When we consider, however, that the writers named in Ezr 4:8 were high officials of the Persian king, sending to the monarch a written accusation against the Jews in their own and their associates' names, it requires but little stretch of the imagination to suppose that these personages were acting at the instance of the adversaries named in Ezr 4:7, the Samaritans Bishlam, Mithredath, and Tabeel, and merely inditing the complaints raised by these opponents against the Jews. This view, which is not opposed by the כּתב of Ezr 4:7, - this word not necessarily implying an autograph, - commends itself to our acceptance, first, because the notion that the contents of this letter are not given finds no analogy in Ezr 4:6, where the contents of the letter to Ahashverosh are sufficiently hinted at by the word שׂטנה; while, with regard to the letter of Ezr 4:7, we should have not a notion of its purport in case it were not the same which is given in Ezr 4:8, etc.[1]
Besides, the statement concerning the Aramaean composition of this letter would have been utterly purposeless if the Aramaean letter following in Ezr 4:8
- ↑ The weight of this argument is indirectly admitted by Ewald (Gesch. iv. p. 119) and Bertheau, inasmuch as both suppose that there is a long gap in the narrative, and regard the Aramaean letter mentioned in Ezr 4:7 to have been a petition, on the part of persons of consideration in the community at Jerusalem, to the new king, - two notions which immediately betray themselves to be the expedients of perplexity. The supposed “long gaps, which the chronicler might well leave even in transcribing from his documents” (Ew.), do not explain the abrupt commencement of Ezr 4:8. If a petition from the Jewish community to the king were spoken of in Ezr 4:7, the accusation against the Jews in Ezr 4:8 would certainly have been alluded to by at least a ו adversative, or some other adversative particle.
