Ezra 4:1

Opposition to the Building Efforts

4:1 When the enemies of Judah and Benjamin learned that the former exiles 1  were building a temple for the Lord God of Israel,

Ezra 4:4

4:4 Then the local people 2  began to discourage 3  the people of Judah and to dishearten them from building.

Ezra 4:7

4:7 And during the reign 4  of Artaxerxes, Bishlam, 5  Mithredath, Tabeel, and the rest of their colleagues 6  wrote to King Artaxerxes 7  of Persia. This letter 8  was first written in Aramaic but then translated.

[Aramaic:] 9 

1 tn Heb “the sons of the exile.”

2 tn Heb “the people of the land.” Elsewhere this expression sometimes has a negative connotation, referring to a lay population that was less zealous for Judaism than it should have been. Here, however, it seems to refer to the resident population of the area without any negative connotation.

3 tn Heb “were making slack the hands of.”

4 tn Heb “And in the days.”

5 tn The LXX understands this word as a prepositional phrase (“in peace”) rather than as a proper name (“Bishlam”). Taken this way it would suggest that Mithredath was “in agreement with” the contents of Tabeel’s letter. Some scholars regard the word in the MT to be a corruption of either “in Jerusalem” (i.e., “in the matter of Jerusalem”) or “in the name of Jerusalem.” The translation adopted above follows the traditional understanding of the word as a name.

6 tc The translation reads the plural with the Qere rather than the singular found in the MT Kethib.

7 sn Artaxerxes I ruled in Persia from ca. 465–425 b.c.

8 tc It is preferable to delete the MT’s וּכְתָב (ukhÿtav) here.

9 sn The double reference in v. 7 to the Aramaic language is difficult. It would not make sense to say that the letter was written in Aramaic and then translated into Aramaic. Some interpreters understand the verse to mean that the letter was written in the Aramaic script and in the Aramaic language, but this does not seem to give sufficient attention to the participle “translated” at the end of the verse. The second reference to Aramaic in the verse is more probably a gloss that calls attention to the fact that the following verses retain the Aramaic language of the letter in its original linguistic form. A similar reference to Aramaic occurs in Dan 2:4b, where the language of that book shifts from Hebrew to Aramaic. Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12-26 are written in Aramaic, whereas the rest of the book is written in Hebrew.