Jude afterthoughts, the High Priest Joshua

I got to thinking about that High Priest Joshua guy from Zecariah 3 and I thought it would be a shame
not to explore who he was while he was fresh in our minds. First of all, let's remember that the name Joshua = Yeshua= Jesus. It's the same name, but not necessarily the same person. However, I would like to consider the possibility that the myth and cult surrounding Jesus might have had an origin in the mythic tradition surrounding the high priest Joshua that Jude was probably referring to. In fact one possibility is that the only word in Jude that was changed is the word Jesus (Yeshua) into the word Moses in verse 9.  The other Jesus phrases may have been in the original text, actually referring to the high priest of Zechariah, not the Jesus of Nazareth. There is no way to know, but, to me, these speculations make more sense than that Jude was written by a christian worshipper of the New Testament Jesus. That Jesus can't be found in the book of Jude.

First let's note that the high priest Joshua is called Jeshua the son of Jozadak in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. He is called Joshua son of Josedech in Haggai and Zechariah. They are considered the same person.

In Ezra 2:2, we see Jeshua was a Babylonian exile, returning to Jerusalem. In Ezra 3:2, we see Jeshua is a priest. Seven months after the return, Jeshua and his fellow priests build the altar of god to burn sacrifices. In Ezra 3:8, two years after the return, Jeshua and his fellow priests and Levites supervise the building of the new temple. In Ezra 4:3, the people who were living in the land when the exiles returned wanted to help build the new temple because they had also been worshipping Yahweh. Jeshua and the rest of the heads of the families of Israel refused their help. The locals resented that and set about trying to sabatoge the building. Eventually, after multiple complications, the building came to a stop. In Ezra 5:2, Haggai and Zechariah were prophets, the ones who later supposedly wrote about Joshua/Jeshua. They were helping Jeshua try to rebuild the temple. They finished the temple in Ezra 6. In Ezra 7, many more exiles returned to Jerusalem from Babylon, including Ezra, supposedly the writer of this book, even though it refers to him in the third person. They brought many levites and lots of treasure for the temple with them. When the new group got to Jerusalem, they had a great sacrifice to god. Later, they were told that the previous group of returned exiles had intermarried with the locals. Ezra was appalled. After a lot of weeping, wailing, and repenting, all the men who had married "foreign" women were required to "put away" their wives, which probably meant to divorce them. Then they had to each sacrifice a ram as a guilt offering. This included descendants in Jeshua's family.

I always think its funny how the bible calls the locals of that land foreigners. Technically, the returning Israelites themselves were the foreigners by that time.

In Nehemiah, we have an account of later events. Ezra had left Babylon for Jerusalem in Artaxerxes 7th year. Nehemiah left Babylon in the 20th year. He left because he heard that the wall of Jerusalem was broken down and its gates burnt. He wants to help rebuild. After the walls have been rebuilt and guards appointed, Nehemiah wants to register everyone. He finds the genealogical records of the first group of returned exiles. Jeshua's name is included in Nehemial 7:7, 12:1, 7, 10 (there we learn names of one of Jeshua's sons and some of his grandsons.) In this book Jeshua's son is called Joiakim. Joiakim served "in the days of Nehemiah the governor and Ezra the priest and scribe." The name Jeshua is repeated a few times in the book of Nehemiah, but it is unclear if it always the same Jeshua.

That's pretty much it for Jeshua in Ezra and Nehemiah. The only definite claim to fame in these books  is that he was a levite priest and one of the first exiles to return. He was supposed to be instrumental in building the new temple, aka "the house of god."

Next we look at what the books of Haggai and Zechariah have to say about him.

Genesis chapter 11, the Tower of Babel

*Chapter 11 Begins with the etiological story of how all the different languages of the world developed. It is not placed in time, but just kind of floats there and divides one genealogical account from another.

* For some reason, God felt threatened by these smart people building a tall tower, which can't have been any taller than the tallest buildings around today. So, he and some unnamed others go down and confuse the people's language so they can't cooperate any more and do things like build spaceships or go to the moon.

* Here's the tricky part. From where did God come down? If God is up, how far up is he? So far we haven't been able to figure that out, no matter how high we go.

*Now, no one can understand anyone else, which must have been a pain. Somehow God used this event to scatter people all over the world. This, the author tells us, is why the place is called "Babel."
He is apparently making a little pun on the word Babylon, which was in the area where the story supposedly took place.

*What the author doesn't seem to know is that many different languages existed even before the flood is supposed to have happened, and that the development of language is a natural phenomenon still occuring today.

See:
Tower of Babel