Judaism
Ezra and Nehemiah: Piecing together the History of Yehud (Judah)
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, February 26, 2001
The Artaxerxes Letter
In 1944, Arvid Kapelrud stated, “that the rescript [of the framana of Artaxerxes] in its entire spirit and tone is Jewish and not Persian is agreed to by all”. It is not agreed today! Most English scholars accept it as genuine as did Kellerman and Noth. The Jewishness of it might be the work of the editor casting it into a more understandable form, or an editor having to reconstruct a lost or largely damaged letter at a later time. There is not even any need to think that Artaxerxes wrote it. His chancellery 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 thet 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.
Even if the letter is edited, does Ezra 7:12-26 contain what actually happened? Was 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, Ezra 7:15-24
- 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”. Ezra 7:14, 25-26
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.
Was the Persian government in the habit of sending out representatives to establish local and royal law codes? Blenkinsopp claims that Ezra was sent by Artaxerxes I in 458 because Artaxerxes, like Darius, was intent on reorganizing his empire and instituting legal reforms. Janzen says there are two major difficulties with the parallel between Udjahorresnet and Ezra that Blenkinsopp attempts to draw:
- there is no good indication that Udjahorresnet carried out any legal reforms in Egypt by means of royal fiat;
- there is no indication that Artaxerxes I initiated any sweeping legal reforms within his empire as Blenkinsopp claims.
If Artaxerxes had actually begun such reforms, they would be the historical background for Ezra’s work. This objection needs revising if the emperor were Darius II, not Artaxerxes. Darius was half Babylonian and made significant changes in emphasizing Babylonian culture.
Ezra set off, again on the first day of the year, and arrived four months later exactly. Ezra picks up a fresh batch of colonists, evidently priests but not Levites at Casiphia by the river Ahava. There were no Levites because the caste of Levites only arose after the Persians had set up the temple. An editor thought the absence of any reference to Levites strange and has added an explanation. The confusion is like that of much of the scriptures—multiple redaction—anachronistic mentions of Levites have later been added.
Casiphia must be Ctesiphon and the river must be the Euphrates, or a nearby tributary. Who were these priests that were not Levites, and therefore apparently unsuitable? Yet others called Nethinim were found and were considered suitable. These Nethinim served the role for Ezra of priests and were admitted into the priestly caste being allowed to marry with them. It looks very much as though Ezra is using his authority to create a class of reliable people whom he would use to impose order on to the unreliable earlier colonists of Yehud.
Financial Matters!
The Persians were less generous than the Neo-Babylonian kings in financial policy toward temples. The Persians incorporated some of the established temples into the government-regulated system of land tenure. At Ur, the vast temple lands and holdings belonging to the god Sin were overseen by the same government officials who administered government land and waterways.
Some texts refer to the temple lands both as belonging to Sin and as “bow land”, a kind of fief distributed by the crown to vassals who were obligated to perform military service and pay taxes in exchange for the land. Other texts note that holders of temple land are charged the same kind of tax that was paid to the crown on the royal fiefs. So, some of the temples were integrated into the network of tax-gathering organizations. The temples were also obliged to make payments for public works.
In Egypt, Cambyses put an end to the royal donation of provisions to the temples there, allowing only three to continue to receive produce from the government, and even in those cases he drastically cut their income from the crown. Yet the Persians were also well aware of the importance of courting regional religious sensibilities to keep the peace in their vast empire.
Cambyses agreed to Udjahorresnet’s proposal and restored the cult, priests, and festivals of the temple of Neith at Sais, according to Blenkinsopp. Udjahorresnet also says that Cambyses came to Sais to prostrate himself before the goddess. In fact, one of Cambyses’ seals from Egypt was designed in traditional Egyptian style and claimed that he was the “beloved of Wadjet”, the goddess. In Egyptian reliefs he is pictured in local dress, kneeling before the gods.
The Babylonian Chronicles also suggest that Cambyses worshipped before Marduk at Esagil. Diodorus claims that because of Darius’s close association with the priests of Egypt and his study of their theology, he was addressed as a god by the Egyptians during his lifetime. There is political sense in a king presenting himself as a devotee of a god or goddess of a conquered region, since such actions are likely to garner support for the empire or at least reduce local animosity toward the ruling power.
The Persians would also cut off royal donations to temples and increase their payments to the administrative coffers, but a king could have authorized a donation to a particular cult, as we find in Artaxerxes’ letter in Ezra 7:15, 21-23. Udjahorresnet reports that Darius restored the various temple guilds at Sais, and “had commanded to give them every good thing”, presumably a royal donation to re-establish what had been destroyed in the earlier revolts in Egypt against Persian power. Artaxerxes evidently made a similar contribution to Jerusalem as a gesture of goodwill.
The list of provisions in Ezra 7:22 donated to the temple is presented just as Persian lists of the period were presented. The item is listed, then the unit of measurement, then the number of units to be provided. Provisions are listed in this way in a letter from Arsames regarding rations to be given to one of his officials travelling from Babylon to Egypt, as well as many ostraca from southern Palestine regarding items from royal stores. Artaxerxes’ claim to his treasurers in Ezra 7:23 that he wishes through these donations to avoid the wrath of the God of Heaven, though always assumed to be the Judaean god, could have meant his own God Ahuramazda who wore the heavens as his “massy cloke”.
As for the text’s claim that the king authorized his treasurers not to tax the clergy of the temple (Ezra 7:24), a parallel exists in the Gadatas letter, a Greek inscription from the second century AD that presents itself as a copy of a letter sent from Darius to an official by the name of Gadatas in the Ionian province of Magnesia. In it, Darius warns Gadatas to cease taxing the sacred gardeners of Apollo. This is the only document besides the Artaxerxes letter of Ezra that witnesses to a Persian-period clergy with a tax-exempt status, and, as with the letter in Ezra, the authenticity and historical reliability of the Gadatas letter are disputed. Some think it was an opportunistic late forgery but J Wiesehöfer (1987) thinks the author has enough knowledge of administrative practices of the Persian period. The inscription also introduces matters that have nothing to do with the cult at Magnesia, an unlikely dilution if the inscription was composed long after the Persian period merely to support the clergy’s wish for tax-free status.
When a new temple was established in the Persian province of Lycia, a province of Anatolia, in the fourth century BC, the priest received immunity from local taxes but not from those of the central Persian authority. The establishment of this cult is recorded on the Letoon trilingual stele, found in 1973 in a shrine to the goddess Leto in the Xanthos valley. It states that Artaxerxes—probably Artaxerxes III (Ochus) but possibly his son, Arses—had issued a decree in his first year (therefore likely to have been 358 BC, possibly 337 BC) founding a cult to the Carian gods and its laws. The stele makes out that the king had responded to a request of the local people to recognize the cult. Pixodatus was the Carian satrap of Lycia, so his role was akin to that of Nehemiah, according to the Jewish scriptures. Nehemiah is a Jew who is also governor of Yehud, and petitions the shah to assist the Jews. Pixodatus does the same for the Carians, though he presented his petition at the request of the people, not merely on their behalf. The Xanthos decree gave complete freedom from taxation to the priests and the sanctuary. There must have been a quid pro quo.
The Greek and Lycian versions on the stele end with an appeal for the satrap to recognize this new cult, while the Aramaic ends with the Persian satrap’s response. The Aramaic (Persian) part of the text explains that the provisioning of the temple would be used for raising taxes, and Pixodatus would administer it. The priests too would have to maintain the laws of the cult god. Whereas the Greek has “May Pixodoros establish (the cult) as lawful”, the Aramaic version ends with “He [Pixodatus] wrote this law for enforcement”. The three versions, but especially the Greek and Aramaic, parallel each other closely. A Dupont-Sommer thinks the Greek and Lycian were the original appeal to the Persian authorities for the establishment of the cult, and the Aramaic version was the positive response to the appeal from Pixodatus. The Aramaic has quoted the Greek verbatim, just as the Persians habitually did. The Greek version states that the cities establishing the cult “gave to them [the priests] immunity [of taxes] of goods”. Yet the Aramaic, which follows the Greek so scrupulously, omits this entirely. The satrap did not want the clergy to believe that the Persian government would exempt priests utterly from taxes. They had a concession from city taxes but would be raising them for the imperium.
The biblical account continues at Nehemiah 7:70, where large amounts of money were collected from people as offerings. Gilbert J P McEwan, (Priest and Temple in Hellenistic Babylon 1981) shows that in Babylonia, the larger temples at least were involved in tax collection and government land ownership. Large temples owned large amounts of land and other holdings that they would rent out. The Eanna shrine at Uruk owned 150 storage facilities, large plots of land and farms. The temple had a governing board that would oversee the holdings. It received rent, tithes, and offerings as income and paid out salaries through its various prebends, which included members of the priesthood but also many different groups of artisans. Lower levels of temple personnel simply received rations. All temple holdings were considered to be the property of the god, and so temple property at Uruk was called “the property of Anu”.
While some of the land remained under direct control of the temple administration, other parts were leased out. The prebendary rights were as much temple property as the land and so were the temple slaves. Administrative policy concerning temple function, personnel, fines, assigning vacant temple land, and so on was made by the “puhru” as a whole, which was presided over by the chief administrative officer, the “shatammu”. The assembly included the cultic professionals among its members, and membership within the assembly qualified one for membership in the city. The assembly would even consider such matters as marriages, petitions, and grievance. At Uruk, the prebendary system was controlled by the “bit abim” (“houses of the fathers”, priestly castes or clans). All the higher civil and temple officials were members of one of the temple clans, and assembly membership was likely restricted to those who were clan members, although it is possible that the clan system was not introduced until the Hellenistic period.
Throughout the Persian period, established Babylonian temples existed not just as cult centers but “as social units with dependent populations and extensive administrative staffs, as economic units with widespread real property, diverse sources of income and facilities for accumulating and redistributing their wealth”, according to M Stolper. In this social setting the “shatammu” as chief administrator of the temple did not act by himself but always within the context of the head of the assembly. It is all remarkably Jewish.
In Neo-Babylonian texts from the Ebabbar shrine at Sippar, the temple administrator appears in connexion with the questioning of assembly members involved in lawsuits, and in some texts appears even with royal judges. At Sippar he was involved not only with managing matters such as land, cattle, and temple personnel, but also acted as judge in a few cases dealing strictly with matters internal to the temple assembly. As an administrator, then, a “shatammu” could not force an assembly to act but could only lead it as it made its decisions. Insofar as such an administrator could apparently act as a judge, his authority was limited to matters within the world of the assembly.
Scribes appear within the Babylonian temple assemblies, both the “sepiru”, the Aramaic scribe who wrote on parchment, and the “tupsharru”, the cuneiform scribe who wrote on clay. The “tupsharru” was considered a priest, while the “sepiru” was considered an administrator. So beyond referring to members of the Persian bureaucracy, the term “scribe” could also refer to functionaries within the temple organizations, and in Babylon to people who were considered both priests and administrators. Janzen tries to maintain that Ezra was simply a temple scribe, a “tupsharru”, but that is untenable unless Ezra-Nehemiah is abandoned as a pointless work.
The actions that Ezra performs in the Ezra narrative have contemporary parallels. Joel Weinberg has given convincing parallels between the Jerusalem temple community and those of Babylonia, between the Babylonian “puhru” and the “qahal” of Ezra-Nehemiah. Both terms refer to a temple assembly, and the “qahal” of Persian-period Yehud appears to have functioned much like its Babylonian counterpart. The Jerusalem temple assembly was structured by the caste of priestly families that were the equivalent of the Babylonian “bit abim”.
Ezra acts like a “shatammu”, an administrator who can guide the assembly but who cannot mandate decisions, yet the Artaxerxes letter gave him that authority. Janzen thinks Ezra was just the head of the assembly and declares the letter spurious denying that Ezra had the authority to legislate a decision in the way that Nehemiah did. In Nehemiah 5, the poor complain about the burden of taxes, and the governor handles it. This, though, was a matter beyond the bounds of the assembly. Ezra was not sent to replace the governor, although as a more senior official, he had more power. The governor still acted as governor, and had to shift the attention away from the royal taxes that had caused the problem.
Janzen says Nehemiah can act in a way that Ezra cannot, an obviously unwarranted assumption that he has to deny the shah’s letter to uphold. Janzen goes on to say that Ezra had no power to act outside of the assembly, because he did not use it, but a senior statesman and diplomat would have sought to lead rather than drive, especially in delicate matters, and especially because that was how the leading priests, the “shatammu”, in fact, behaved. When, in Ezra 9-10, he works within the assembly on a matter wholly internal to it, he works as “shatammu”, not as royal official because it is more effective, but there is no doubt in the whole work that the assembly knew who had the power. Ezra’s authority shines through.
Reading the Law
A most important passage follows in Nehemiah 8 where Ezra reads the law to people who already putatively had the most comprehensive law since Hammurabi—the law of Moses. They are supposed to have had it for a thousand years, and the Second Law, or Deuteronomy, they are supposed to have had for about 200 years. “They had forgotten them!” the “scholars” of the Jewish and Christian persuasions tell us. S Mowinckel (1965) lists the hypotheses and their proponents about “The Book of the Law of Moses” which Ezra read (Neh 8:2-15):
- Deuteronomic Laws—Laurence Browne, Raymond Bowman, M F Scott, Ulrich Kellermann;
- A collection of legal materials—Rudolph Kittel, Gerhard von Rad, Martin Noth;
- The Priestly Code—Abraham Kuenen, Bernhard Stade, W H Koster, Eduard Meyer, W O E Oesterly, Adolphe Lods, Hans-J Kraus;
- The Pentateuch—Julius Wellhausen, Ernest Sellin, Hans Schaeder, Otto Eissfeldt, Wilhelm Rudolph, Kurt Galling, Sigmund Mowinckel, William F Albright, John Bright, Frank Cross and James Sanders, but C Houtman objects that legal citations in Ezra-Nehemiah do not come from the Pentateuch, nor are supposed Pentateuchal citations quoted verbatim.
Only the first or second can be right. The Priestly Code has to be much later, being the elaborate rules of a well established sacerdotal centre. Ezra leads the group of Levites in teaching the law, obviously working in a senior capacity. Here he is called both “priest” and “scribe”. In fact, Ezra reads to the colonists and the Am ha Eretz a covenant, an enforceable treaty in the form of a statute like the one the biblicists tell us they had had since the time of Josiah. The law read out by Ezra 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 they were commanded not to mourn! David A Smith, in the Lutterworth Dictionary of the Bible concedes that the response was grief, but it soon turned to joy! It was the law of Mazas, Ahuramazda, called Mazas by the Assyrians, Moses by the Jews, or perhaps Misa (Mica), the name of Mithras in the Persian dialect. Jewish sages have thought of Ezra as the second Moses. He was the first Moses, unless Ahuramazda or Mithras is considered the first. It also begins to look like 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 easily explained from its assimilation into Hebrew as meaning “his brother”.
Ezra read out Deuteronomy! Deuteronomy, charges the priests (Dt 17:18 and 31:9-13) with a public reading of the law to Israel. Ezra teaches Torah to the community, acting the way a priest would. The name Deuteronomy does not imply that some law went before it except in the minds of scholars who cannot think. Deuteronomy is a name given to a biblical book by Christians because they thought there already was a first law—the law of Moses. The truth is that Deuteronomy was the law until the priests of a later date, when the temple was up and running, wanted to add as many layers of sacrificing, tithing and taxing as they could to extract the maximum revenue from the population. John How is sure Ezra’s law is Deuteronomy. The parts reminiscent of the Priestly Code (Neh 10:38-39; 12:47) were additions by the Chroniclers—priests.
The form of the law is exactly the form of ancient near eastern treaties. Christians want us to believe that God chose a legal form for his covenant with the people that the Semites of the fertile crescent knew well. If this pathetic lunacy were not so ingrained and prevalent among biblical scholars it would be risable. Indeed it is, but there is no historian who has the nerve to tell the religious dogmatists to do something useful like sweeping roads or digging out cesspits, leaving scholarship to professionals who do not need to call upon the hypothesis of God’s finger at every juncture in Palestinian history.
David C Deuel calls Ezra “an Old Testament pattern for expository preaching”, when he means that Ezra is the Old Testament pattern of expository teaching.
If Judaism followed the pattern established by Ezra and if the church took many of its first practices from Judaism, is it possible that expository preaching has enjoyed an unbroken succession of “pulpiteers” from this early period?
Need he ask? He points out that Larsen had already said:
Preachers today stand in this awesome succession. We are the descendants of those incendiary spokesmen for God in all their variety and diversity.David L Larsen, The Anatomy of Preaching (1989)
The shape of the ceremony when it was read out became the traditional shape of Jewish and Christian services which centre on readings from the legally binding books and an exhortation to obey. Psalms and suitable prayers reinforced the message: “Obey the law and you are saved. Do not obey and you are doomed”.
The people could not understand what was being said, though Ezra was a Jew reading out the law of Moses, we are assured. A large number of assistants were needed to “interpret” Ezra’s words for the crowd and to explain precisely what they meant—the “sense”. Biblicists know that Ezra 4:18 refers to “translation” not to “explanation”, and sometimes they will admit it in a footnote while going on then to treat the meaning as explanation. “Translation” here means “interpretation” or “explanation”, they say. It means “translation” because Ezra is a Persian and he is reading in Persian. His assistants translate the Persian words and explain them to the assembled throng.
In the ritual the people call out, “Amen, Amen!” This now means “quite so” or “truly”, repeated twice, as Jesus did in John’s gospel, but oddly enough Artaxerxes was called “The Mindful”, in Greek, Mnemon, so the people are actually calling out Artaxerxes’s name in Greek! Whether this is a bizarre coincidence or whether for some reason Ezra was reading the law in Greek, inviting the crowd to respond by repeating the Shahanshah’s name in Greek, will never be known. It seems doubtful, except that the same law might already have been used in the Greek colonies in Asia, so Ezra had it to hand in a readily usable form—but in Greek! In any event, the calling out of “Amen” to acknowledge a religious statement has never ceased since, in Judaism and Christianity.
The Festival of Booths
Ezra in the passage next entered has the colonists celebrating the festival of Booths. The Chronicler tells us that the Jews had not been celebrating the Feast of Booths since the time of Joshua. For you scholars at the back there, this means it had never been celebrated. It was supposed to have commemorated the time God spent with the Israelites in their tents in the desert. They had to have settled down for it to make sense, so it could only have been celebrated in the time of Judges, according to biblical chronology. It would not occur to a Christian or Jew that the Chronicler is actually leaving clues to take the rise out of the gullible believers. These people in reality had never spent any time in the desert in booths, so what was the point? The people who had lived in booths in the desert, or Eurasian steppes, were Iranians.
Zoroastrians had a harvest festival in the autumn dedicated to Mithras, and we have to conclude that Ezra was really introducing a festival to match that of Mithras. Booths is held from 15 to 22 of Tishri which corresponds to the end of September and beginning of October (sometime in the interval 20 September to 19 October) in our calendar. Mithras (Mica) became the Jewish archangel Michael, and Michaelmas Day is still, to this day, 29 September in the Christian calendar. Also significant is that Booths required the sacrifice of seventy bulls over the whole period of the festival, and Mithras is associated with bull sacrifice.
A bundle of twigs called the “Four Species” are ritually waved throughout this festival, a habit that has no scriptural explanation except that the booths were to be made of twigs:
Go forth unto the mount, and fetch olive branches, and pine branches, and myrtle branches, and palm branches, and branches of thick trees, to make booths.Nehemiah 8:15
Zoroastrian priests always carried a bundle of twigs called the “Baresman”, and we can deduce that the “Four Species” being waved are a memory of the Zoroastrian origins of the ceremony of booths.
The purpose of the festival for Ezra was that the new law had to be ceremonially taught for a week every year. But the original period of the ceremony did not match that adopted later—it was not set on the fifteenth day of the month as it now is. This first one was held on the second day of the seventh month. It shows that the traditional date set in the Mosaic law did not precede this law of Ezra. Ezra, in short, was founding the tradition, and later it was moved by the priests to make way for the Day of Atonement that was comemorated on 10 Tishri (Lev 23:26-32).
The Chronicler mentions the Festival of Booths elsewhere in his long history (2 Chr 5:3; 7:8; Ezra 3:4) but these simply show that the editor called the Chronicler was writing at a later period, when the feast had become traditional, and it had been customary to retroject it into the past, much of which was a mythical justication for the priestly extortions. A Guillaume explains to us, in a commentary on Chronicles:
The doctors of Islam shaped the laws of millions of Moslems by reading back into the origins of their religion the conditions and ideas of their own age: how customs and laws introduced by Mohammed became de rigueur by the simple expedient of claiming for them his precept or example.
It is remarkable that Christians like Guillaume could write this without a hint that they had noticed the same could have happened in Christianity and Judaism. Guillaume wrote in about 1920, but there is little evidence that many Christian scholars, or anyone with influence, have noticed it until this day. To make it utterly clear—the whole bible is built on the same principle. Guillaume might have been a genuine Christian idiot savant because he asks in wonder or deceit:
Why was it that Israel’s great saints had lived as though the law had never been given?
Despite what he said about the Moslems, it never seemed to occur to him that much Jewish scripture is fabricated at a much later date and retrojected into the past. Later laws concocted by the priesthood not more than about 200 years BC are retrojected into a distant antiquity to give them a caché that they could never otherwise have had. They invented a character to explain why their law was called the law of Moses, a name that they came not to understand because their god was called Yehouah not Moses.
This part of Nehemiah shows the foundation of the feast of Booths and indeed of the central elements of Judaism, in the time of Ezra. No one can seriously believe that the native people had forgotten these traditions from their inception until the time of Ezra, or that an official of the Persian king should turn up with records of a detailed law that the people for whom it was intended had forgotten for a long time. Ezra instituted the feast and the readings of the law that became the basis of our modern patriarchal religions.
Separating Husband from Wife
Now we come to Ezra’s most offensive act, the case of the foreign women in Ezra 9-10, when the members of the assembly brought the matter of intermarriage to Ezra. Marital relations with the Am ha Eretz were forbidden in the law:
When Yehouah Elohim shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou, and when Yehouah Elohim shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them. Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them. Neither shalt thou make marriages with them. Thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods.Deuteronomy 7:1-4
Ezra deplores the situation, claiming that it will provoke God to anger and cause God to destroy the community, but it is the assembly or part of it that confesses the “sin”. Shecaniah, not Ezra, suggests that the assembly cause those of its members who have married foreign women to divorce them (Ezra 10:2-4).
Ezra made the whole of Israel swear to do as he wanted, and obliged the Jewish men to divorce their wives and cast off them and their children, or have all their property and rights removed. We have to return to Ezra 9 to follow the proper sequence of events. The mention of the ninth month in Ezra 10:9 confirms the correctness of the restored order of the work. The chronology is right.
Some colonists had married wives of the native people—people who were supposed mythically to have been ethnic Jews, even if they had strayed from proper practice, as Jews and Christian pretend. The complaint is against the uncleanness of the men of the land, the native inhabitants of the hill country who were the same people as the “exiles”, but the Chronicler picked out Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. There is only one reason why ethnic mixing should have been forbidden, since there is not a shread of evidence that the Israelites were ethnically different from Canaanites. It is that the real complaint was against Egyptian women, because Egypt had declared UDI. So, the problem sounds ethnic—but it is really religious. The basis of it is the Zoroastrian one that marriage should be within the religion. The people who are called to Jerusalem are the “children of the captivity”—the colonists.
Blenkinsopp objects that there is no law in the whole Pentateuch calling for those who have married local people to divorce them and abandon them with their children “according to the law” (Ezra 10:3). It can hardly be meant as a serious objection. If membership of the community meant not marrying non-members, then none of them could marry non-members and remain members! It follows that they had to divorce their wives and children to remain members of the Jewish community. If they refused, they could no longer be Jews and were treated as if they were natives themselves. It might have been that the law about divorce was explicitly stated, but at a later date the locals had joined the club by taking up the proper worship of Yehouah, and perhaps the proscription seemed superfluous, and so was dropped. It remains true, though, that a Jew must have a Jewish wife for his children to be considered Jews, and some Jews ignore even this.
Lisbeth S Fried adds an interesting observation on Nehemiah 13:23-25, where the governor punished the Jews who had taken foreign wives, by beating them and pulling out their hair. A text from Babylon, contemporary with Darius II (420 BC), uses the same phraseology as the Nehemiah passage and shows that plucking the beard was a deliberate humiliation used as a punishment by the Persians.
Josephus says Bagoas had offered to make Joshua the High Priest in a tendentious account which accuses Bagoas of polluting the temple, entering it in his capacity as governor to investigate the crime. Answering protestors, Bagoas, whose very name (Bagayavahu) includes the Persian word for God (Baga), and who must have been a Zoroastrian, declared, “Am I not purer than he that was slain in the temple?” He was! Nothing was more impure than a corpse and no corpse worse than that of a dead priest. Bagoas was accusing the colonists of hypocrisy, and imposed an additional tax on their sacrifices for seven years.
What the basis of the quarrel was between the brothers is not stated, but the fact that Bagoas did not punish Johanan personally for a heinous murder shows that he was not plotting against him as Josephus says. Ezra (Ezra 10:6) spends the night with the murderous priest, Johanan, apparently condoning his action. Ezra must have considered the murder justified, and he had the power of life and death, so had the same view as Bagoas. Persian interests must have been served by the murder which, to judge from the subsequent actions of Ezra might have been connected with mixed marriages of temple officials and priests with women of a different religion, most probably Egyptian women being the main concern, as offering both religious and loyalty problems.
Ezra speaks of the transgressions of the colonists, “those that had been carried away”. He means not the ones that had just returned with him, but the previous colonists who had made a bit of a pig’s ear out of their duty. Down to the Dead Sea Scrolls words like “the Captivity” (the Golah) or “Captives” was a word of honour for the colonists. It is taken to refer to their captivity in Babylon, but the Babylonian Jews were obviously not captives and some, to judge by their names, did extremely well. Ezra is supposed to have been a Jew who became a Persian official. Nehemiah is the same, according to the bible. How are these people captives? The truth is the “Returners” were captives of Persia. The name The Golah became a name of pride for the colonists and used to distinguish them from the colonized. Ezra speaks of the “remnant”, a way of denoting the colonists as special as the Righteous Few while the Am ha Eretz and the apostatizing “returners” were unrighteous. He states clearly (Ezra 9:9) that they are still in bondage:
For we were bondmen; yet our God hath not forsaken us in our bondage, but hath extended mercy unto us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and to repair the desolations thereof, and to give us a wall in Judah and in Jerusalem.
It is powerful propaganda. Ezra all the time speaks of “our God”, implying, if he was a Zoroastrian, that the gods were the same one, yet, if he really were Jewish, he continues the propaganda of Cyrus that the Persian kings were the agents of the Jewish God on earth. In the next but one verse he declares with utmost clarity that this is the time when the Jews possessed the land:
The land, unto which ye go to possess it, is an unclean land with the filthiness of the people of the lands, with their abominations, which have filled it from one end to another with their uncleanness.
This is just tha attitude of the Persians to the “daevas”, the false gods of the Evil Creation that had to be destroyed and not compromized with. Plainly, Yehouah was a Yazata not a daeva, but the Baals were daevas. There is no recognition here at all that the people of the land were themselves Israelites that had been left behind, there was no interest in them at all while they remained attached to their Baals, and there could be no intermarriage. At least in its concept of a good and an evil creation, Zoroastrianism has a theological basis for separation, but Judaism has none except an assumed superiority. Doubtless the women that the earlier “returners” had married had also been worshippers of Yehouah, but in the native Canaanite style. This is what the remnant had to stamp out and the reason why those of the restored faith had to divorce them. The apparent quotation from Deuteronomy (Ezra 10:11) seems to have been edited in the law itself (Deut 7:1-3) to get rid of Ezra’s statement that the land was unclean.
Like a good statesman and diplomat, Ezra gets the cooperation of some senior men, and examined the cases of mixed marriage over a two month period. The outcome is a list of those found guilty—only 111. It shows that the number of earlier colonists must have been small.
The Law is Deuteronomy
The action now moves back to Nehemiah chapters 9 and 10. In Nehemiah 9:6, God is described in relation to the heavens and the “heaven of heavens”, perhaps a suggestion of a heaven behind the heavens, a Zoroastrian idea because Ahuramazda is often described as wearing the “massy heavens” as his cloak. The nations in verse 9:8 are most of the nations already mentioned in connexion with the mixed marriages, yet it is supposedly referring to Abram, 1500 years before. And the covenant that the writer has just shown being introduced by Ezra in now cast back into the mythological past, showing that this, to the end of the speech, is all later composition. Its situation is manifestly false being a joint speech by eight Levites, and a long one for them to keep in synchronization, though modern versions attribute it to Ezra, as is likely to be correct.
The end reverts to the law and suggests that the law brought by Ezra was Deuteronomy (Ulrich Kellerman, 1968). The feast of Booths was celebrated on the second of the seventh month. In JED of Genesis no date is given and in P it appears as the 15th day of the seventh month. P was evidently the final modification of the law. The reading of the law in Nehemiah 8:2-18 corresponds with Deuteronomy 31:11 but does not appear in P. The rejoicing and the paradoxical command not to mourn matches Deuteronomy 16:14-15. Gifts for the poor in Nehemiah 8:10 matches Deuteronomy. Women and children are introduced in Nehemiah 8:2 and also in Deuteronomy. Only the Holiness Texts (Lev 23:43) identify the Festival of Booths as a memorial of the Exodus.
Most significantly, P specifies the tenth of Tishri as the Day of Atonement, yet in this account it is not mentioned. Even though a solemn assembly is called on the eighth, nothing is said about the famous fast of the tenth, showing it was a later invention, yet is prescribed in P. This account makes a use of a law and events that back it up that precede the writing of P, the Priestly Code, and the Holiness Code of Leviticus. Indeed it implies that the Chronicler might not have known it, suggesting that it was later even than the historian.
Moreover, the introduction of the covenant in Ezra 10 has no hints that there had supposedly been a history of Israelite covenants. Whatever seems possibly to reflect them turns out to be common to all of the covenants, therefore giving no indication of priority, while what seems particular to this one does not look genuine—it is probably interpolated. Thus Nehemiah 10:33 begins an excerpt from P to explain the use to which the temple tax is put. The explanation would have been superfluous in context, so seems to have been added for non-Jewish readers! Nehemiah 10:36b-39 is an addition that echoes P but also echoes unnecessarily what has been said in the previous two verses. Otherwise, Nehemiah 10:20 on mixed marriages is Deuteronomy 7:3 and has no parallel in P. Forgiving debts in the sabbath year (Neh 10:31) is Deuteronomy 15:2.
The temple tax of Nehemiah 10:33-34 is only a third of a shekel, a sum that appears nowhere else. Elsewhere, in the P scriptures, it is given as 1/2 shekel (Exod 30:11-16); 38:25-26), and it is the same in both of the books written in Roman times by Josephus. Tax rarely falls once instituted, and so 1/3 shekel is the likely original level set by the Persians. After the fall of Persia, the priests were free of all restriction and raised the tax to make themselves rich. Thereafter, the support base of the temple rose anyway, so the priesthood had a rising income without having to raise the tax further. The conclusion is that Deuteronomy and its source, Ezra-Nehemiah, preceded P.
The minimum age of Levites is set at 20 in Ezra 3:8, but has risen to 30 in Numbers (with one anomaly, 25, perhaps showing a staged increase), and seems to correspond with the 30 years implied in the gospels with respect to the admissible age of Jesus, and so too of the Essenes. Note too, that in Exodus 28:42 and 39:28, a work from the Ptolemaic period, the priests had to wear linen trousers, the characteristically Persian garment, stemming from them having been horsemen. Moreover, Exodus has the priests wearing a linen girdle matching the Zoroastrian kushti.
And a girdle (abnat, cf Persian navote, new born) of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, of needlework, as Yehouah commanded Moses (Persian Mazda).Exodus 39:29
A Letter to Artaxerxes
The Aramaic passage Ezra 4:7-23 follows next. The mention of Xerxes in verse 6, Artaxerxes in verse 7 and Darius in verse 24 suggests that the Darius must be Darius II, but no biblical scholar seems to consider this nowadays, all of them assuming it must be an anachronistic reference to Darius I. If Darius II is meant then the “second temple” was built fully 100 years later than is imagined, about 417 BC.
The letter sent shows several misunderstandings that indicate it is not original, Aramaic or not, and had been composed or reconstructed by people who did not fully understand what it meant.
The difficulties of Ezra 4:7-11 concerning the names mentioned as authors of a letter to Artaxerxes have already been considered, and Garbini has given the explanation. The supposed names Bishlam and Mithridates are a misunderstanding of words that meant “on the folded wrapping” because a short summary of the contents were written on the outside of chancellery documents to facilitate the Persian bureaucracy. It shows that the Chronicler had fragments of an original document that he no longer understood.
The letter, apparently to Artaxerxes II, must have been written near the middle of the fifth century. The response somehow was the sending of Nehemiah as governor about 445 BC, after Artaxerxes had stopped the building. The complaint is against the “Jews” who “came up from you to us”. The Jews were not seen as “returning exiles” but people “sent”. They seem to have been ignoring the king’s order and restoring the temple, and refusing the assistance of the native worshippers of Yehouah. L E Browne in Peake’s Commentary says:
Exiles had been coming back from time to time in the course of nearly a century. There is no need to suppose they formed a distinct community in Jerusalem.
Though it is true that colonists had come back in several phases, the story of the “returners” is of a group coming into Judah as an elite, and certainly forming a distinct community, therefore.
Note that in Ezra 4:2, the Samaritans were deported under Esarhaddon, in Ezra 4:10, it is under Osnapper (Ashurbanipal) while in 2 Kings 17, it seems to have meant Shalmaneser.
Egypt Secedes: Megabyxos Rebels
Pericles the leader of Athens had a base at Dor about 468 BC. The Greeks were likely to have supported the Egyptians in rebellion, so the base was of concern to the Persians. In fact, Greek mercenaries helped the Egyptians when they actually did rebel. Just before the return of Nehemiah, the satrap of Abarnahara, the noble general Megabyxos, had to put down a severe Egyptian rebellion (460-456 BC), but then rebelled himself because his honour had been compromized (449 BC). He defeated the king’s armies twice, and because Artaxerxes could not defeat him, but knowing him to be an honourable man, he offered a pact, and the two men seem to have returned to friendship. From then until the middle of the reign of Darius, except for a year of regnal squabbles before Darius II took control of the throne in 424 BC, there was a long period of peace. Advantage was taken of it to fortify Jerusalem and build up a dependent colony in Judah in case the Egyptians should again cause trouble.
The broken up book of Ezra-Nehemiah now continues at Nehemiah 1. Nehemiah is contrite over an event that supposedly happened over a century before. If the disaster were contemporary as the news and prayer imply, the walls and gates of Jerusalem must have been restored after the Babylonian destruction to be damaged again in this conflict. To be honest, we have to assume the latter because Nehemiah 1:1-3 seems undoubtedly to suggest that the Jewish settlers had been punished with the implication that some had been sent into exile while some were allowed to remain behind but destitute. It is hard to see why an event that happened 140 years before should appear as if it were news, if the Babylonian exile were meant.
It is plain from Nehemiah 7:4 that the city had been deserted, so there was no reason to build walls to protect the citizenry. It was built as a fortress. The true reason for the derelict state of Jerusalem and its need for fortification will have been the UDI declared by Egypt. If Megabyxos had punished the colonists for siding with the Egyptians in the rebellion of Inarus, the situation could have been as it is shown here. The Persians had been trying to get a reliable people settled in Jerusalem, because it was nicely placed to guard the routes into Asia. It was not on the direct route, being rather inaccessible on its hilltop site, but that was an advantage for a fortress and a base of operations. The Egyptian rebellion had made the need urgent, because they had sacked the undefended town or it had joined them in rebellion.
Nehemiah’s prayer displays the sentiments of Deuteronomy 30:1-4, so in part might be a genuine fragment, but the rest looks like a pious composition to introduce Nehemiah 2:1. The restorer did not give a full and proper date to his restoration of Nehemiah 1 because the next fragment he had was dated. So he built a composition around a small fragment he had to show Nehemiah’s prayer, and the Jews coming in supplication, but he or another editor then added the wrong year—the same one as in chapter 2—making Nehemiah learn about the problem after he had responded to it. Christian commentators ask us to amend twentieth to nineteenth in Nehemiah 1:1—the Holy Ghost being slack again!
The chapter purports to explain how Nehemiah persuaded the king to change his mind about rebuilding the city. If the story is from the original, it is propaganda, otherwise it is a later romance. Nehemiah 5:14 declares Nehemiah to have been the governor of Judah for twelve years, so our conclusions about the propaganda, or romance, are justified—Nehemiah was a Persian official. Before he was sent on this tour of duty he had been cupbearer to the king, a position that declared him to have been a Zoroastrian, because the king would never accept his drinks from unclean hands, and a trustworthy man, because his duty was to ensure that the king’s drinks were not poisoned. If he was also a Jew, then Judaism was considered an acceptable variety of Zoroastrianism.
The Persian authorities seemed to realize that they had been pussyfooting in Yehud and now wanted decisive action. Nehemiah was sent out with a military escort (Neh 2:9) showing that the times were troubled. Ezra was given no escort. They used propaganda to get the colonists to do the work for them, adding gifts as sweeteners. Nehemiah 3:5 and 3:27 show that even the wealthy who initially objected to doing manual work eventually helped out. But Nehemiah 4:10 suggests the truth that the colonists were a ruling class unaccustomed to such work.
The fact that the workers had to be armed to protect themselves makes the resistance they were facing sound more serious than mere objections. It sounds incredible that the authorities, the Persians, could not keep order and tends to confirm that we are looking not at any peaceable resistance but a troubled period of rebellions when the Persians were far from in control, because the Persian military were busy elsewhere, but they were succeeding in regaining control.
The results of the rebellion of Megabyxos occasioned the complaint to Artaxerxes. Even if the colonists had had permission to restore the temple and the city walls, it would have looked rebellious to chose this time to start, and so Artaxerxes stopped it. The complaint might have been just Jewish propaganda or their assumption. Artaxerxes might have stopped it as a sensible precaution under the circumstances.
Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, is known from an Elephantine papyrus dated 407 BC, that refers to his sons as Dalaiah and Shelemiah. His name seems to have a reference to Baalath, who is Astarte, suggesting he worshipped the older gods of Canaan, but it might be Babylonian (Shunibel or Sanbassar), so he was perhaps a colonist himself, but his sons were plainly brought up as Jews. Perhaps the daughter that married the grandson of Eliashub was brought up in the old religion, but if not, Nehemiah refused even to accept converted local women as Jews, at least so far as the priesthood was concerned. Of his allies, Tobiah also apparently worshipped Yehouah, but is described as an Ammonite. The family of the Tobiads appear again in the Greek period, so they were plainly influential.
Nehemiah in 5 inserts a parenthesis that shows the wealthier of the colonists had been exploiting even the less successful “returners”. These were troubled times and normal economic relations must have been under strain. The hills around Jerusalem were not easy to make a living from, and grain, for example, mainly had to be procured by trade in the market of Jerusalem. In these troubles, the poor were getting poorer and doubtless the rich richer, by exploiting scarcity. People were having to mortgage their children, their plots and even having to sell their children into slavery to survive—and these were “returners!” It might well have been that these poor colonists found themselves cut off by the natives and exploited by their own wealthy classes and so were worse off than either. Nehemiah sought the agreement of the wealthy to end this exploitation. Zoroastrianism always required charitable treatment of the poor.
Charles E Carter is sure that Jews outside of Yehud maintained the economy of the temple state. The assumption always is that many Jews did not return from exile, and it was these millions of wealthy Jews in Babylonia who supported their fellow Jews that returned. The Jews were supposedly in exile for 70 years. The ruling ten percent of a population that left 11,000 behind are thought to have gone into exile—1000 people! They were removed as captives and must have started out penniless and insecure even if they had been ensconced somewhere as local rulers, yet only 70 years later, they had multiplied into millions of successful businessmen, banking in the top banks! Even if it was 170 years because the return was at the time of Darius II not Darius I, it is an impossible achievement. They would have had to double in numbers every generation for ten generations. If such a growth rate is to be defended, it means the exiles were not hindered but rather were favoured by the Persian rulers, they were interbreeding and they were proselytising, so that those who returned were not ethnically the same as those who left. To accept it is to deny the Jews as an ethnic entity identifiable with the Israelites, and to deny them any ethnic connexion with Moses. The “Exile” is impossible, but Christians and Jews always insist upon it.
Yet, Carter is correct. The temple state was set up as the cult of the whole of Abarnahara. It is the people of Abarnahara who are the “peoples of the lands”, mentioned often in Ezra-Nehemiah and plainly different from the Am ha Eretz, who are the locals. The “peoples of the lands” are the Hebrews, and they it is who have to support the temple state. Yehud is like Washington DC, Canberra, Australia, or more accurately, the Vatican City. It was a religious state meant to gather the people for tithing. The three annual pilgrimages will have facilitated the collection of tithes and taxes from the Hebrews, and would bind them in unity. Carter writes:
The sacrifices were a form of taxation, designed to underwrite the priesthood and the temple officials.
And they were the tax men for the Persian state. Nehemiah 10:33-34 imposes a temple tax of 1/3 shekel, in addition to the sacrifices.
Nehemiah is keen to show that he is himself thrifty in the harsh conditions, not calling for the full resources he was entitled to for his diplomatic functions and feasts:
Moreover there were at my table an hundred and fifty of the Jews and rulers, beside those that came unto us from among the heathen that are about us.Nehemiah 5:17
Where is the Jewish faddiness about table fellowship that they were famous for? Perhaps because the colonists were trained as a nation of priests of the Jerusalem temple, they later adopted the attitude of the Zoroastrian priests, who were particular about cleanliness and purity for the sake of their duties, and could be particular about eating alone, or only with those they knew to be clean.
Nehemiah is taken as a Jew, though he must have been a Zoroastrian, but what of the “rulers” and the “heathen?” Jews are distinguished from “rulers” and “those” of the heathen, presumably rulers of the “heathen” nations of Abarnahara not heathens themselves. The rulers, whether of the heathen or the Jews, were Persian officials and administrators, and therefore likely to have been Zoroastrian. If the Jews, as all this seems to suggest, were Zoroastrians too, or crypto-Zoroastrians acceptable as Zoroastrians, then this table fellowship would have been possible within the Zoroastrian laws of purity. Interestingly, the Septuagint omits “and rulers” from this passage. It was translated in Maccabaean times and the Maccabees did not wish to suggest that the Jews did not rule themselves.
Who Were the Prophets?
The next section is simply Nehemiah 6, but it contains an utterly crucial piece of information at Nehemiah 6:6-7. A letter comes to Nehemiah from Sanballat:
It is reported among the heathen, and Gashmu saith it, that thou and the Jews think to rebel: for which cause thou buildest the wall, that thou mayest be their king, according to these words. And thou hast also appointed prophets to preach of thee at Jerusalem, saying, There is a king in Judah: and now shall it be reported to the king according to these words. Come now therefore, and let us take counsel together.
The crucial information is in the words, “thou hast also appointed prophets to preach of thee at Jerusalem, saying, There is a king in Judah”. It is an irrefutable admission that prophets were instruments of propaganda. Sanballat says that Nehemiah was already preparing the people for a coup by having prophets prophesy that he would be the king. It is exactly what we know that Cyrus and other Persian kings did to prepare the ground for his moves against countries like Babylon and Ionia.
Prophets were effectively agents provocateur who would begin whispering campaigns then, when they judged the time right, would make bold prophecies on behalf of their employer to prepare the people and get their support for his takeover, or social changes.
To imagine that the prophets of ancient Israel were anything other than these, is pure deceit. The Persians used prophets to spread ideas that were favourable to them, or alarm. Here it is proved in the bible itself, so Jewish and Christian commentators have always been aware of it. Only their flocks have not, and just in case they wonder, the commentators assure them that these are not true prophets! Thus Browne writes:
It is interesting to note the political use to which prophets were put. We sometimes forget the proportion of prophets who were concerned with promoting true religion was small. The rest were not necessarily followers of false gods, but as mere politicians and flatterers of kings, they were rightly described as “false prophets”.
Outrageous but feeble special pleading? Correct! If it were possible to distinguish true prophets from false prophets, there could be no use for false prophets at all. All prophets would be true prophets. If it is not possible to distinguish them, then prophecy is useless anyway—no one can know beforehand whether a prophet is a fake or not, so none of them should be listened to. How would any Christian or Jew know now whether the biblical prophets were true ones or not? Because they helped set up Judaism? That was the purpose of them as political agents of the Persian kings, so, according to Browne, they are false prophets! The Persian kings made use of prophets or oracles (the later prophecies of Zechariah are described as “oracles” in the bible) to create expectation and doubts. They were propagandists who did just what we read the biblical prophets doing. There is no reason at all to believe that the Jewish prophets were not agents of the Persian king.
Since Ezra at this time introduced the law called Deuteronomy, it is not surprising to find warnings there about prophets trying to persuade people to follow other gods:
If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the Lord thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee.Deuteronomy 13:1-5
Even the reference to bondage in the land of Egypt is not amiss here, since the Egyptians had rebelled and the Persians were keen to keep the people of the hill country on side. Indeed, references such as these will certainly have led to the later elaboration of them into the bogus history of slavery in Egypt in the Bronze Age. The importance of prophecy at this time as a propaganda tool both ways is also highlighted elsewhere in Deuteronomy:
I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him. But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.Deuteronomy 18:18-22
They Persian chancellery knew its own provocateurs, agents and spies, and promised to murder those of the other side, the normal risk of the profession still today, but there is no way an innocent bystander could know in advance true prophets from false prophets. One side or the other must come out on top and that is the only way of telling. The Persian kings were confident of having prophecy on their side—the prophets were their own agents. The earlier kings at least, like Cyrus and Darius, were certain they were battling the Evil Creation on behalf of God, Ahuramazda. They could use prophets as propaganda machines to help their victory, and when it came, it proved that they were doing right and God was on their side. Unless the Assyrians used prophets in the same way, as propaganda, which is possible, most of the biblical prophets are Persian, and their purpose was to get support for the colonists from the native Am ha Eretz.
The genealogy here is the same as the one in Ezra, and is unnecessary. Nehemiah is calling for a conference not a list of ancestors, and the results of the conference are announced in Nehemiah 11:1. The deserted city—it is latter half of the the fifth century BC and Jerusalem is still deserted after 150 years—has to be populated so the leaders are obliged to move in, along with one in ten drawn by lots, and some volunteers. The Jews were hardly dying to get in there, but a populated city is quickly created by these tough and unpopular measures.
