Matthew Levering wisely rejects von Balthasar’s notion that Ezra-Nehemiah is “like a brook in the process of drying up”: “Why should the rebuilding of the temple and the renewal of obedience to the Torah, despite the diminishment of the splendor of the temple and the continuing failure fully to observe the Torah, be counted as small things”?
More positively: “the rebuilding of the temple and the renewal of obedience to the Torah are precisely the kind of wrestling to be faithful to God’s gifts that one would expect from true sons and daughters of Jacob. A spiritually weak people would not have bothered to reclaim their temple and Torah, but would instead have been content gradually to blend into the wealthy and powerful society of Babylon religiously, economically, and politically. His wrestling with God at the threshold of the holy land may leave Jacob/Israel permanently limping . . . but this is a glorious wound, not a sign of drying up.”
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