How Persia Created Judaism 2.2
Achaemenid research still suffers from persistent marginalization in the academic world… Achaemenid studies have been persistently undervalued…Professor Pierre Briant
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, December 08, 2000
Abstract
Religion as Propaganda
The cosmological teachings of Anaximander of Miletus show marked Zoroastrian influence, according to M L West (Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient, Oxford 1974). Anaximander lived just before Cyrus conquered Ionia, but Persian magi seem to have been propagandising before—the priests to the shrine of Apollo at Magnesia on the Meander welcomed the Persians and Cyrus rewarded the inhabitants of the town with tax breaks and freedom from forced labour. Satrapal coins issued at Tarsus in the fourth century BC bore the figure of a god in Persian dress identified in Aramaic letters as Nergal of Tarsus. Boyce considers this as odd and explains it as having “a propaganda purpose”. It was meant to induce Nergal’s worshippers to accept Persian rule “through this courtesy to their god”.
Strabo records a tradition that the temple of Zela in Pontus was set up for thanksgiving during Cyrus’s war against Lydia. Originally it was an artificial mount surrounded by a wall, typical of the sort of high open space favoured by Zoroastrians for worship. From then on, for a thousand years, Zoroastrian temples existed in Asia Minor.
After securing the east in several years of campaigning, during which his agents prepared the ground in Babylonia, raising dissention among the priests of Marduk who had been slighted by Nabonidus, who favoured the god Sin, Cyrus moved against Babylon. The whole of Chaldaea surrendered with little resistance! Syria, Palestine to the Brook of Egypt, and Elam all fell simultaeously as vassals of Babylonia.
In 1879 AD, a cylinder was found in Akkadian script, the usual writing of Babylonia, with 45 lines of an edict of Cyrus. The initial lines berate Nabonidus, but are incomplete. They speak of a weakling, dishonour, enmity, stopping the daily offering, presumably to Marduk, and instead offered daily hostility, all the dwelling places had become ruins and the people of Sumer and Akkad were like corpses.
He brought all of his people to ruin through servitude without rest. Because of their complaints, the lords of the gods became furiously angry and left their land. The gods, who dwelt among them, left their homes, in anger over his bringing into Babylon.
It seems Marduk took pity on his people and searched everywhere in all lands…
…for a righteous prince, after his own heart, whom he took by the hand. He called Cyrus, king of Anshan, by name. He appointed him to lordship over the whole world… Marduk, the great lord, looked joyously on the caring for his people, on his pious works and his righteous heart. To his city, Babylon, he caused him to go. He made him take the road to Babylon, going as a friend and companion at his side. His numerous troops, in unknown numbers, like the waters of a river, marched armed at his side. Without battle and conflict, he permitted him to enter Babylon. He spared his city, Babylon, a calamity. Nabonidus, the king, who did not fear him, he delivered into his hand. All the people of Babylon, Sumer, and Akkad, princes and governors, fell down before him and kissed his feet. They rejoiced in his sovereignty. Their faces shone. The lord, who by his power brings the dead to life, who amid destruction and injury had protected them, they joyously blessed him, honouring his name.I am Cyrus, king of the world, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon… Eternal seed of royalty whose rule Bel and Nabu love, in whose administration they rejoice in their heart. When I made my triumphal entrance into Babylon, I took up my lordly residence in the royal palace with joy and rejoicing. Marduk, the great lord, moved the noble heart of the residents of Babylon to me, while I gave daily attention to his worship. My numerous troops marched peacefully into Babylon. In all Sumer and Akkad I permitted no enemy to enter. The needs of Babylon and of all its cities I gladly attended to… and the shameful yoke was removed from them. Their dwellings, which had fallen, I restored. I cleared out their ruins.
Marduk, the great lord, rejoiced in my pious deeds, and graciously blessed me, Cyrus, the king who worships him, and Cambyses, my own son, and all my troops, while we, before him, joyously praised his exalted godhead. …the gods, who resided in them, I brought back to their places, and caused them to dwell in a residence for all time. … by the command of Marduk, the great lord, I caused them to take up their dwelling in residences that gladdened the heart. May all the gods, whom I brought into their cities, pray daily before Bel and Nabu for long life for me, and may they speak a gracious word for me and say to Marduk, my lord, I permitted all to dwell in peace.
Another cylinder said that Cyrus rebuilt Esagila and Ezida, respectively the temples of Marduk and Nebo at Babylon and Borsippa. A long poem apparently by a priest of Esagila praises Cyrus and curses Nabonidus. Interestingly, the Seleucid king, Antiochus I, did exactly the same as Cyrus, restoring these two temples and making sure everyone knew about it. Cyrus told these defeated people that he ruled them through the wishes of their gods. Since Cyrus plainly did not believe that these gods were legitimate, being a believer in Ahurumazda, it has to be admitted that he was simply using the foreign gods to manipulate their worshippers. The next question is: Was the restoration genuine, or did he “restore” what suited the empire. Did he restore them in their previous rites and beliefs or did he change them in the process? The Jewish scriptures should be proof enough that he changed them utterly.
Supposedly, Cyrus allowed deported people to return home as the scriptures say (Ezra 6:3-5). Several different peoples are mentioned on the cylinder seals and it is assumed that each of them would have had similar promises to those given above or in the Jewish scriptures. Frightened Biblicists attribute the whole of this Persian imperial policy to the magnanimity of the Achaemenids, with no conditions or ulterior motives. They dare not accept that religion was used for the purpose of foreign policy, to control the subject people.
In the days before mass communication, it was mass communication! Few people would not go to their temple or place of worship on the prescribed occasions and hear the words of their god read out. The strategy of the Shahanshahs was to ensure that what they heard inculcated respect for the Great King, the god that had picked him out to rule the world, and the laws that they formulated and presented to the people. To be rewarded the people must be obedient, and to pay their tithes and taxes was a duty to god. People who did this were righteous. Just in case they were not, and proving the practical nature of the whole policy of retoration, is the fact that “restored” temples in frontier territories nearly always had an attached fortress!—in Jerusalem, what eventually became the Antonia Tower.
The belief in the universal dominion of a supreme god, the idea that a local deity, let us say, Koshar of Ugarit, reigns also over Crete and Memphis, changed the formula of homage but left intact its content. A new ruler received the lordship from each universal god simultaneously, and established his relations to each god separately as before.E J Bickerman
The Persian kings paid dutiful homage to each local god as the universal god. They had control of the land in fact through conquest, but sought to confirm it in law—the law of God, whatever name he had locally. So, their policy was to restore what had previously been national gods that approved local rulers, as a universal god that approved the Persian rulers. Obviously, this was a long-term policy. It was winning the hearts and minds, and simple people had to be treated differently from clever ones. That was the purpose of deportation. Clever people were removed from their power base and given a power base elsewhere that they held contrary to the local people and only with the support of the empire. They were made princes and priests in a strange country to control the local people on behalf of the Great Kings. They were privileged but precarious. As Mary Boyce says:
It would have been impossible for the Persians to have imposed their own religion on the numerous and diverse peoples of the ancient lands they now ruled.
Cyrus and his descendants were not so crude. They did not impose their own religion, they generously “restored” the old one, using the proven method of deportation. But curiously enough, the old one had significant features of the Persian religion once restored. Boyce knows that Cyrus was an expert propagandist and there was no better propaganda than religious propaganda. The religious right in America know it still. Even liberal Presidents of the USA have to end every speech with the mantric words, “God Bless America”.
People of religious conviction are convinced that what is good for their god is good for everyone. Doubtless Persian kings felt the same way. Cyrus and Darius were not so foolish as to try to force people to worship an unknown god, but the Jewish scriptures testify to the fact that the restored god might not have been recognizable to the local population, despite a familar name and certain traditional trappings. Pace Bickerman, they rather changed the content of the old religions towards Zoroastrianism while leaving symbols intact.
Boyce, kow-towing, it seems, to the sensibilities of Jews and Christians, claims that what influence there was was “not official proselytizing” but only individuals “speaking ardently” about their Zoroastrian faith. No doubt there were such people too, but obviously imperial policy could hardly have been openly known without being self-defeating. It is perverse to say that Cyrus’s propagandists were unofficial amateur missionaries, and, once it is accepted that they were conducting an official policy, there is no further reason to draw the line at their use of religion as propaganda.
The Same in Egypt?
Why leave out Cambyses? No reason, despite the bad press he had from the Greeks and Egyptians. They claimed he was a madman who knifed the Apis bull and had destroyed Egyptian temples. It seems not to have been true. Though his soldiers had plundered them, he had quickly taken action to stop it and “restore” them. Like his father, Cambyses was keen to use religion. He restored the priesthood of Sais, presented libations for Osiris and venerated Neith, the goddess of the city. He also claimed he was a legitimate ruler of Egypt because his mother was the daughter of the Pharaoh that Psamtik III’s father had deposed. Royal inheritance in Egypt remained in the female line until this point in history.
The well-known letter from the priests of Yeb dated about 410 BC claims the temple to Yehouah there had been established before Cambyses. It agrees that Cambyses had destroyed Egypt’s temples but had spared Yehouah’s. The priests over a hundred years later probably accepted the falsehoods of the Egyptian priests as history. After Darius had succeeded him, the Persians had no interest in countering such propaganda. Darius was the legitimate successor of Cyrus. It is easy to see why the priests of Yeb did not want to admit their foundation by Cambyses.
That Cambyses, a man with a dishonourable reputation, had set up their own temple was denied by their claiming the temple to Yehouah had preceded his campaign and victory. Cambyses had intended to conquer Ethiopia but had failed. He will have left Jewish troops there to guard the border because Egyptians were unreliable, having just been defeated and resentful, and that will be when the Yeb temple was set up (524 BC). Since this is before the Jewish temple at Jerusalem had been established, and long before Ezra, the Jews of Yeb worshipped something closer to the original Canaanite Yehouah and his family.
Darius sent his Egyptian collaborator, Udja-Hor-Resenet to Egypt to “restore” the “Houses of Life” attached to the temples where the holy books, inscriptions and precedents were kept, and theology and medicine were studied. The layman who had a problem would come here for priestly advice. There was an important house of life at Edfu, a great temple dedicated to Horus. Edfu, from the Ptolemaic period that followed the Persian period, is the best preserved temple in all of Egypt, as it was covered in sand until recent times.
On one of the walls of the temple is engraved a list of the sacred books kept there. Along with the books on rules of the temple, inventories of the temple holdings, and religious calendars, there were numerous books on magic:
The Book of Appeasing Sekhmet, The Book of Magical Protection of the King in His Palace, Spell for Warding Off the Evil Eye, The Book of Repelling Crocodiles, The Book of Knowledge of the Secrets of the Laboratory, The Book of Knowing the Secret Forms of the God.
At the top of the hierarchy of priests was the high-priest, the sem priest, or “First Prophet of the God”. One of the titles of the priest Nebseni in the Book of the Dead is “president of the secrets of the temple”. He was a learned man, an elder of the temple, an accomplished administrator and politician. As in Judaism, only priests of the highest rank were permitted to enter each temple’s holy of holies and care for the “oracle”.
Bob Brier in Ancient Egyptian Magic tells us that a function of the priests was caring for the cult statues of the gods. Oracles were so called because they would nod their heads in answer to questions, and even talk. No one knows how this was done. Priests, called by the Greeks Stolists, offered the god food several times a day, clothed him in the morning and sealed the chamber in the evening.
The priests would interpret dreams, supply incantations, prayers, magic spells, amulets, charms, or love potions, dispense cures for illnesses, and counteract malevolent influences. The books were for priests, and were kept from the few laymen who could read, using hieroglyphs as a secret code long after they had ceased to be generally used, having been replaced by hieratic and demotic—just as the Christian priests wrote only in Latin to keep their knowledge from the uneducated. Why should the Persian king have been interested in Egyptian medicine, law or theology? In restoring these schools and libraries he had carte blanche to change what was written down to whatever suited him. Doubtless during the restoration, the priests will have found invaluable lost books! Should there be any doubt he also commanded that Egyptian law should be recorded. Egyptologists seem not often to consider whether the papyri they find are pseudepigraphs written by the Persians to further their own policies.
Historians must ask themselves whether this was pure altruism, kindness and concern for an alien culture or whether here was a chance to strengthen Persian rule through the religious base. We find Egyptian inscriptians that, just as the scriptures say that Yehouah put Cyrus in charge of the world, Ra made Darius king of Egypt. To curry favour with the priests, Darius restored to them the revenues that Cambyses had imposed upon them. He built a large new temple to Amun-Ra, the Egyptian god closest in nature to Ahuramazda, at the oasis of el-Khargeh, and signs of a widespread influence in such matter are found elsewhere. He also supported the cult of the Apis Bull. Finally, a letter to his Egyptian satrap tells him to intervene in the appointment of high priests, proving what ought to be obvious, that great emperors like Darius could not avoid interfering in hugely influential positions like the priesthood. It is plainly imperative that the holders of the posts most influential upon the views of the people had to be the king’s men.
Darayavahu
Darius is properly Darayavahu. Yavahu is uncommonly like Yehouah (YHWH), and must have sounded similar. Vahu is the Iranian god of the wind, that became, like the Hebrew, to mean breath and so life, so Yavahu literally means the same as YHWH. Scholars admit the etymology of “DR” (“ZR”) is puzzling. Literally, “zara” refers to the action of sowing seed in the fields (Gen 26:12; Isa 37:30), and seems to be a Semitic root. So, Zara in Hebrew is seed. Yet it is used in different senses either through metaphor or through the introduction of the same word with a new usage.
It means “progeny” as a metaphor of seed—so by a remarkable coincidence, Darayavahu can be read in Hebrew meaning “seed (progeny) of Yehouah”, “seed of the living god”. Indeed it is virtually the same as Israel (seed, progeny of El) except that the general word for god, El, has been replaced by the specific Yehouah.
Curiously, zara denotes Yehouah’s establishing Israel in the land of Palestine in a future day in an interpretation of Israel (Jezreel) as suggested above.
And they shall hear Jezreel. And I will sow (ZR) her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.Hosea 2:22-23
Those returning under Darius could have been encouraged to read Israel as code for Darius, then it reads: “And they shall hear Darius…” And what is he doing? Adopting a people who are not his own people!
Oddly enough, sowing is scattering seed. These people that have been sown in the earth can just as easily be scattered. So it is also used in almost an opposite sense too, making it ideal as a poetic word that can be positive or negative according to the response of the people. Just the intention of the Persians. It is not surprising, then, that it is popular in “late” (post-exilic) works such as Hosea, Isaiah, Psalms, Job and Proverbs.
Having noted this it is perhaps hardly surprising that the same letters signify divine help, rescue or even salvation. In Ugaritic, DR (ZR) means “rescue” or “save”, appearing in personal names analogous to Joshua (Jesus), Hadididri (Hadad saves), Asarya (Yehouah saves), Isra (Salvation). Similarly ZR in the bible is used with the divine name (either El or Yah) to form Jewish proper names: Azarel, Azriel, Azariah and Ezra, but the “salvation” is downgraded to “help” in most translations. Merely to pray for “help” to a mighty god seems modest, unless it leads to salvation.
In the scriptures, the salvation is often from enemies in battle. Egypt will not “save” Judah and the prophet condemns reliance on it (Isa 30:7; 31:3). Chronicles, books usually put in the same school as Ezra and Nehemiah, is particularly emphatic of divine saving help. The Psalms too. Divine help to save the nation of Israel is a common theme in Isaiah (41:10, 13, 14; 44:2; 49:8; 59:7, 9)—through God’s aid, Israel will overcome her foes. Psalms makes it clear that the help is salvific, not merely assistance:
But the salvation of the righteous is of the Lord: he is their strength in the time of trouble. And the Lord shall help them, and deliver them: he shall deliver them from the wicked, and save them, because they trust in him.Ps 37:39-40
The parallels in these verses show that the help given is salvific. This was the intention of the Persian kings when they “restored” the gods and temples of their subjects. They wanted it to seem like a salvation and in their propaganda depicted it in no uncertain way as such. If the people, though, were ungrateful, the tables would turn.
It seems most unlikely that Darius would not have used the coincidence of the sound of his name in his propaganda to the worshippers of Yehouah, that the Persians were building up as loyal subjects in Palestine. Darius sent another batch of “returners”, possibly writing the prophetic pseudepigraph Hosea and parts of Isaiah, both of which mean “salvation”.
Moses and Exodus
