A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.Jesus on wealth, Luke 12.15
How Persia Created Judaism 23
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
Nehemiah and Ezra
Artaxerxes succeeded his father aged 18 when his father was murdered in a palace coup in 465 BC. In 458 BC, he abandoned Elamite as the language of the official records and introduced Aramaic. Doubtless the traditional Elamite scribes had been prepared for the change but more Persian scribes were being trained, initially in priestcraft, then specialising as scribes. These were all hereditary professions.
Under Artaxerxes, Megabyzes (Megabyxos, Bagabukhsha) was satrap of Abarnahara. he was a descendant of one of Darius’s six nobles and was married to the sister of Artaxerxes. He shielded the Athenians whom he had fought and defeated in Egypt, until he was ordered by the queen mother Amestris, to kill them. Feeling dishonoured to have to break his word, he rebelled, twice defeating the king’s forces until they came to a truce (c 450 BC).
In 444 BC, Artaxerxes sent Nehemiah to Jerusalem, instructed to bring the people into the fold of worship of Yehouah, a universal god of heaven. Morton Smith wrote:
He secured to the religion that double character—local as well as universal—which was to endure…
Boyce immediately notes that “Zoroastrianism itself had long had this double character”.
Nehemiah was the “cupbearer” to Artaxerxes (Neh 2:1). Since Artaxerxes, as a devout Zoroastrian, could not have touched let alone drunk from a ritually unclean cup, Nehemiah must himself have been a Zoroastrian. Pollution in the Zoroastrian scheme was the result of the Evil Spirit who caused “dust, stench, blight, disease, decay and death”. Devout people were obliged to stay clear of these noxious things to protect themselves as Ahuramazda’s good creation. The king particularly required this protection, and we can be sure that his servants had a duty to keep him pure.
The Zoroastrian priests had instituted a rigourous cleanliness code to protect the devout. Indeed, cupbearer to the king would hardly have been a menial position and Nehemiah must have been a Zoroastrian priest, not a mere servant. Nor would a mere servant have been sent to a colony with such an important position and task. Nehemiah introduced these same purity codes to the Jews, and devout ones live by them still, though they do not understand the reason for them. The point here is that Nehemiah could not have been a Jew himself, if he was the royal cupbearer, unless the religion of the Jews was Mazdayasnism by another name.
Ezra was sent too in 458 BC or 398 BC, from the bible which says year seven of the king, but there were two kings called Artaxerxes. Some think the number is corrupt and should be 37, making the year 428 BC, allowing for an apparently close association with Nehemiah. Or was it year seven of Darius II (417 BC), the name of the king having been mistaken from an association with Nehemiah?
He was the “scribe of the law of the God of Heaven”. For the Persians the god of heaven was Ahuramazda, but the title was interpreted to mean Yehouah. His duty was to write out god’s law to a people who supposedly had an extensive law of their own god. Ezra 7:11-26 reads out a copy of the letter that the king Artaxerxes gave him explaining the authority for his position. The letter emphasizes that people go only by their own free will, a statement that implies that it is not normally the case. One is led to ask why this case should be different.
And I, even I Artaxerxes the king, do make a decree to all the treasurers which are beyond the river, that whatsoever Ezra the priest, the scribe of the law of the God of heaven, shall require of you, it be done speedily, Unto an hundred talents of silver, and to an hundred measures of wheat, and to an hundred baths of wine, and to an hundred baths of oil, and salt without prescribing how much. Whatsoever is commanded by the God of heaven, let it be diligently done for the house of the God of heaven: for why should there be wrath against the realm of the king and his sons? Also we certify you, that touching any of the priests and Levites, singers, porters, Nethinims, or ministers of this house of God, it shall not be lawful to impose toll, tribute, or custom, upon them. And thou, Ezra, after the wisdom of thy God, that is in thine hand, set magistrates and judges, which may judge all the people that are beyond the river, all such as know the laws of thy God; and teach ye them that know them not. And whosoever will not do the law of thy God, and the law of the king, let judgment be executed speedily upon him, whether it be unto death, or to banishment, or to confiscation of goods, or to imprisonment.
The king addresses his order to “all the treasurers which are beyond the river”. Now “beyond the river” is of course the Persian province Abarnahara, the whole of the Levant beyond the Euphrates. Jews and Christians pretend it means “beyond the Jordan”, but how many rich treasurers are there in Palestine alone? The rest of it shows the king is purporting to placate the people, making sure there is no wrath against the king—it has a political purpose. But who benefits financially—the priests and temple officials who are exempt from taxes. Furthermore, Ezra was to enforce the law on “all the people that are beyond the river”, and enforce it with savage measures.
Ezra was told to teach people the law if they did not know it and he is considered to have been the instituter of the “Priestly Code” (P) of the Pentateuch. Its indebtedness to Zoroastrianism is plain but never observed upon. The “Holiness Code” of Leviticus 18 to 26 is a code of purity from pollution that again is evidently dependent on Zoroastrianism, though apologists will pretend otherwise when they are obliged to comment at all. Such a denial is “as preposterous as it is pointless”, to use West’s phrase.
Ezra also added the creation in Genesis 1:1-2:4a, the sophisticated one. Genesis 1 is strikingly Zoroastrian in two ways:
- The active principle of creation is the spirit of God, just as Ahuramazda creates through the Good or Holy Spirit.
- The creation in both was in seven stages, surely an astonishing coincidence, though the descriptions of the creations are different.
A puzzle is the absence in the Jewish scriptures of teachings of fate after death, individual judgement, heaven and hell. Death brings Sheol. Amos 9 and Psalms 139 extend Yehouah’s rule to Sheol but only in Isaiah 26:19 is there hope of a future after death, and that, as in Zoroastrianism, is resurrection not immortality as a spirit. Mary Boyce writes:
Since Zoroastrian apocalyptic finds its counterpart in Jewish and Christian eschatology, not disjointedly but as part of the same fixed scheme which is to be discerned in the Gathas, it is difficult not to concede to Zoroastrianism both priority and influence.
Quite so but Boyce inconsistently thinks the Jewish purity laws are “wholly Jewish”. The destruction of death (Isa 25:7-8) is a reflexion of the end of “limited time” in Zoroastrianism, when the evil creation is destroyed and the Evil Spirit is imprisoned forever. Judaism has Satan as an Evil Spirit, although he seems not to have an existence independent of Yehouah, and Yehouah claims to create both good and evil (Isa 45:7). Presumably Satan has his own inclination to create evil, independently of Yehouah, otherwise it is hard to see how he is such a trouble. That makes Judaism exactly equivalent to Zoroastrianism. What appear to be differences might be simply because we have two sources, neither of which is complete and both of which have had independent histories of compilation and redaction, so that they have evolved differences, but their identity at the centre is still obvious. Our knowledge of Jewish apocalyptic with the discovery and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that Judaism was much more dualistic than the scriptures suggest.
Darius II Favours Jerusalem
Professor Mills says that even if there had been no historical contact between Judaism and Persian religion, the closeness of these themes would demand their careful study by Christians and Jews believing their own religions to have been revealed, because He must have revealed them somewhere else too! He concludes:
“If the Divine Power saw fit to make use of the Persian religious system to educate his people… this should only awaken reverential thanksgiving.”
In fact the Jews were subjects of the Persian kings for 200 years, and the Jewish scriptures declare that a Persian priest called Ezra had to give the Jews a law!
Darius the Great put his trust in the one good god of Zoroaster’s revelation. Ammianus Marcellinus, from earlier unnamed sources, says that Darius replaced the heads of the priesthood by seven more cautious holy men, after they had tried to usurp the throne. The whole story is probably propaganda, and actually the Magi who supported Darius in what was his own successful coup were rewarded. Either way, a board or commission of seven Magi were the supreme religious authorities and located in the Persian capital. They consecrated a Persian king when he succeeded to the throne and suppressed heresy.
Xerxes, who succeeded his father in 486 BC, desecrated the great temple of Marduk in Babylon, slaying a priest and carried off the huge statue of the god, which was said to be of solid gold. His purpose was political, to destroy the god who was traditionally the protector of Babylon and would serve as the focus of a separatist movement and revolt, but Xerxes had such confidence in Ahuramazda that he feared no reprisals from Marduk.
Xerxes proves that the Persian kings were religious zealots not pussy cats as Christians and Jews want us to believe from a reading of the bible. They rewarded collaboration and punished defiance. Herodotus and Cicero report that Xerxes destroyed the temples on the Acropolis. Many historians disbelieved it until the discovery of an inscription at Persepolis in which Xerxes boasts of his conquest of Greece, of his godliness in destroying the temples on the Acropolis in which the Greeks had worshipped devils, and in commanding them to worship them no longer:
There was a place in which devils were formerly worshipped. There, by the help of Ahura Mazda, I demolished that lair of the devils and I issued an edict, “You shall not worship devils”. And in the very place in which devils had once been worshipped, I piously and with Righteousness worshipped Ahura Mazda.
The Persians also destroyed the Greek temples at Branchidae, Naxos, Abae and other places not reported. They spared Delphi because the priests there advised the Greeks to yield to the Persians. In fact, the Greeks prevented Xerxes from conquering Europe, if that had been his aim, but the theology of Darius and Xerxes seems not to have altered to the time of Darius II (423-405 BC), the king who succeeded Artaxerxes I (464-424 BC) after the short reigns of Xerxes II and Sogdianus (both 424 BC), intervened in the Peloponnesian War and died in 405 BC.
On the other hand, the Jewish temple was “completed” (again!) between 445 BC and 417 BC, most probably the latter date in the reign of Darius II. The Persian governors and priests in Jerusalem thereby caused a schism in the worship of Yehouah in the Hill Country. The native Israelites, the Samarians who, under Persian coercion it seems, had accepted the law as the Torah, built their own temple on Mount Gerizim, and Jerusalem is insignificant in their Pentateuch. At a later date when the temple was established, the Persian tradition became the “orthodox” position of the Pharisees or Persian faction—Pharisee, Parsee, Parsi—which survived the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD as Rabbinism! The Sadducees were nothing to do with the original worship of Yehouah or they would have been Samaritans. They were a Hellenized faction that tried to reject Persian influences (“no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit” Acts 23:8) in favour of more civilized Greek practices.
Darius was a Babylonian by culture. Achaemenian kings took foreign wives but it was not common, the main wife was not usually foreign and others would have had to have converted or at least observed the Zoroastrian purity laws. The son of a Zoroastrian was regarded as fully Zoroastrian because it was the male seed that counted, the belief being that women were merely fertile land for the man’s seed. Jewish belief was the same, which is why only a man could “beget” and why childless women in the scriptures are described as barren, like a barren field. The Achaemenid kings were pious but practical men. Their foreign marriages were likely to have been diplomatic, and not for the generality to copy. Darius was the son of a Babylonian woman. Xerxes II was the heir but was murdered by Sogdianus, the son of one of Artaxerxes’ Babylonian courtesans, and Sogdianus was in turn killed by Darius II, another son of a Babylonian courtesan.
The royal line was no longer Persian but half Babylonian and influenced strongly by their Babylonian mothers and upbringing. Babylonian customs now began to assert themselves more strongly. So, the religion’s centre of gravity shifted to Babylon in the fifth century. There the Magi would have come into direct contact with the cult of the god Marduk, who might have been the model for the revival of Mithras, previously seen as the equal of Shamash. Achaemenian emperors up to Artaxerxes II, were solely devoted to Ahuramazda, never naming other deities, who were merely anonymous “other gods”, in their inscriptions. The Zoroastrian holy men in Babylon also found themselves in the world’s capital of astrology. It was a superstition which at that time, and indeed for many centuries thereafter, could plausibly claim to be a scientific observation of the heavens, and thence the world. Chaldaean astromancy was taken up by the Magi.
By blood, Darius II was half Babylonian, but would not have been the heir of Artaxerxes I unless his son Xerxes II had not been immediately killed. Darius killed the assassin and took the throne. He continued the Achaemenid interest in restoring religions, but he was particularly interested in preseving temple archives, doubtless a job of some practical value. As in the case of the first Darius helping out in the “Houses of Life” in Egypt, he could alter the transcriptions to suit Persian policy, and could doubtless find the odd missing tablets. He “restored” the temple of Eanna in Uruk and installed extensive archives. The records of the bank of Murashi cover half a century up to about 400 BC. It shows how cosmopolitan Babylonia was. It was policed by foreign garrisons stationed permanently in the country, so the Persian kings were taking no chances even in what was the centre of their empire.
Darius favoured the Jerusalem priesthood. A revealing scrap of papyrus written from Darius to Arsames, his long-serving Egyptian satrap in 419 BC, and found at Elephantine, ordered that the Jews of Elephantine must keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days. It is a surprising order for those brought up believing myth is history. Why was it necessary? These traditions were supposed to have been almost a millennium old even then. Apologists say the feast had been forbidden so it was not an order to Jews but to the satrap himself. Why then was it phrased as an order to the Jews that they must obey? The Jewish messanger was a man called Hananiah, a Babylonian name (Eanna) and the name, by another of those coincidences that litter biblical history, of the brother of Nehemiah. The Jews of Yeb were of the older polytheistic faith of the Canaanites, and it looks very much as though the priests of Jerusalem had the king’s support in bringing them into line with the practice in Jerusalem imposed by Nehemiah and Ezra.
A sandstone stele from Aswan dated itself precisely to June 458 BC. It records that the commander of the garrison at Syene had built a place of worship. Rather than an enclosed temple it might have been an enclosed space open to the massy heavens. In 408 BC, the Jewish military governor at Elephantine, probably a grandson of the man who built or restored a temple there, the command of the Syene garrison seems to have been inherited, colluded with the priests of Khnum to cut off the water supply from the Jewish garrison, then they destroyed the temple to Yahu. The satrap was absent at the time. Subsequently, the priests wrote to the Jerusalem priesthood and to the governor of Judah, Bagoas, for help in rebuilding the temple. It seems it never was given.
The whole events look suspicious. Arsames absents himself and a Persian military governor immediately helps to destroy a Jewish temple with the aid of Egyptian priests, even though Jews are loyal allies of the Persians, and this has been a Persian outpost manned by Jewish soldiers for a century. The truth must be that this older temple at Syene, being polytheistic, was an embarrassment to Persians and Jews and had to be ended. It is always presented as caused by the jealousy of the Egyptian priests, or their annoyance that the Jews would have been sacrificing sheep when the ram was the sacred animal of Khnum. Yet it was done with the help of the local Persian governor, and under a fancied policy of religious toleration in general and admiration for the Jews. It proves that there was no religious toleration in general. Religion was a policy option, and the kings had opted to support one temple to Yehouah—at Jerusalem.
Conscious Foreign Policy
All of it shows that the Persian kings were not naïvely interested in restoring alien cultures out of some exaggerated sense of altruism to defeated people. It was a conscious foreign policy to get political control of subject people who had every reason to be resentful. It was to preserve the Persian peace, the Iranian sense of universal order.
Garbini notes that the Demotic Chronicle of Egypt, a papyrus dated in the third century BC but speaking of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, takes the same attitude of the judgement of God on Egypt as the Deuteronomic History does on the Jews. It seems unlikely that a Jewish history should have inspired an Egyptian one, but not that Persian propaganda should have been used in Egypt as well as elsewhere. If this papyrus is accurately dated to the third century then it could be an edition of an earlier Persian work. The Persians will have done in Egypt what they did in Yehud, a finding with possibly profound consequences for Egyptology.
In his Egyptian inscriptions, Darius emphasizes “maat”, the Egyptian concept closest to “Asha”. Cyrus was the Messiah, the son of God, to the Jews, and Egyptian inscriptions declared that for Atum, Darius was “his son, his steward”, and that, “his person should be remembered beside his father, Atum”. Atum-Ra became the perfect equivalent of Ahuramazda, a hidden god behind the sun, who created the cosmos to be governed by “maat”. The sun rising each morning drove away the powers of darkness, symbolic of order driving away chaos. Rebellion is chaos, a product of the Evil Spirit, while order is good, an attribute of God.
A lesser parallel with what the Persians did in Jerusalem might have come to light in Asia Minor. A monument was found in 1973 declaring that the citizens of Orna had agreed to set up a cult of the god of Caunos, a nearby town. The god was to be called “the Lord the God of Caunos”, and seemed to be a local Apollo. They had sponsored a “house” for the god and specified sacrifices and endowments. Persians did not build “houses” for their gods because they felt they had the cosmos as their home, but they were happy to build temples for foreigners because they would then assemble there and provide the opportunity to hear the law. The monument specifies divine punishments for violating “this law” included being carried off to the “Abyss”.
Plainly this was not a Zoroastrian god, but had been granted certain Zoroastrian features, including an Iranian title of unknown meaning but used of Mithras. Mithras was guardian of the first watch of the day, sunrise, and Persian places of worship came to be called “Gates of Mithras”, an expression used by the Urartians. Zoroastrian worship always had to be done before noon, and this habit perhaps predisposed non-Iranians particularly to see Mithras as the visible face of Ahuramazda. It seems to be an early example of Apollo-Mithras syncretism, which was popular in the region a hundred years later and for many centuries thereafter.
It is curious too that the god is called the god “of Caunos” in some places and the god “of Orna” in others. Apparently a unifying formula, it is reminiscent of Yehouah being the god of Israel and of Judah. The scroll scholar, A Dupont-Sommer, said it showed the Persians had an office of state for overseeing and regularizing the religious affairs of subject people:
Not to impose on them Iranian divinities and cults but to ensure good order and security in a domain which in ancient societies was politically so important and often vexed.
Dupont-Sommer is sidelined nowadays mainly because Christians do not like his ideas about the Essenes and Christianity in interpreting the scrolls, but this insight shows him to be a perceptive man. The Persians had to approve the High Priest of any cult, and we can be sure he was not appointed purely for his piety. These were political appointments, and the practice of religion was a political act. The Reverend Professor Lawrence Mills detected a ministry or religious affairs, and Professor Boyce sees a chancellery department to deal with Zoroastrian foundations from at least the fourth century BC. It is difficult to see them as separate institutions.
Moses and Exodus
