OLD TESTAMENT LAYERING - POST-EXILE PERIOD
The spreadsheet below continues the formating system I described on the two previous pages. Where previously, the books 'dated' off of Samuel, and then Isaiah, the next group 'dates' off of Nehemiah and Ezra. A portion of this screen overlaps the previous, continuing with Nehemiah, and including Genesis and Exodus.
Illustration below:
[1] This is a section from the previous Isaiah page.
[2] The four vertical lines here represent two lines for the Nehemiah 'dating', and two for Ezra. As with the Samuel, and Isaiah, most of the books in this group have either a Nehemiah or Ezra component. Even though you can safely date Nehemiah/Ezra to 500 bce or thereabouts, I couldn't really figure the right-side end-point (dating for Daniel). Please see the previous page for the discussion of Genesis/Exodus.
[3] Even though in the diagram, Ezra looks 'alone', his linkages are substantial, both here and on previous pages, as an editor.
[4] Lamentations is a little difficult to position, with a miscellaneous set of linkages. It's quite possible Lamentations 'grew' over time, with Ezra being the final contributor.
[5] Daniel is a study just by itself. It clearly links to the Nehemiah/Ezra 'time' period, though it's much 'later'. On average, I don't think its into the greek period. But if you delve into it by chapter and even verse, it appears to be 'a work in progress', several chapters are very much into the greek period. There's some persian and some greek dated text. I might point out here that both Daniel and Ezra have substantial aramaic components, neither of which measurably impacted the neural networks at the syntactic level (its much more obvious at the vocabulary level).
You'll also notice 1st Chronicles at the bottom. I have it in red. I'm really not sure 'where' it belongs! It's clearly different from 2nd Chronicles, though.
Interpeting overall, this period seems to be a time of transition. Ezra/Nehemiah may well have done a bunch of editing, but judging from the retention of the older syntactical patterns, I doubt the editing was 'wholesale'. More likely they were adding, subtracting, and re-ordering the text (sound scary).
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