording in Neh. 12.22 does not explicitly state that Yaddua was high priest through the reign of Darius III, it seems to imply that this was the situation, and the Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37–96 BCE) places Yaddua in office at the time of Alexander's conquest of the Levant (332 BCE), which ended the rule of Darius III (Ant. 10.8.7). The reference in v. 22 to ‘Darius the Persian’ is vague, leaving open the possibility that it was intended to refer to Darius II (424–404 BCE) rather than Darius III (335–330 BCE). This is the common view, based largely on the assumption that the first Darius had come to be mistakenly known in Jewish tradition as Darius ‘the Mede’ (Dan. 5.31 [6.1 Hebrew]; Daniel 6) so that the second Darius would have been distinguished from him by applying the contrasting geographical epithet, ‘the Persian’ (so, e.g., Wilson 1915: 193; Rudolph 1949: 193).