The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

HENGEL The Scriptures in Second Temple Judaism 161
was joined to this new collection of prophetic works. Thereby the
historical books were classed within the second corpus as 'former
prophets' before the real prophetic scriptures named as the 'later
prophets'. That these prophetic books were also classed with the
Torah and its author Moses, as the one 'authoritative' prophet, is evidenced
at the end of the whole corpus in Mai. 4.4:
Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I
commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.
I would see the concluding verses of Malachi and the beginning of the
books of Joshua, with the repeated references to Moses and his book
of statutes, as a redactional inclusion.
The formation of the Pentateuch and the framing of the prophetic
corpus are at the same time an expression of the new shape of the
Israelitic-Jewish religion in Persian and early Hellenistic times. It
became a religion of the holy book with a strong historical dimension.
It also acquired a new class, namely the scribes.
3. Ezra, 'the Scribe', and the End of Prophecy
Already in Judaism the end of prophetic inspiration and the beginning
of scribal learning were connected with the name of Ezra. According
to Josephus in his apology Contra Apionem the 'authentic succession
of the Prophets' lasts from Moses to Artaxerxes. Josephus has in mind
Ezra who, in the seventh year of Artaxerxes (Apion 1.40-41), went up
to Jerusalem (Ezra 7.1-2). The rabbis make him a restorer of the
Torah. As a pupil of Baruch he becomes identified with Malachi, at
the same time he is made author of the books of Chronicles, Ezra and
Nehemiah, that is to say, he is for them the last inspired prophet. On
the other hand he is reckoned among the men of the 'great synagogue'
(Ab. 1.1). So he is 'the binding link between the Jewish prophet and
the Jewish sage', 1 which means that he appears as the man of transition
who concluded the time of revelation and opened up the era of scribal
learning.
This then had little to do any more with the 'historical Ezra'. But it
would be wrong, to turn Ezra into a merely artificial figure. If the
Aramaic letter of the Persian king describes Ezra the priest as a royal
1. L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society of America, 1913), IV, p. 359.