Big Ideas · 13 · Ezra
A book written in two languages on purpose
Ezra-Nehemiah embeds Aramaic imperial documents within a Hebrew narrative. Judeans spoke the empire's language to the empire, and their own when telling their story.
Live in the empire, tell your own story.
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The structure models a bilingual life: dependence on foreign rulers, combined with building one's own institutions. Persian, and later Hellenistic, rulers let subject peoples live by their ancestral laws, space the scribes used to make texts central.
Source: Why the Bible Began, pp. 216–217
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