Wednesday, May 4, 2011

...Like A Gentile Or Tax Collector (part 7)


The third and final use of “seventy-seven” in the Hebrew Scriptures comes from the book of Ezra.  Ezra is a post-exile work, chronicling the trials and travails of God’s people as many exiles returned to the land of their inheritance, seeking to rebuild the Temple.  There, in the thirty-fifth verse of the eighth chapter (which, based on what is to be found there, seems as if it should be located after the second chapter), we read “The exiles who were returning from the captivity offered burnt offerings to the God of Israel, ninety-six rams, seventy-seven male lambs, along with twelve male goats as a sin offering.  All this was a burnt offering to the Lord.” 

Also in the eighth chapter, Ezra presents the record of his group’s travel to Jerusalem with the expressed purpose of re-building the Temple of God.  Reading there, we find “On the twelfth day of the first month we began traveling from the Ahava Canal to go to Jerusalem.  The hand of our God was upon us, and He delivered us from our enemy and from bandits along the way.  So we came to Jerusalem, and we stayed there for three days” (8:31-32).  This itself is an interesting point of comparison, as Jesus Himself, in a way, was traveling to Jerusalem.  It will not be too far down the road in Matthew’s narrative that we see Jesus triumphantly entering Jerusalem and dramatically entering the Temple.  Of course, later on, as part of Jesus’ “trial,” we will hear testimony that Jesus had said “I am able to destroy the Temple of God and rebuild it in three days” (26:61b), which is an allusion to an underlying motif of the Jesus tradition, not explicitly heard in Matthew, that Jesus saw Himself as a replacement for the Temple. 

The parallels with Ezra, and with the words previously quoted, are quite striking.  If Ezra is in mind when Jesus speaks words in regards to forgiveness (and based on what follows immediately thereafter, this doesn’t seem to be a stretch at all), then He is calling attention to the wider context and story in which this use of “seventy-seven” is to be found.  For those that will be hearing Matthew’s story, which will occur well after the Resurrection and after the various components of the oral (and written, to be sure) Jesus tradition have been relatively fixed, the resonances between the Ezra passage and Matthew’s narrative practically jump off the page. 

In regards to the lambs sacrificed, of which there were seventy-seven as part of the sin offering, we can make reference to the fact that Matthew has already called attention to Jesus as a “lamb led to the slaughtering block” (Isaiah 53:7b) with his reference to the fourth verse of that same chapter of Isaiah’s prophecy: “but He lifted up our illnesses, He carried our pain,” which is to be found in Matthew 8:17.  With the sacrifice of Jesus so inextricably linked to forgiveness, this connection becomes quite overt, strengthening our insistence that Jesus also has Ezra in mind when He uses this particular number in relation to the offering of forgiveness, which is a point that Matthew is sure to drive home through his tailoring of the narrative.  The twelve male goats that were put forth as a sin offering are easily connected to the twelve tribes of Israel, and by extension, to the twelve chosen disciples of Jesus.  Naturally, any talk of “three days,” which is the amount of time spent Ezra is said to have spent in Jerusalem at the initial point of the return, would immediately call to mind the “three days” between the crucifixion and the Resurrection---the figurative tearing down and re-building of the Temple.   

Finally, as the wider story of Ezra would be under consideration (if indeed Ezra is in view at all), then also in view are thoughts of exile and exodus (Babylonian captivity and return to the land).  Though there had been an official decree by the king of Persia that the Jerusalem Temple was to rebuilt and that the people were to be allowed to return to the land, there was not a sense of liberation.  In the ninth chapter of Ezra, just a few words away from the repot of the return to Jerusalem and the offerings (according to the way in which Ezra is presented), Ezra reports on the mindset of the people, saying that “Although we are slaves, our God has not abandoned us in our servitude.  He has extended kindness to us in the sight of the kings of Persia, in that He has revived us to restore the Temple of our God and to raise up its ruins and to give us a protective wall around Judah and Jerusalem” (9:9). 

Though they were in the land and had been given a degree of liberty, they were still subject to the king of Persia, with their exodus incomplete.  So, any implicit reference to Ezra would call to mind the general mindset there expressed and quite possibly still held by the people of Israel as they lived under the occupation of the Romans.  They had a degree of liberty, but in no way would they have considered themselves to be free.  They were ruled over by Gentiles and their tax collectors.        

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