b Sanh 21b
Judaism
Ezra and Nehemiah: Bringing
Judaism from Persia
Abstract
Persian emperors are mentioned in Ezra-Nehemiah in close to the right order, though the three Dariuses and two Artaxerxes are not distinguished. Taking the order and chronology to be true, the return of Ezra and Nehemiah is in the reign of Artaxerxes II. The problem is that Nehemiah could hardly have been as late as the twentieth year of Artaxerxes II and fit in with Elephantine papyri about thirty years earlier that already look to an established temple in Jerusalem. The king was Darius II. Persians gave the Jews the concept that this tiny country could become a great nation if its people were obedient and righteous. The Jewish David is a mythologized Darius II. The Maccabees, once they had set up the Jewish free state, embellished the myth of Darius II as the founder of the Jewish state, into the myth of David, the founder of a Jewish empire!
Ezra, called both priest and scribe, obviously working in a senior capacity, leads Levites in teaching the law. He reads to the colonists and the Am ha Eretz a covenant, an enforceable treaty. The law read out was a law that had to be kept. Ezra imposed it firmly under threat, and the people wept! Some say they wept in joy, but the response was grief—they were commanded not to mourn! It was the law of Mazas, Ahuramazda, called Mazas by the Assyrians and Moses by the Jews. Or perhaps Misa (Mica), the name of Mithras in the Persian dialect. Jewish sages think of Ezra as the second Moses. He was the first Moses, unless Ahuramazda or Mithras is considered the first. It looks more than a coincidence that his brother is Aaron, in Hebrew letter equivalents, Ahrwn. Besides the final “nun” the word looks to be a mishearing of Ahura (Aura, Oura), and the “nun” is from its assimilation into Hebrew as meaning “his brother”.
Ezra the scribe attended the ceremony of dedicating the walls, together with Nehemiah. If this happened in a second period of office of Nehemiah beginning about 430 BC, it could have been in the reign of Darius II. The compiler, unable to distinguish between the Persian kings thought “year seven of Darius” meant Darius I. It was impossible, so he rejected it in favour of Artaxerxes, who had already been mentioned in the context of Nehemiah, because the two men were together at the dedication. Ezra really came in year seven of Darius II specially to dedicate the walls and to introduce the new law. Ezra was never a “returner” and could not appear in lists of them, and was never a High Priest of the Jerusalem temple. He was the senior priest in the Persian empire.
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, February 26, 2001 Ezra and Nehemiah
Esdras
The Book Restored Initial Considerations Am ha Eretz
The Temple Treasure A Letter to Darius Ezra
The Law of God or the Law of the King The Artaxerxes Letter
Financial Matters! Reading the Law The Festival of Booths
Separating Husband from Wife The Law is Deuteronomy A Letter to Artaxerxes Megabyxos Rebels Who Were the Prophets?
When was the Dedication of the Walls? Darius I or Darius II?
Population Who were Jews? Ethnicity
Culture
The Founder of Judaism Was Ezra a Fiction? The Root ZR (SR) ZR as a Priestly Title
Moses as the Mythologized Ezra
Ezra and Nehemiah
In the modern bible, Ezra and Nehemiah are presented as two separate books. Quite why is anybody’s guess because they are only a single book as everyone interested knows. Doubtless clerics will tell us it is tradition, but it is more likely to be dishonesty intended to fool religious innocents, because this is the key to the foundation of Judaism, and the clerics prefer it to be confused to keep their flocks confused. To make sure it is thoroughly confused and that no one can understand what is happening, even if they can be bothered to read it, the book has also been mixed up!
These two books together with the two books of Chronicles—also just one book really—are an attempt at a complete history of the Jews from Adam to the time it was written, seemingly the fifth century BC. The original material comprising it was written in the Persian period, but it was edited after the end of the 200 years of Persian rule rather than near its beginning as it pretends. 2 Chronicles ends with the same verses as the beginning of Ezra seemingly showing that they were part of the same work. Yet Ezra and Nehemiah was admitted into the Jewish canon before
a school of editors.
John C H How, who was a scholar of Trinity College Cambridge, tells us that
Ezra-Nehemiah is of great importance because it covers the years 537 BC to almost 300 BC, when “the real foundation of Judaism with its rigid exclusivism and its intense devotion to the Law of Moses were laid”. The genealogies at the end take us to Jaddua who was a High Priest only a few decades before Alexander conquered Persia. In fact, the events in Ezra-Nehemiah mainly take place in a 30 year period in the reigns of Artaxerxes I and Darius II, but How is right that this is the foundation of Judaism.
L E Browne, in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, has no doubt that the work of the priestly school called “The Chronicler” that wrote these books displays the same outlook as that of the authors of the Priestly Code (P) of Genesis. Elements of P are found in Ezra-Nehemiah but they are interpolations. The law that the book is concerned with is Deuteronomy. The emphasis of the Priestly Code on the priesthood, temple worship and on the paraphernalia of it, that plainly took a good length of time to evolve after Ezra and Nehemiah founded Judaism, puts P late, in Ptolemaic or Maccabaean times. 2 Maccabees 2:17 says what the Maccabees were up to:
God… delivered all his people and gave them all an heritage, and the kingdom, and the priesthood and the sanctuary…
Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah are full of genealogies and this fondness for them, and more particularly the inclination to compile them and invent what was not known, was a habit of men of leisure—the temple priesthood of a much later time, again the time of the Ptolemies or the Maccabees—intent on giving an antiquity to their own profession and to the Jewish nation as a whole that had in reality just been founded. M E Meeker, studying Semitic tribes in Arabia, has shown that tribal genealogies reflected ideological beliefs not actual historical lines.
The early part of Chronicles is written as a genealogy to get the reader quickly to the time of David when the author wants to begin the tale proper. That is because the Hasmonaean scribes were intent on legitimizing the reign of the Hasmonaeans by showing that they were simply re-establishing the kingdom of David of old. There had been no kingdom of David, of course—they made it up as an ancient reflexion of the Hasmonaean kingdom!
Ezra-Nehemiah consists of three main parts based on content and style:
Ezra 1-6, a history from the first year of Cyrus to the sixth year of Darius. 1.
Ezra 7-10, the story of Ezra told in a different style. 2.
Nehemiah, the story of Nehemiah. 3.
1 Esdras
Unlike the Pentateuch that has to be analysed purely from its internal clues,
the redactional activity that has led to the two separate versions we now have. These revisions are from the mid-second century BC when the Jewish scriptures were compiled from what remained after the civil war, as 2 Maccabees 2:13-14 declares. It offers an acceptable explanation for the chronological mix up of the books, though it is hard to understand why those who were supposedly so familiar with them did not notice the blunders.
So, what we seem to have are two different attempts to put together the fragments of the works that remained or could be remembered. Neither is correct. The authors had forgotten the order of the Persian kings, just as the author of Daniel, writing at about the same time had. It shows that what we have today is not genuinely from the Persian period.
Curiously 1 Esdras does not mention Nehemiah. It might be a deliberate intention to ignore the Persian administrator in favour of the supposed Jewish priest, Ezra, but since 1 Esdras ends with the same Greek words as Nehemiah 8:13, words absent in the Hebrew texts, Nehemiah might have been meant to follow 1 Esdras, which is therefore itself incomplete. Whole sections of 1 Esdras can be seen in different parts of Ezra and Nehemiah.
The leader of the first “returners”, Zerubabel, was considered the messiah by Haggai and Zechariah who made him the grandson of Jehoiachin (Jeconiah) a man who went into captivity in 597 BC. Joshua, Zerubabel’s companion, is the son of Jehozadak, the High Priest in 587 BC who is also the son of Seraiah, the father of Ezra (Ezra 7:1-5, 1 Chr 6:14-15). Ezra then is the brother of the High Priest of 587 BC and the uncle of Joshua who returned about 520 BC, while he himself returned in 458 BC at the earliest. Doubtless Jews and Christians will see the hand of God in these miraculous relationships, but it really shows that whoever made up the chronologies had no clear idea of the times involved.
They had the idea that most of the people “returned” together just a few years after Cyrus issued his decree. The lists of “returners” in Ezra 2:1-67 and in Nehemiah
7:6-69 are essentially the same, but they purport to be the first “returners” under Sheshbazzar in Ezra and the contemporary “returners” in Nehemiah. They thought Seraiah and Jehozadak could have had children in captivity who returned about 536 BC, and had no idea that Ezra was returning much later still.
Bits of Ezra are in Aramaic (Ezra 5:1-6:18; Ezra 4:5; Ezra 4:6-23; Ezra 7:12-26) suggesting that an Aramaic book was a source of the original, or an attempt to imply that it was. All four bits of Aramaic refer to the actions of Persian kings in respect of the Jews, so seem to be a hint of genuine chancellery archive. Perhaps they were, but were destroyed when Nehemiah’s library was scattered, and all we have are later imperfect reconstructions. Or, perhaps, they were composed deliberately to give a false impression. Whether fraudulent or a sincere attempt at restoration of something lost, they are not genuine now.
Ezra has Cyrus.
M Dandamaev and A Lukanin (The Culture and Social Institutions of Ancient Iran) state that there are “no grounds for speaking of a special benevolence toward Judaism on the part of the Persian king”. The supposed benevolence of the Persian kings to Judaism depends purely on the bible itself. The Persians have been considered as benevolent to the cults within the empire, the Cyrus Cylinder being an oft-cited example of this generosity. Yet what seems to be benevolence in these propagandist works actually was carefully calculated to give political advantage, as Amelie Kuhrt has shown for the Cyrus Cylinder itself.
Cyrus drew upon the form of Mesopotamian building texts to show himself as a pious monarch dedicated to restoring cults neglected and damaged by Nabonidus. He authorized the restoration of privileges to temples in Babylonia and Assyria. Kuhrt says he did it to restore the religious status quo ante to gain support from these areas and their priesthoods. The kings sought the favour of populations to give no basis for revolution, and they wanted a reliable and trusted organization for the collection of taxes. So whatever altruism the kings seemed to offer would be multiply repaid by a grateful people.
But the Persians destroyed the temples of people who resisted their power. Darius I destroyed the temple at Didyma involved in the Ionian revolt (Herodotus 6.18-20). The leaders of the temple in Elephantine claimed that by the power of Cambyses, “all the temples of the gods of Egypt were overthrown”.
Some say the story of the generosity of Cyrus was based on the stories of Hezekiah and Josiah. Yet no one knows anything about the domestic acts of these kings except what the bible tells us. The Deuteronomic history was written after Ezra and so the acts of the older kings were probably based on the acts of Artaxerxes, rather than the reverse. The objective of the history was to depict the Jews in the past as having been an apostate and ungrateful people who deserved God’s punishment because of their wickedness. This sort of propaganda suited the rulers, the Persians, rather than the Jews themselves, so their source ought to be evident.
The Book Restored
C C Torrey has, in careful research, that few would question, convincingly restored the correct order of the original work as:
Ezra 1. Edict of Cyrus; Sheshbazzar brings the temple treasure.
1 Esdras 4:47-56; 62-5:6. Darius approves Zerubabel to return.
Ezra 2:1-4:5. Zerubabel returns and begins the work opposed by adversaries.
Ezra 5-6. A letter is sent to Darius and the decree of Cyrus found; the temple is built and dedicated on the 3rd of the twelfth month in the sixth year of Darius.
Ezra 4:6. An objection is raised in the time of Xerxes.
Ezra 7-8. In the 7th year of Artaxerxes, Ezra comes to Jerusalem with a letter of authority from the king and men gathered on route.
Nehemiah 7:70-8. In the seventh month Ezra read the law and introduced the festival of booths.
Ezra 6:14-15 Lit
Nehemiah 9-10. Mixing ceases on the 24th; the author gives Ezra a long composed speech; a covenant is sealed by Nehemiah and others; separation is again confirmed and a pledge to give a third of a shekel followed by an added justification of it.
Ezra 4:6-23. Adversaries demand a letter to Artaxerxes and he stops any further work on the walls until the time of Darius.
Nehemiah 1-7:69. In the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, Nehemiah comes as governor and repairs the walls of Jerusalem against opposition; he implements social and economic reform.
Nehemiah 11-13. Lists of people are followed by a retrospective look by Nehemiah at his second tour of duty during which the walls were dedicated, apparently in the reign of Darius II.
The reordering assumes that the correct sequence of Persian kings was known in the original, but had been forgotten by the time attempts were made to reconstruct it by the Jewish priests after the war, but the logic of the unfolding story also confirms this order. A confusion is apparent immediately and that is that there seem to be two Dariuses in the unfolding tale. Usually the references to Darius II are assumed to be anachronistic references to Darius I. In fact the Darius referred to could be Darius II Nothus. Sir H Howorth, a century ago vigorously argued this was the case, but needless to say believers were no more interested then in scholarship than they are now, but only apologetics.
Sara Japhet of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, notes in Second Temple Studies II
that the Persian emperors are mentioned in Ezra-Nehemiah, as it stands, in close to the right order, allowing for three Dariuses and two Artaxerxes who are not distinguished. The Darius of Ezra 4:5 is Darius I, that of Ezra 4:24 is Darius II while that of Nehemiah 12:22 is Darius III. The Artaxerxes of Ezra 4:7ff is Artaxerxes I while that of Ezra 7:1 is Artaxerxes II. In Ezra 1-6, the order of kings is Cyrus, Darius, Ahasuerus (Xerxes), Artaxerxes, Darius, the latter being Darius II, and the story looks straightforward. This passage almost says it all:
And they built, and finished, according to the commandment of the God of Israel and according to the command of Cyrus, and Darius, and Artaxerxes the king of Persia. And this house was finished on the third day of the month Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king.
Cyrus allows the temple to be rebuilt, some people return and begin (538 BC) but there is opposition and the work is interrupted for the reigns of Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes, until it is resumed in the second year of Darius II and completed in his sixth year (418 BC). It suggests that the chronology and therefore the order of the books is correct.
Taking the order and chronology to continue true, the return of Ezra and Nehemiah is in the reign of Artaxerxes II, and the last king of Persia, Darius III is mentioned in
Nehemiah 12:22. The greatest problem with such a simple and uncluttered scheme is that Nehemiah could hardly have been as late as the twentieth year of Artaxerxes II (384 BC) and fit in with the Elephantine papyri which are about thirty years earlier and already look to an established temple in Jerusalem.
looks hard to refute but, to minimize arbitrary changes in order, would mean that Ezra returned in year seven of the same king. The whole reconstructed composition is curious in the way that it puts Ezra ahead of Nehemiah when the internal clues are that Ezra’s reforms presuppose Nehemiah’s:
In Ezra 9:9, the walls of Jerusalem were already built, so Nehemiah went before Ezra to build them (or they must, as his story perhaps implies, have been knocked over again in the meantime).
Jerusalem is derelict in Nehemiah (Neh 7:4; 11:1-2) but is healthily populated in
Ezra (Ezra 10:1,13). (Had it been sacked again by Megabyxos or the Egyptians, or were the two restorers in the wrong order?)
We take the two men to be discussed in the wrong order, the Chronicler not knowing what the order was and choosing to put Ezra, the most important, because the most senior, first. The two facts noted that might explain the biblical order does not stop the reverse. Jerusalem might have been restored to some degree and populated in the time of Darius the Great, but was later sacked in the troubled time at the start of the reign of Artaxerxes. Other evidence for the reversal of the biblical order is given in the section on Ezra.
By taking Ezra to return in the seventh year of Darius specifically to inaugurate the city walls and the temple, and to deliver the law, the problems of chronology are minimized with only the assumption that an editor tried to correct what he thought was an error—that year seven of Darius (I) was impossible and it must have meant year seven of Artaxerxes, because Nehemiah and Ezra were contemporaries.
Initial Considerations
Jeremiah 25:12; 29:10 says the exile would last seventy years—a lifetime—meaning that no one who returned would remember the country and its temple as it was. The exile would be longer than anyone could remember. No one could remember either, but that was because they had never been exiled in the first place—they were being deported to Yehud but the propaganda was they had no memory of being exiled initially because it was over a lifetime ago.
Cyrus had issued a general decree that people could return to their homes, but it was a cover for deporting colonists, just as the Assyrians and Babylonians had done. Cyrus was simply cleverer about it. There are few historians today, as opposed to theologians, who cannot see the declarations of Cyrus as propaganda. On the Babylonian cylinder seals Cyrus was the chosen king of Marduk, the Babylonian god. On the clay tablets of Nippur, Cyrus was the chosen king of the local god Sin. In the Jewish scriptures, Cyrus was the chosen king of the local god Yehouah. Cyrus proclaimed himself as the king chosen by the god of each nation. Curiously, ANET records that Cyrus ordered “as far as Ashur and Susa, Agade, Eshunna, the towns Zamban, Me-Turnu, Der as well as the regions of the Gutians, I… established for me permanent sanctuaries”. Nothing is mentioned of a permanent sanctuary at Jerusalem.
justify the forcible colonization that was to follow. W K Lowther Clarke, in the
Concise Bible Commentary, admits that few took advantage of Cyrus’s edict, but the ones who did enforced their “policy on the apathetic ’people of the land.’” Racist? Since the “returners” were so few, these “apathetic” people must ultimately have provided the main body of the ancestry of modern Jews. As thick as two short planks, Lowther Clarke tells us:
There was no deliberate settlement of foreigners, as in North Israel after 721.
He has to say this because the integrity of the bible depends upon the ethnic group called in it the Israelites being continuous from Abraham to the time of Jesus. To admit that the people who “returned” were not the people who went rather spoils the picture.
In Ezra 8:36,
And they delivered the king’s commissions unto the king’s lieutenants, and to the governors on this side the river, and they furthered the people, and the house of God”,
Ezra’s orders are delivered to the “satraps and governors of Abaranahara”, the correct translation. How many satraps were there in Yehud? The whole of Abarnahara was one satrapy. Perhaps this is a simple infelicity or an exaggeration to magnify Judah, but it gels better with Ezra being sent to inaugurate a temple for the whole of Abarnahara, not just to Judah itself.
The insertion from 1 Esdras makes it clear that the Jerusalem temple was meant to be the temple of the whole of Abarnahara not just a small part of it—it really was the temple of the Hebrews, the population of Abarnahara, not merely the Jews. Syrians, Phœnicians and Canaanites had to help financially in building and maintaining the temple in its period of inception. The sums required were substantial—20 talents a year for building, 10 talents a year for sacrifices and unspecified support for the colonists is commanded, proving that they were privileged. The privileged class of people called Jews were divided into several castes whose duty was to mind the temple, and who had been given a small state of their own, rather akin to the Vatican. This province, Yehud, was obviously carved out of the Arab state of Idumaea (Edom) leading to a long lasting hatred between Jews and Idumaeans.
The myth is that they went up on the first day of the year in the second year of Darius (or Cyrus), presumably meaning that the new state was declared on that day, making the Persian New Year a famous day to remember in Jewish history.
Ezra 2:1-67 gives the list of 42,000 returned exiles, pretending that they all returned at once.
concern with lunar associations suggests that the colonists considered Yehouah as the god Sin. Some people were weeping. It was not from joy but because they realized they were being enslaved (the Jews called themselves “the Captivity”) by a new ruling class with a different god from their own, even if it had the same name. Not surprisingly we hear immediately (Ezra 4:1-5) that hatred between the Jews and the Samarians had begun.
Am ha Eretz
Ezra 3:3 already spoke of fear of the “People of the Land”, the Am ha Eretz or Dallal ha Eretz (Poor of the Land), the people already living in the Palestinian hills when the colonists moved in under Persian protection to settle. At the inception of the temple, while some were rejoicing and some were weeping, we hear that there were “adversaries”.
Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the children of the captivity builded the temple unto the Lord God of Israel; Then they came to Zerubbabel, and to the chief of the fathers, and said unto them, Let us build with you: for we seek your God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither.
These were the natives who, according to the supporting mythology, had been left behind when their rulers were taken captive. If so, the rulers no longer wanted anything to do with them. Though they had lamented in the ruined temple for seventy years, and now were supposed to have been weeping with joy, the returners ignored them because they were “adversaries”. These people were themselves deportees from the Assyrian period and knew it. The ruling Samarians were deported from Bit Adini, the area around Harran in Syria, the Aramaean homeland, and, oddly, next to a small state called Yauda whose capital city seems to have been called Samal. Esarhaddon, the Syrian king had sent them to Israel from these small Aramaean states to worship the same god, Yehouah, as the colonists. They were utterly rejected:
Zerubbabel, and Jeshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers of Israel, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the Lord God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us.
Only the Yehudim, the people sent by the Persian kings as colonists had the right to build a temple and restore a religion, and it must have been to a particular and different specification from that already in situ. Had the “returners” been simply restoring the old temple, what possible objection could they have had against accepting the assistance offered by the native Yehouah worshippers? They could have had none. It is plain that the colonists were doing something that they knew would not be acceptable to the natives in any case, and so they refused assistance from the outset. Judaism was to be a new religion based on an ethical Yehouah of the Ahuramazda mould, not a fertility religion based on the mould of the Baalim of the natives.
has it that the Samarians were able to hold up the work for twenty years, but it seems most likely that Sheshbazzar could only make a formal beginning in the reign of Cyrus, and not enough colonists were sent until Zerubabel and Joshua came in the reign of Darius. The hostility of the natives obviously emerged when they were refused leave to help in the reconstruction, and that was when enough colonists had returned. Once there were enough colonists, protected by the Persian satrap, the locals would have been unable to stop the work. Sabotage, however, was possible and the account suggests that measures had to be taken to prevent it.
The Temple Treasure
The vast treasure returned also must be queried. It all supposedly happened as soon as Cyrus captured Babylonia. The problem is that unless the kings of Babylon meticulously kept captured treasure in depositories, how could it have been gathered together so easily to return it? Captured treasure, like that captured by the conquistadores in America, was put to use, to pay soldiers and to build new buildings. It was not just stored, it was melted down, spent and otherwise dispersed. How then was it still hanging about fifty or seventy years after Jerusalem had been razed by Nebuchadrezzar?
The Book of Ezra tries to explain that it was kept in a temple called “The Temple of Babylon!” Yet Babylon had many temples and, if one was called the Temple of Babylon, it must have been to Marduk, the Babylonian god. Why should priests of Marduk want ritual objects that were meaningless to them? They would have had them recast as objects suitable for their own religion. Furthermore, the Palestine hill country was never so wealthy that any pre-Babylonian temple in Jerusalem would have had a vast treasure, whatever the bible might say about the mythical Solomon. These hills were impoverished.
The only answer, if Ezra is correct, is that Nebuchadrezzer set up a temple to Yehouah somewhere in Babylon. It must have been a Canaanite temple like the one in Elephantine in Egypt, but might have been a centre for worship of the Baal Yehouah of the deported Canaanites. Commonly conquerors would carry off idols, images of gods, and set them up elsewhere for superstitious reasons—they hoped to have the favour of the god. If Canaanite Yehouah had an image—a bull, one would guess—then that might have been carried off and used to set up a Yehouah cult elsewhere.
Had Yehouah already been a Babylonian cult, even if not a major one, then it would explain the Jewish names in the accounts of the Babylonian bank of Murushu in the fifth century. It is falsely assumed that the Jews were taken into captivity to the city of Babylon. There they flourished and that explains the presence of Jewish names on Babylonian tablets. A few thousand deportees, or myriads, could hardly have had much impact from a condition of slavery in about three generations.
manner in which they worshipped must have been different in these different places.
Yehouah and El were Canaanite gods not just Jewish and Israelite ones. Indeed, El was also worshipped for centuries in Mesopotamia. Added to that was the deportation of the Israelites by the Assyrians, and they must have had names in “Iah” and “El”. If they were allowed to keep their names then they would have been passed on, at least grandfather to grandson, a common preference in those times, presumably so that fathers and sons could not be confused. It seems the Persians decided to rationalize religions in an acceptable way, by unifying divers gods under a Mazda-like cloak as the God of Heaven. Iranians called those who followed these non-Zoroastrian religions Juddin.
When the Persians had decided to set up a Jewish colony in Jerusalem supported financially by the Hebrews of Abarnahara, they might indeed have taken some cult objects from a temple of Yehouah in Babylon to Jerusalem, but the image of a bull would not have been one of them, even though Persians revered bulls. They used no images themselves for their High God, Ahuramazda, other than a winged disc, and this is the most likely image used in the temple of Yehouah. The rest of the ritual paraphernalia mentioned, where it is not exaggerated for propaganda purposes, was donated out of the Persian treasury. The king aimed to get the money back with interest once the colony and its temple had been established.
A Letter to Darius
The report continues at Ezra 5:1, the Aramaic section having been wrongly inserted. The official mentioned is Tatnai (Tattenai, Tatannu), satrap of Abarnahara, a man with an Assyrian name, and his sub-official has a Persian name. A T Olmstead reports, “Ta-at-t[an-ni] (Tattenai) governor (pahat) of Ebirnari (Abarnahara, in Persian times)” appears in a Babylonian document of 502 BC. Abarnahara was what was essentially to become the empire of David in mythology. It covered Cyprus, Phœnicia, Syria, Palestine and West Arabia, the places whose treasurers had to support the new temple.
The Samarians evidently complained to the governor and the satrap about what was going on. The start of the reign of Darius was troubled and possibly the satrap thought they had a point. Cyrus had issued his policy on thousands of cylinder seals and it is inconceivable that Tatnai did not know imperial policy, so that was not the issue. But he might have thought it a good idea to humour the Samarians for awhile, pretending to be sympathetic then coming back with the message that it was out of his hands. Persians were generally rather subtle rulers, a fact that is usually ignored. The search for the decree by Darius I looks unlikely and might have been the satrap’s propaganda to allow the Samarians to save face.
late that they precede the time of Jesus by only about a century, not the millennium or two that biblicists think.
Ezra
Now Ezra appears on the scene—or did he? The seventh year of Artaxerxes I would have been 458 BC whereas the seventh year of Artaxerxes II was 397 BC. The editor does not know the sequence of Persian kings and makes no effort to distinguish one Artaxerxes from another, but seems to think Artaxerxes preceded Xerxes, who has little role in this story. Ezra was a contemporary of Johanan (Ezra 10:6) and Nehemiah was a contemporary of Eliashub (Neh 3:1) but Johanan was the son of Eliashub, so Ezra seems to have been a much younger man than Nehemiah and might have appeared a generation later in the reign of Artaxerxes II. What is more, the list of High Priests (Neh 11 and 22) shows that Johanan or Jonathan was actually a grandson of Eliashub, and the Elephantine papyri show he was High Priest in 408 BC. Ezra seems to have “returned” much later than Nehemiah. Note that he is not listed as a leader of the “returners” in Ezra 2:2 or Nehemiah 7:7.
Ezra is always considered to be a Jewish High Priest and concerned only with Jewish matters (though he is never called a High Priest or listed among them in the genealogies). David Janzen, in JBL (2000), goes all around the mountains to return to the point of departure. Ezra was a priest and scribe who served as administrative head of the temple community. The letter of Artaxerxes is spurious, merely a midrash which it is unhelpful to bother trying to understand, and Ezra’s work is simply as administrator, priest, and scribe working within the framework of the temple assembly in Yehud. Ezra functions simply as a temple official, albeit on a number of levels, and had no mission. The Ezra narrative admittedly seems to contradict itself:
while Ezra is not a high priest, he appears to act like one,
while he is not a satrap, he appears to wield satrap-like powers,
while he is sent to enforce the law in Yehud, it is the community that actually appears to exercise legal authority,
while he comes to restore the cult, supposedly it has long been functioning
His position was a peculiar one. But it will not do that Ezra was just a temple official! Artaxerxes informs Ezra that the royal treasuries are obligated to provide resources to the temple in Jerusalem and that they are not to tax the temple clergy (Ezra
7:20-24). He also authorizes Ezra to appoint judicial officials throughout Abarnahara, the satrapy of which the province of Yehud was a part, and to teach the law of God there (Ezra 7:25-26).
He presents it as an act of restoration of normal religious practice on behalf of the local worshippers and approved by the kindly shah, here Cambyses. The shah commanded the expulsion of foreigners from the temple, the removal of ritual impurity, the appointment of legitimate cult personnel, the restoration of traditional worship and the Houses of Life. And what were the Houses of Life? They were training schools concerned with the recording of religious law and its interpretation.
Another Egyptian example comes from Elephantine, where a letter has been found from the satrap of Egypt, Pherendates, wriiten in 491 BC, in the reign of Darius I, to the priests of the temple of Khnum in which he told them of a decree of the shahanshah for the selection of chief priests. It looks like a direct interference, unlike the usual more subtle approach, unless subtler approaches had failed. Darius had spent some time codifying Egyptian temple practices. The priests of Khnum perhaps were defiant, and the apparently direct Persian intervention was a response to the “abnormal practices” they persisted in following. The Persians will still have claimed to have been restoring proper practice, and their first step was to appoint compliant people, not dissenters, as priests.
Herodotus describes a case of the same ploy being used in a different context. After the Ionian rebellion, Artaphernes, satrap of Sardis held a council of the cities’ representatives to agree on how conflicts should be handled, before they were assessed for taxation. Evidently the Persian satrap met the Greeks to “facilitate” a local agreement. Naturally, it would be one agreeable to the suzerain, but would emerge from a local council. It could therefore be presented as the Persians merely responding to the wishes of the locals.
Another case is the inscription found at Sardis in 1974, being a Greek copy of an original monument set up in year 39 of Artaxerxes (426 BC or 365 BC). The hyparch of Lydia set up statue of Zeus and founded rules for his proper worship. No one who worshipped other gods such as Sabazius, were to worship this one, called Zeus of Baradates, a mixed Greek and Persian title. Idiosyncrasies of the style suggest the Greek was a translation out of Aramaic, so here seems to be another local cult set up with its own laws, but approved by the Persians. Pierre Briant declared that none of this illustrates…
…how the Persian community at Sardis fell back upon its own religious traditions. Quite the contrary, it indicates the intense intercultural exchanges between Persians of the imperial diaspora the local elites.
The Persian ploy was to present changes in religious practice and law as restoring some religious norm on behalf of the local people. The shah simply approved the desired changes, thus giving them the force of imperial law, and so Frei calls the ploy “imperial authorization”. Of course, even though the changes are dressed as having been a local initiative, as Erhart Blum showed, they rarely were, the king, or rather his chancellery, being the true author of the changes.
The Persians succeeded so well in spreading the propaganda that they would respond favourably to local requests that it is still believed, doubtless helped by the bible which spreads the same propaganda. It has become so strong a tradition in Daniel
landing the hero in the lion’s den! Joseph Blenkinsopp, a scholar in a catholic college, notes the shahs’ willingness—to judge by widespread evidence from across the empire—“to regulate, one might almost say, micromanage, local cult practice”. And, “interest in the operation of local cults seems to be the one exception to the noninterventionist policy” imagined of the shahs generally. Catholics can hardly be keen to admit the Jewish religion was created as a matter of imperial policy by the Persian Zoroastrian shahanshahs, but that inference draws closer once the shahs are seen to be interested in regulating local cults. Darius was furious that Gadatas, one of his officials in Ionia, had taxed the sacred gardeners of Apollo of Magnesia, despite his “policy about deities”. Persian policy was to keep the priests of local cults on side by allowing them taxation privileges (“ateleia”) in return for keeping order—helping to collect taxes and enforcing the law through their cults.
Many scholars have found it significant that in the letter and elsewhere in the Ezra narrative, Ezra is called a “scribe” as well as a “priest”. The word scribe was used in two basic senses in the Persian period:
someone who has the ability to read and write and who is called upon to transcribe legal documents;
1.
officials within the administration. 2.
We use the word “secretary” in equivalent ways, as someone who transcribes letters and as a senior government official like a Secretary of State. Legal documents or letters from Persian officials mention the name of the scribe who wrote out the letter. An order from Arsames to his officials in Egypt states that “Nabuaqab wrote”, and that “Nabuaqab is the scribe”. In the same letter, Arsames writes that “Anani the scribe is chancellor” and since Anani is not the scribe who committed Arsames’ words to paper, here “scribe” means “chancellor”, the “overseer of the order”. Anani will see that the order is carried out.
This double description of someone as “scribe” and “chancellor” is known elsewhere from the Persian period. A cuneiform document from 486 BC. concerns an order given by a satrap to two men regarding a certain amount of barley, and both men are referred to as “sepiru” (“scribe”) and as “bel temi” (“chancellor”). These titles appear in the introduction to the letter of Ezra 4:11-16, part of the correspondence between “Rehum the chancellor and Shimshai the scribe” (Ezra 4:8) and Artaxerxes. Artaxerxes orders that the building of Jerusalem come to a halt, and that Rehum and Shimshai enact the royal decree in Yehud. A cuneiform text also refers to “a scribe of the satrap of Egypt”, who worked at the royal court and who kept the satrap informed of what was going on there.
So, a scribe was an official position within the Persian administration, and the “Scribe of the God of Heaven” was an office of the Persian government. Scholars who accept the validity of Ezra’s mission look to the title of scribe to explain his position vis-à-vis
the royal administration. Did scribes do the types of things Ezra was commissioned to do according to the letter—teach the people about the law and appoint legal officials? If scribes represented higher ranks in their absence, then Ezra could have received a commission from the shah to introduce Jewish law to Abarnahara and to appoint judicial officials who would act in accordance with it.
Ezra 7:14
but it is difficult to understand why an officer responsible for Jewish affairs should have been needed at the Persian court. To suggest that a tiny colony should require its own minister of religion in the chancellery is absurd. However, if Jewish here pertains not to Yehudim but to to “Juddin”, the Persian description of non-Zoroastrian religions, the title and position would make complete sense.
It seems Ezra was a senior minister responsible for religious affairs in the empire, and this can only add to the suspicion that Ezra is an abbreviation of Zoroaster. Zoroaster was a title of officials of the Zoroastrian religion at Rhages under the Medes and doubtless remained the same under the Persians, though officiating at the new capital. What could have brought such a senior religious authority, a man senior to the satrap, to Yehud?
Josephus tells us that it was that Johanan had murdered his own brother in the temple! If the colonists had been given the task of setting up an official religion—a religion of the Good Creation—then this was a serious matter. More so in reality because it will surely have been a symbol of the dissension between the Samarians and the Jews. The governor of Yehud, Bagoas (Persian Bagavahya, Bagoses, in the Elephantine papyri) had reported the murder to the satrap of Abarnahara, and thence it reached the office of the minister of religious affairs at the king’s court. Ezra sought the permission of the king to go and sort it out in person:
Forasmuch as thou art sent of the king, and of his seven counsellors, to inquire concerning Judah and Jerusalem, according to the law of thy God which is in thine hand.
Artaxerxes II came to the throne in 404 BC. From the dated letters of Elephantine, Bagoas was governor of Yehud in 410 and 407 BC. Egypt declared itself autonomous about this time, and remained semi-independent for sixty years, so suddenly Yehud became an important place as an outpost once more. In these conditions of uncertainty and change, Johanan seems to have decided to get rid of his troublesome brother. The fact that the satrap did not punish the High Priest suggests that Joshua was considered a trouble by the Persians. Instead sacrifices were taxed implying a more widespread dissension in the worshipping population and Ezra, the senior minister for religious affairs, was sent to sort it all out.
The Law of God or the Law of the King
Eduard Meyer in 1886 pointed out the implication of Ezra 7:26 for Judaism. The shah ordered them to obey the Jewish law on pain of death. “The law of your god and the law of the king”, in Ezra 7:26, implies the identity of two laws but could imply two separate laws. The conjunction translated as “and” is better translated as “namely”, yielding “the law of your God, namely, the law of the king”. A Babylonian document recording the sale of a slave mentions “datu sari”, the king’s law, but it does not imply a legal code, for any law given the imprimatur of the king was the king’s law. The authoritative Cambridge Ancient History denies any unequivocal evidence of the implementation of an imperial legal code in the time of the Achaemenids.
P Frei, Persia and Torah (Ed J W Watts)
J L Ska
expressed as decrees to promote God’s will, or “arta”, the fundamental orderliness that even God was subject to.
In the ancient Near East, any law was based on divine legitimation and so involved religion.
Kings ruled in the name of a god, and, if the law of a god could possibly clash with the law of a king, the people would consider the god to have it right and not the king. Plenty of religious people today still, Christians as well as Moslems, put their conception of the law of God before the law of the land. Eastern potentates could not have endured two separate and possibly conflicting laws operating simultaneously. The Persian shahs were not at all tolerant of the daeva religions, the religions of the evil gods, manifested by opposition to the agent of the God of Heaven, the Persian king. If any such group of people had defied the king, they would have been punished as being influenced by evil daevas. [†A MODERN EXAMPLE. The very same argument
was used by our Christian leaders Bush and Blair against the Moslems who defied their exploitative policy in the middle east. Dare one say, “Plus ça change”?] It follows that the laws of any local God were necessarily the laws of the king so long as the king saw nothing in their application that contradicted his will. Once they did, they were illegal and were punished.
The Persian authorities needed a legal document containing the basic customs and laws of the community living in Judea to grant religious and political autonomy on a clear juridical basis to this province.
M A Dandamaev and V G Lukonin thought the Persians accepted localities into the empire as pseudo-autonomous regions subject to the overriding royal judicial system. The regions were bound to fidelity by political, economic, and religious laws obliging them to do certain things like pay taxes, and in return favouring the ruling elite with tax concessions and privileges. The Persians exploited local institutions for their own ends, but it is absurd to imagine or pretend that they did not ensure that the institutions were suitable to their purpose in the first place. They ensured they were by appointing and controlling local officials, and ensuring their loyalty with concessions and privileges.
G Knoppers, Persia and Torah (Ed J W Watts)
Ezra 7:25 Persian kings seem to have given local appointees significant leeway to govern their communities in accordance with larger strategic priorities. Achemaenid hegemony was maintained even as local customs were honoured… Persians allowed locals to hold important offices within their territories, but, during most periods, the Persians seem to have restricted entry into the highest offices within the government to members of the Persian aristocracy. The Persian kings preferred to reward good conduct and loyalty from members of other societies by granting honorary titles and material distinctions, rather than providing open access to the highest levels of martial or political decision making. This practice protected the highest echelon of the Persian elite from unwelcome integration, while encouraging local and regional appointees to manifest loyalty towards their superiors.
The Persian aristocracy had actually failed in this at the very highest level by the time of Darius II, who was half Babylonian, being the son of a concubine, but it remains a good summary of Persian policy.
And thou, Ezra, after the wisdom of thy God, that is in thine hand, set magistrates and judges, which may judge all the people of Abarnahara, all such as know the laws of thy God; and teach ye them that know them not.
Blenkinsopp can argue that Ezra was not bringing a new law because Ezra 7:25 spoke of those who knew the laws of your God and those who did not know them in Abarnahara, the latter having to be taught them. If the laws were new ones, few people indeed in Abarnahara could have known them. If they were not new, then why did no one know them except Ezra and a few specialists? Ezra 7:25 is not referring only to Jews, but to all the people of the Abarnahara satrapy, as Michael Heltzer and Lisbeth S Fried argue. Ignorance of the law was even then no defence, and everyone in the satrapy had to know what it was. Blenkinsopp disagrees on the grounds that the clause “all the people of Abarnahara” is qualified by the next one, “all such as know the laws of thy God”. It is how the modern text is punctuated but it still says that the people of Abarnahara are to be judged by Ezra’s laws and so had to know them and be taught them if they did not. Having been taught them, eventually everyone would know them, and so be subject to them! Moreover, the whole of the sense of the passages preceding are that Ezra had command over the treasurers of the whole satrapy, not just Yehud. The ones who knew the laws Ezra brought were the people he had taken with him to colonise the province, and they had the duty to teach the rest.
Ramesses IV “righteousness” for Judaism, and Fried is surely correct that the basis of law in the courts of the judges was essentially the righteousness (“ma’at”, “arta”) of the judges, though they had formal laws too, and both “ma’at” and the law were taught in the Houses of Life. Persian judges were fired if they transgressed!
Fried does not deny that there were laws in the ancient near east, and that collections of them like Hammurabi’s were common, there being apparently at least nine such Akkadian codes, and that they were multiply copied and studied. Even so, she says no attempt was ever made to keep these codes current by updating them in response to real cases. Fried tells us these collections were collections of “just verdicts” meant to be examples for the judges of “ma’at” or righteous judgements, but not statutes or precedents to be cited in making a decision. Fried seems to go too far. R Westbrook in
Revue Biblique (1985) disagrees with her, though she has a point about using the collections in training magistrates in the righteousness of judgement. Donald B Redford in the same book (Persia and Torah) also disagrees, pointing out that to decree a taxation is to decree a law, and Egyptian taxation receipts have been found. The law was specifically applied.
Parallel Babylonian codes such as the collections of omen texts, medical texts and astrological ones were cited by their users, though the legal codes seemed not to have been. Despite it, we can read “his case will not be judged as an inhabitant of his town”, “the custom of the place” and “the law of market gardeners” (D B Redford), showing that there were local government laws and even laws for different trades. The simple explanation is that judges were not necessarily literate whereas the doctors and scribes versed in prediction were. Judges were like British magistrates or like Justices of the Peace. They were laymen who heard the case and made the decision, but the recording was by a professional scribe, and the same man or another scribe assisted the judge by citing to him the relevant legal cases to help his “arta”, “ma’at” or righteousness. The judge was not obliged to follow the advice of the scribe or lawyer but it is unlikely that he often would ignore it.
Redford thinks that it is absurd to imagine people making codes of law and faithfully copying them out, for no good reason. Thutmose III made laws and established instructions, for the law must be “done as it should be”. Egyptian writing is replete in legal terms. He lists phrases that illustrate his point:
Laws of the Palace.
I am one that enforces the laws of the king.
…who groups his (Pharaoh’s) laws and does not frustrate his doctrine. The council of 30 for interpreting the laws of his lord.
Whereaver I presided in court, justice was exact, and the process of law was followed.
Enrich your officials that they may enforce your laws.
Superintendent of the laws of the Perfect God in the Department of Administering Justice.
The Egyptians had offices of “Superintendent of the Law”, and “Custodian of the Law”, both implying papyrus collections of laws or edicts—the same word, “hp”, covered both. Redford cites J-M Kruchton (1981) that judges performed their tasks “the instructions before them, the laws in their day books”. As in the phrase used in
D B Redford, Persia and Torah
hand”. Important decrees specified that they should be written down or even published on inscribed stelae, and, indeed, the scribes ensured that all law was written down at once as part of the law-making process. Laws such as treaties were read out to the people. “The law was not only written down with care but also classified and filed” according to a rational system, Redford says. Conclusively, in Egypt the punishment of a crime was sometimes cited from a “hierglyphic text” or “from the gods”.
The Egyptians postulated a divine underpinning to all law.
A vast bureaucracy supported libraries, archives and the Houses of Life. Among them were the judges who had their day books, apparently used as legal precedents, in fact. Altering any written record was a serious crime akin to perjury, and the judges were proud to claim they enforced “the laws of antiquity”. It is the perfect situation for a conquering king to come along and claim he is codifying the law for everyone’s benefit, when he really has a large commission of scribes altering all the relevant laws according to Persian chancellery models.
Curiously, scholars found that in the Saite period a considerable amount of editing went on, so that important texts like the Going Forth By Day were substantially changed. The pharaoh, Ahmose II (Amasis), immediately before the Persian conquest, reformed the Houses of Life! Even his predescessors like the priest of the Theban “temple state”, Mentuemhat, boasted of their restoration of the temples and the law, and the twenty fifth and twenty sixth dynasties immediately preceding the Persian conquest were noted for their “archaizing tendencies”—their whole style was artificially old! Redford concludes:
Egypt entered the last quarter of the sixth century BCE with perhaps the most sophisticated legal system in the world. It may now be asked what Darius, a late arrival on the scene, whose ancestors had but recently emerged from breech cloth, wanted with this law… Darius was doing the Egyptians no favours by having this law written out—again!
Redford does not answer the question he tells us may now be asked, but it is legitimate to ask it. If Darius was doing the Egyptians no favours in spending 16 years rooting around their religious and legal schools supposedly codifying their laws, then what was he doing? It ought to be obvious that what he was doing is what Persians did in Yehud—ensuring that the laws and religion of Egypt suited the Persian kings.
J Blenkinsopp, Persia and Torah
a thorough jumbling of recent Egyptian history by the Persian commission to provide legitimacy and therefore acceptance of their own rule. Redford accepts a tradition, citing R A Parker, that books and writings and new writings were brought to Egypt by Darius. If Darius was interfering with the records by restoring them, then a batch of substantially edited records intended to look as if they were pre-Persian, in other words, archaized, ought to be anticipated. It is just what scholars have found.
All that was needed in Yehud, Blenkinsopp thinks, was that the sense of the law had to be properly taught (Neh 8:8). It is hard to see how this makes any difference at all. These people who had had a law for a thousand years did not understand the sense of it? If the sense of a law that is supposedly well known has to be taught, then how well known was the putative law? And when a law is given a new sense, how is it the same law? The whole point of the Persian approach was that they aimed to be seen as not interfering, but as being helpful—helping the people restore normal religious service. That was their ploy, but really they were imposing their own laws, laws that suited them as rulers, and that shines through, now! They were subtle. So subtle that it has taken until now for historians to realize it. They have been beguiled for too long by Persian propaganda put over as religious necessity. Biblicists even make out that the Persian officials were being manipulated by God’s clever people, though they were too stupid to realise it. The whole sense is the opposite. The Persians had a consistent policy of implementing their own policies but contriving to present them as being with the agreement of local people. The people were fooled by it, and so accepted it quiescently.
The fact that the Jewish law is the only one mentioned in the decree (Ezra 7:14, 21, 25) and that the penalties for infraction of the laws, listed in descending order of severity, are characteristic of Persian rather than Jewish penal practice, suggests the conclusion that the Jewish law Ezra was authorized to enforce is now invested with the authority of the monarch, and therefore is, in effect, royal Persian law as far as Jews in the satrapy are concerned.
In fact, the passages cited make no mention of Jewish law but the law or laws of “your God” or the “God of Heaven”, so the singular Jewishness of the law is deduced from the belief that Ezra is a Jew. Ahuramazda was also the God of Heaven, and would have been Ezra’s God, had he been a Persian not a Jew. Fried accepts that Ezra’s “God of Heaven” (Ezra 7:12, 21, 23) was a “local manifestation” of Ahuramazda, and notes that Thomas M Bolin, in a discussion of the Elephantine temple in the context of Persian religious policy, came to the same conclusion (1995).
Interestingly, the expression “law of Moses” only appears 14 times in the Jewish scriptures and six of them are in books speaking manifestly of the Persian period,
Pierre Briant
Lisbeth Fried, Persia and Torah
law, but they understood by it, when obliged to be clearer, the “law of Moses” or the “law of God”, and these clarifications appear almost entirely in the explicitly Persian books. Hans Heinrich Schroeder concludes that Ezra, as the “scribe in the law of Moses”, was an official of the Persian court.
Justice is first and foremost fidelity to the rule of Ahura Mazda and to the power of the king.
The law of the king and the law of Ahura Mazda have merged. The will of the king is the will of God.
A popular ploy of believers faced with an unattractive hypothesis about their scriptures is to set up a straw man to knock down rather than answering the actual point. It happens in this context too. They pretend that the Persians imposed the whole of the Pentateuch in its more or less final form on to the Jews, rather than initially Deuteronomy alone. It is easy to show that the whole Pentateuch is not Persian! Blenkinsopp asks:
The legal compilations in the Pentateuch are inseparable from their narrative contexts and themselves contain a fair amount of narrative and historical reference… Must we then suppose that the imperial authorities either mandated or auhorized the juxtaposition of the larger narratives in which the legal compilations are embedded, and then checked them to make sure they presented no threat to the pax Persica?
Er… No, Joseph! Not that Blenkinsopp thinks it. We must imagine he is raising the question rhetorically because others ask it in all seriousness. Of course, the
Pentateuch was never given fully formed, whether by man or by God! It grew by a quite complicated process in an obscure period of history. Lisbeth S Fried tells us that the initially terse basis of the Jewish law was successively glossed by copyists, each seeking to clarify an expression such as “temple servants” (Ezra 7:24) by exemplifying it. Some of the books now in the Jewish scriptures include things the Persians cannot have sanctioned. The idea of a messiah is unquestionably Persian, but the Persian Saoshyant was the saviour of the world in a sense much more like the Christian one because he was to restore Ahuramazda’s Good Creation, free of the harm done by Angra Mainyu. The Jewish messiah was much altered by the resentment against the Seleucid Greeks and became a warrior national saviour epitomized by the Hasmonian brothers.
The seed planted by the Persians, besides the saviour concept, was that this minute country could become a great nation provided they were obedient and righteous. In
2 Chronicles 17:5-9
mythologized detail, but attributes it all to king David! This and other evidence suggests to Blenkinsopp that the Jewish David is a mythologized Darius—actually Darius II. The Maccabees, once they had set up the Jewish free state, embellished the myth of Darius II as the founder of the Jewish state, into the myth of David, the founder of a Jewish empire!
Suffice it to say, the Persians gave a law and began the process of justifying it by giving the Jewish state a bogus history within which the details of the law would be clarified. The lines and tone of the Jewish scriptures were set, but much of the writing followed after the Persians no longer were in charge. The Persians said the Jews had been enslaved by the Egyptians, meaning their country had been occupied by them, but later the fantastic myth of Moses and the Exodus was added by the Ptolemies to explain the name Moses as Egyptian, and was adjusted by the Seleucids, then the Maccabees and the Herodians. So, none of this was Persian.
Lester L Grabbe has noted that the preface to Ben Sira by his grandson speaks of “the law, the prophets and other books” in the second century BC. Here “the law and the prophets” are plainly well accepted, but not so the others that are mentioned so vaguely. Grabbe thinks it is because “the law and the prophets” were Persian but “the others” were later additions.
The Chronicler seems to have been the trade union representative for the Levites. In
Chronicles 17:7-9, it is Jehoshaphat (Yehouah is the Judge) who teaches the law of Yehouah to the people.
Therefore the Lord stablished the kingdom in his hand, and all Judah brought to Jehoshaphat presents, and he had riches and honour in abundance. And his heart was lifted up in the ways of the Lord. Moreover he took away the high places and groves out of Judah. Also in the third year of his reign he sent to his princes, even to Benhail, and to Obadiah, and to Zechariah, and to Nethaneel, and to Michaiah, to teach in the cities of Judah. And with them he sent Levites, even Shemaiah, and Nethaniah, and Zebadiah, and Asahel, and Shemiramoth, and Jehonathan, and Adonijah, and Tobijah, and Tobadonijah, Levites, and with them Elishama and Jehoram, priests. And they taught in Judah, and had the book of the law of the Lord with them, and went about throughout all the cities of Judah, and taught the people.
The word used for law is “torah”, showing that the books of Chronicles are after the Persian colonization, yet Jehoshaphat is supposed to have been a ninth century king. He is doing in the ninth century what Ezra did 500 years later. Plainly, Jehoshaphat is part of Ezra retroscribed into an earlier mythical history. Ezra appointed judges and this mythical king was the Judge of God. Ezra brought priests to teach the law, and that is just what we find this king doing.
The Artaxerxes Letter
officials will have done that and the king merely signed it. The officials might have couched the letter in suitable terms and shown familiarity with the procedures. The mention of the wrath of the Judaean god might have originally meant Ahuramazda, or been diplomatic or the addition of a Jewish editor.
H G M Williamson argues the letter’s use of Imperial Aramaic, its Persian loanwords, and the general agreement of its contents with known Achaemenid policy toward foreign peoples support its authenticity. Sara Japhet and Williamson have damaged the older scholarly consensus that the Chronicler was responsible for Ezra-Nehemiah, and particularly for the Ezra narrative. Williamson admits that the narrative has undergone editing, but its basis is a report that Ezra sent to the Persian court to describe his activity in Jerusalem.
Because most scholars accept the letter of Artaxerxes as authentic, they view Ezra’s work as a “mission”, actions given validation by a royal decree (Persian framana). From this point of view Artaxerxes sent Ezra to Yehud, to reform the temple cult. Artaxerxes may have been concerned about the stability of a region close to Egypt, an unstable and rebellious satrapy, and may have wanted Ezra to impose order in Yehud. By working for social cohesion in Jerusalem and Yehud, Ezra ensured that the province remained docile and accommodating to Persian rule.
Ezra’s journey might have been Artaxerxes’ or a Chancellery idea and there was no original request on the part of the Judaean. It was a standard Persian courtesy to quote relevant bits of any original letter. Here there is no such citation but the letter writer has detailed knowledge of aspects of the Jerusalem cultus. The Palestinian vocabulary in the letter would be understandable if the letter’s author were quoting an original appeal from Judaeans. If there was an original letter, then it has been modified. Perhaps a request was sent to Artaxerxes from the Jewish community and the monarch composed a letter granting the petition that quoted the original piece of correspondence in the manner in which we would expect. Later on, this letter was edited in such a way that the original petition was incorporated, and the whole inserted into its present position in the Ezra narrative.
Jedaniah of the settlement at Elephantine appealed to Palestine in 408 BC for permission to rebuild Yehouah’s temple of Yeb destroyed in 411 BC. Replies came from Bagoas (Bagayavahu), governor of Yehud, and from Dalaiah (Deliyeh), son of Sanballat of Samaria. Both were couched in ways that the sound like the attempt in
Ezra 7 to copy a framana of the Persian king. Both are memoranda concerning the cult of the “God of Heaven”, that begin with an apparent repetition, and both stipulate the temple had to be built “in its place”. It all suggests that this royal letter in Ezra has some historical basis.
The letter seems to quote an earlier bit of correspondence, albeit not one from Ezra or his colleagues. In Ezra 7:21-24, Artaxerxes apparently quotes a letter that he has sent to his treasurers, informing them that they are to supply the Jerusalem temple with provisions. Otherwise there is no reference back to an earlier letter or request. Every known piece of administrative correspondence sent in reply to an earlier query quotes from it. Their absence here makes Ezra’s journey and all of the letter’s particular references to the cult in Jerusalem entirely the initiative of Artaxerxes.
Ezra 7:15-24
Ezra 7:14, 25-26 Ezra originally commissioned by the Persian king to conduct vessels and money to Jerusalem (Ezra 7:15-16)? Was he really given the authority to appoint officials in Abarnahara to adjudicate on the basis of “the law of your God and the law of the king” (Ezra 7:25)? Did the king really instruct his treasurers to supply the Jerusalem temple with provisions (Ezra 7:21-23)? Did he really order them to exempt the temple clergy from taxes (Ezra 7:24)?
The letter as we have it makes Ezra’s journey to Jerusalem and the gifts to the temple there from the royal court appear not as Ezra’s initial suggestion to the king but simply as unprompted royal beneficence. A reader of Ezra-Nehemiah may be meant to assume that this continues the book’s equation of the royal and divine wills. The decree of Artaxerxes in Ezra addresses two main issues:
the donation of money and goods from the crown and other sources to the Jerusalem cult,
1.
Ezra’s own appointment as some sort of official whom the king has assigned “to seek out concerning Yehud and Jerusalem by the law of your God”.
2.
Ezra had authority over all the Jews of Abarnahara, to judge with severe
penalties including death. He had authority therefore over the satrap himself in these matters. It seems that after a hundred years the different colonists had not yet settled the new religion on the region. Ezra was provided with apparently huge resources (though doubtless exaggerated as propaganda) to settle it for good.
Ezra is portrayed as more than just a royal lackey. He is portrayed as a trusted servant of the king. Sara Japhet thinks the editor of Ezra 1-6 indeed equated the will of the Persian king with the will of God. Ezra 7:27-28 has the same attitude. Ezra is told at the beginning of the letter that an order has gone out that he is “to inquire about Yehud and Jerusalem with the law of your God that is in your hand” (Ezra
7:14). Ezra 7:15-24 then discusses financial issues, and the thread of Ezra’s inquiry resumes in the last two verses of the letter. He is to appoint judges and magistrates “who are to adjudicate for all the people who are in Abarnahara, for all who know the laws of your God; and whoever does not know (them) you will teach”. The letter says that Ezra is to appoint these officials “for all the people who are in Abarnahara” (Ezra
7:25). All the people in Abarnahara were to be subject to the law of the God of heaven. Finally, the letter concludes, “all who do not do the law of your God and the law of the king” will be subject to punishment. The Persian shahanshah in practice was God. That is why the shah wanted to apply the law of Ezra’s God to all of Abarnahara.
The appointing of legal officials in Abarnahara and teaching the law were the duties Ezra had, but the rest of the Ezra narrative records Ezra performing only the latter action. Appointment of officials of the law of God in other nations of Abarnahara can have been of no interest to the later Jewish editors, and have been omitted. Ezra teaches the law to the Jewish community in Nehemiah 8. The letter gives Ezra sweeping powers to enforce the law, but the community volunteers their infraction in the case of the divorce of the foreign women in Ezra 9-10, even though Ezra then acts strongly. There is no doubt of Ezra’s huge authority, but he exerts it through diplomacy and moral pressure.
