Bede: On Ezra and Nehemiah (Paperback)

The Venerable Bede's In Ezram et Neemiam is the first and only complete commentary written on these biblical books in either the patristic or later medieval era. This translation, the first rendering of this commentary into any language, presents the work in a format that will be accessible to the layman and illuminating for the specialist. To this end, the volume contains a complete translation of the Latin text; copious annotations dealing with textual, historical, social, and religious issues; a lengthy introduction that explains the texts and seeks to locate it against the backdrop of Bede's eighth-century Northumbrian world; two appendices; and a bibliography. As the Introduction argues, this work of Bede's is an excellent example of the allegorical method of biblical interpretation, which Bede inherited from the Fathers of the Church and for which he himself is justly famed. At the same time, Bede's decision to take up these particular biblical texts on the events surrounding the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem after the return from exile in Babylon is itself fraught with a deeper significance. both the individual and societal levels, he was keen to appropriate them as a guide of sorts for dealing with the pastoral and secular crises alive in his own day. It follows that Bede, as a commentator on Scripture, was thus more of an original mind than is often allowed, as his interpretation of the Ezra-Nehemiah saga is drawn from the exigencies of his own contemporary situation rather than from the stock and trade of past tradition. By making this text available in English for the first time, DeGregorio's translation seeks not only to make more of Bede's exegetical corpus accessible to readers unable to confront the text in its original Latin, but also to alter the conception of Bede as a commentator from that of a slavish imitator to a daring innovator. Ezra and Nehemiah are two books of the Old Testament of the Bible, originally one work in the Hebrew canon. Written between 450 and 250 BC and named for two political and religious reformers in the postexilic Jewish community, they relate aspects of Jewish history from 538 BC to about 420 BC.