Ezra and Nehemiah.
Ezra and Nehemiah for a time constituted one book, Ezra. This was afterwards divided into two books and called The First and Second books of Ezra. Both were ascribed to Ezra. Subsequently the names were changed to those by which they are now known, and the authorship assigned respectively to Ezra and Nehemiah. That both were not composed by the same author is shown by the fact that each contains a copy of the register of the Jews that returned from Babylon.
Critics agree that Ezra did not write all of the book which now bears his name—that it is the work of various authors and was written, for the most part, long after Ezra’s time. A portion of it was written in Hebrew and the remainder in Aramaic.
Nehemiah wrote, at the most, but a part of the book ascribed to him. He did not write the following:
“The Levites in the days of Eliashib, Joiada, and Johanan, and Jaddua, were recorded chief of the fathers; also the priests to the reign of Darius the Persian” (xii, 22).
Darius the Persian began to reign 336 B.C.; Nehemiah wrote 433 B.C.
“There were in the days of ... Nehemiah the governor” (xii, 26). “In the days of Nehemiah” (47).
These passages show that the book, as a whole, was not only not written by Nehemiah, but not until long after the time of Nehemiah. Spinoza says that both Ezra and Nehemiah were written two or three hundred years after the time claimed. The later critics are generally agreed that neither Ezra nor Nehemiah had anything to do with the composition of these books.