Chronology Question

According to traditional opinion, the ministries of Ezra and Nehemiah began in 458 and 445 B.C., respectively. Issues exist. As an illustration, Eliashib served as the high priest during Nehemiah's reign, but Ezra served during the priesthood of Jehohana, Eliashib's son. According to certain academics, Nehemiah served before Ezra. Are there any books in Logos that address the idea that Nehemiah came before Ezra?

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DMB

Bunches, but the discussion is wide-ranging; not just assign-a-date.

I used the search term ' (nehemiah NEAR before) NEAR ezra ' and surface text

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Are there any books in Logos that address the idea that Nehemiah came before Ezra?

One Books search idea is:

nehemiah BEFORE 7 WORDS surface:before BEFORE 7 WORDS ezra

Another Books search idea is:

nehemiah NEAR surface:chronology NEAR ezra

TOTC appendix found by both searches:

4. A question of chronology: Ezra-Nehemiah or Nehemiah-Ezra?

A suggestion made in passing by M. Vernes in 1889, followed by a monograph by A. van Hoonacker in 1890, raised the question whether Ezra and Nehemiah both served the same King Artaxerxes or should rather be assigned to different reigns—Nehemiah to Artaxerxes I (464–423) and Ezra to Artaxerxes II (404–359). It was a seed-thought which was to grow and proliferate with extraordinary vigour. Within twenty years there had sprung up several new propositions: that Ezra’s mission had started not in the seventh year of either of these kings but in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes I (Kosters, 1895), or the twenty-seventh (Cheyne, 1902), or, still within that reign, at some time between the two visits of Nehemiah (Kennett, 1909); while C. C. Torrey had followed up a still more radical hypothesis of Vernes, that Ezra was a figment of the Chronicler’s imagination. Other suggestions were to come, dating Ezra, for example, in the thirty-seventh year of Artaxerxes I (e.g. Albright, 1946; A. Pavlovský, 1957), or exchanging Ezra’s date with Nehemiah’s, so that Nehemiah came to Jerusalem in the seventh year and Ezra in the twentieth (Jellicoe, 1947). But van Hoonacker’s thesis, retaining the regnal years of the text while attaching them to two different kings, has continued to have many supporters.

With a few exceptions, there is general agreement that Nehemiah’s dates, as against those of Ezra, are secure (viz., 445–433 for his first period as governor, and some time shortly after this for his second), since the Elephantine papyri offer incidental support for their general accuracy. It is also agreed that the chronological reconstructions which would make Nehemiah arrive before Ezra involve some rewriting of the biblical narrative, not simply a reinterpretation of it. The text as it stands precludes such a sequence, and is therefore emended at certain points in the belief that the author or final editor has, in H. H. Rowley’s phrase, ‘slightly touched up the story’.²⁵ Whether it is in fact the ancient writer or the modern scholar who deserves this comment is what we must now consider.

The thread that runs through all this diversity of hypotheses is the unacceptability, in the judgment of those who take these views, of the temporal priority of Ezra over Nehemiah, although some would allow him to have arrived towards the end of Nehemiah’s career, and therefore to have had some dealings with him. And while many grounds are given for these rearrangements of events, most of their advocates give precedence to the same four apparent anomalies in the story, namely: a. the comparative lack of combined activity by the two reformers; b. the thirteen-year gap between Ezra’s arrival and his reported reading of the law; c. Nehemiah’s seeming unawareness of Ezra’s divorce machinery; d. a series of contacts with the high priest Eliashib and his successors, which seem to place Nehemiah and Ezra a generation or two apart. There are also minor points, generally agreed to be inconclusive, and worth discussing only after these first four, to which we now turn. ...

Derek Kidner, Ezra and Nehemiah: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 12, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 161–163.

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