Getting Biblical in Daily Life
God doesn't appear in Ezra or Nehemiah as a character with a speaking role. He's evidently still talking to his people through prophets like Haggai and Zechariah, and he grants protection to Ezra when he journeys home. Yet, despite the fact that Ezra and Nehemiah are so focused on appeasing God and obeying his laws, God remains a protective figure in the background. If not for him, the whole plot wouldn't make any sense. People beseech God for help and forgiveness, but for the most part, human beings are left to work out their own destinies.
In Ezra and Nehemiah, God seems to be giving his people a chance to prove themselves and demonstrate their self-sufficiency without God needing to step in. The law has become something that the people are responsible for maintaining and upholding, with righteous figures like Ezra and Nehemiah taking center stage. God's become less of an actor in the drama and more of a stage manager, director, or producer, waiting behind the scenes to see if the play itself is running smoothly.
Jack Miles, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of God, argues that the Law of Moses takes the place of the active, speaking God of other books, since the law apparently contains everything that God wants to say. Ezra presents the law to the people as the center of their religion—it's the space where they're going to access the divine presence (source: Jack Miles, God: A Biography, New York: Vintage, 1995, 388-390).
When King Solomon builds the First Temple, God enters it in the form of a cloud provoking supernatural shock and awe. The Second Temple's reconstruction is a much more mundane affair. In fact, these books feel entirely natural, even ordinary in their outlook. No God addressing Moses with thunder and lightning and trumpet blasts on Mount Sinai. Humans fill the roles of judges and spiritual teachers. The Book of Ezra seems to mark the end of God's intervention in Jewish history in the Hebrew Scriptures.