Judaism
How Persia Created Judaism 4.3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 30, 2001
Friday, 03 February 2006
Abstract
Alexander and the Persian Heritage
Bagoas poisoned Ochus in 338 BC, then after the short reign of Arses (338-337 BC), Darius III Kodomanes (Codomannus) (335-330 BC) became the last of the Persian shahs whom Alexander defeated in 333 BC, when he fled and was killed in 330 BC. While he was seiging Tyre, Alexander had to suppress a revolt in Samaria. Josephus says the Samarian religion was reformed by someone called Manasseh at this time. Despite the antagonism between the Jews and the Samarians, Nehemiah informs us that the noble priestly houses of Judah had many bonds of friendship with the Samarian noble houses. According to 2 Kings 17, they had a religion of Yehouah but of other gods also. It sounds closer to the original religion of the Israelites.
In fact, the author of 2 Kings tells us that the Assyrians had carried off the inhabitants of Israel and replaced them by deportees from the north of Abarnahara, who brought in their own gods and so did not “fear the Lord”. The Assyrian king sent a priest of Yehouah to instruct the deportees in the religion of the land.
The puzzling aspect of it all is that these people were supposedly not Israelites, so why should they have been bound by Yehouah’s covenant with the Israelites? The truth is, of course, that not all the Israelites had been transported out by the Assyrians. Indeed, the story suggests that the Assyrian king was doing what Cyrus and Nabonidus did later—he sent a priest to train the natives in the proper worship of the “god of the land”. Here we might have the origin of the earliest stories of “return” in the bible—the “return” of Abraham and his family who came from just that part of the Assyrian empire.
They seemed to take only partial notice of their instructor, if we are to believe the scriptural account, for they continued to worship their own gods as well as Yehouah, doubtless, the gods of the fathers! As in Judah, it worked only partially, and the Assyrians did not keep power long enough to enforce it.
The Persians doubtless aimed to transform worship to the Lord of Heaven in Israel as well as Judah, but the Samarians accepted it more readily having been primed by the work of the Assyrians. If the Samarians more readily accepted the Torah and abandoned the old polytheism, there was no need for all the Persian propaganda that had to be published as prophetic pseudepigraphs to show the Am ha Eretz the error of their ways. Thus none of this got into the Samaritan bible.
Nehemiah 13:28 has it that the son of the Jewish High Priest, Joiada, married the daughter of Sanballet, the Samarian governor, and so Nehemiah expelled him. Some commentators think that this young man reformed the Samarian religion, introducing the Pentateuch and temple worship on Mount Gerizim, and so equates with the Manasseh of Josephus, though the dates are a century out. The Sanballat of Nehemiah is confirmed by letters from the temple at Elephantine dated 407 BC in which two sons are mentioned, each having a name ending in Iah, indicating that Sanballat worshipped Yehouah. This early date makes Josephus wrong, but Sanballat might have been a title so, there were probably successive ones.
The Samarians murdered the Macedonian governor. Samaria was destroyed by Alexander in retaliation, and Alexander made Samaria into a military colony occuppied by Macedonian veterans. The Jews were delighted.
Persia and Greece were rivals to influence the world, Persia by a political empire and commerce and Greece by a cultural empire and commerce. Only political empires stop at boundaries so the Greek sphere and the Persian sphere always overlapped considerably, geographically in Asia Minor, but Greek traders, artisans, and soldiers and generals as mercenaries, moved around the Persian Empire. The Persian rulers were far sighted and sponsored Babylonian science. Naburimanni, an astronomer at the time of Darius, calculated tables of lunar eclipses that were more accurate than those of Ptolemy or even Copernicus.
Furthermore, Kidinnu, another astronomer in the fourth century BC, two centuries before Hipparchus, discovered the precession of the equinoxes and calculated the length of the year accurate to 7 minutes 16 seconds. The discovery of the precession of the equinoxes gave authority to the Persian view of the universal god as a sun beyond the sun—a god beyond the heavens that moved the heavens themselves! This became the basis of Platonic philosophy and the beliefs of the Mithraists.
After Alexander, the Persian religion was left with no political base, so information from earlier sources is especially valuable in knowing the nature of Zoroastrianism originally. Unfortunately, Magian ceremonies were held without anyone not of the faith permitted to observe, not at first for any reason of secrecy, but for purity reasons. Non-believers were impure, or at least likely to be impure. Greeks reporters were therefore dependent on what the Magi told them or translated for them from their sacred books. The Magi were keen on proselytizing, but they were subject to a government ministry which directed religious affairs, and this ministry will have had its own political agenda, doubtless with the syncretistic aims of making it easier for collaborating foreigners to associate with the True Belief.
The most important effect the Persians have had on the world is from their policy of creating new local cults on the model given by Zoroaster but based on an old existing cult. They set up the cult of Yehouah in the temple in Jerusalem based on the universal god, Ahuramazda. Their aim was to present the emperor, known as the “king of kings”, as the representative approved of the Universal God on earth. The Universal God was therefore the “king of the king of kings”. Yehouah has this very title (the Alenu Prayer), a title that we can hardly expect even liberal Persian kings to tolerate unless they were happy that Yehouah was Ahuramazda! The Jewish scriptures are copper plated evidence of the success of this Persian policy. Cyrus is incessantly praised.
The Rev G F McClear, sometime warden of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, writes in his New Testament History:
As subjects of the Persian kings, the Jews were eminent for their loyalty and good faith. While Egypt, Cyprus, Phoenicia, and other dependencies of the Persian crown, were frequently in rebellion, the Jews remained steadfast in their allegiance to the “Great King”, and increased rapidly alike in wealth and numbers.
This fidelity to the Persians even led Jaddua the High Priest to defy Alexander for a time. As Alexander approached, having seiged and razed Tyre, the priest was lucky enough to have a dream telling him to greet Alexander! He garlanded the city and went forth in his priestly finery to welcome the conqueror. Alexander was as shrewd as Cyrus, however, and fell prostrate before the priest in adoration at the holy name inscribed on his tiara (a Persian head dress), and declared he had seen it all in a vision. In fact, he must have been fully aware of the loyalty of the Jews and of the reasons for their loyalty. He offered to bestowe on the Jews any privilege they might select. McClear concludes:
They requested that the free enjoyment of their lives and liberties might be secured to them, as also to their brethren in Media and Babylonia…
Alexander agreed, but note that there were enough Jews not only in Babylonia but also at the heart of the Persian empire, in Media, to merit a special mention. These were the three lands whose gods, albeit of different names, the Persians certainly considered as “the God of Heaven”.
From these political manoeuvres came Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all the important patriarchal religions. The Persians and Greeks rather than the Jews and the Greeks were the founders of the western world.
Alexander’s burning and vandalism of Persepolis has always been considered inexplicable. He had read his history and Alexander aimed to do what Cyrus and Darius had done. He was always generous to enemies who yielded readily or caused him little trouble. He burnt Tyre for forcing him into a long seige but otherwise burning cities was out of character. The Persians had surrendered readily after their major defeat at Issus in 333 BC and Alexander’s campaign in the west.
A mosaic recovered from Pompeii dating from the first century BC showing Alexander on horseback to the left, partly obscured by damage, fighting his way through to the Persian king Darius III on his chariot to the right at the battle of Issus.
Darius III repeatedly offered terms to Alexander, increasingly generous terms, virtually amounting to surrender, but Alexander refused. He overcame token resistance at Gaugamela and the Persians folded. He entered Persepolis and dallied there for four months, offering to train 3000 Persian princes in the techniques of the Greeks, before destroying the city. It seems so odd to some historians that they say it must have been an accident caused by drunken carousing, of which Alexander was fond. Was it a deliberate act of vandalism because the Greek scholars that Alexander took with him found the essence of Greek scholarhip already in the sacred writings of the Persians, showing the Greeks as well as the Jews were indebted to their enemies?
In the east, Iran lost Arachosia and Gandhara under Seleucus I to the Indian Mauryan empire. These lands of ancient Iranian settlement, had been re-colonized in Achaemenid times. Inscriptions there from the third century BC were written in good Persian chancellery Aramaic. They also could speak Northwestern Prakrit, and these eastern Iranians will have passed Zoroastrianism into India where it inspired Mahayana Buddhism
In the second-third centuries AD, Bardesanes wrote of “the descendants of Persians who lived out of Persia” as being still numerous and maintaining their traditional customs in Egypt, Phrygia, and Galatia. Zoroastrian sanctuaries still existed in Asia Minor, the oldest being at Zela in Pontic Cappadocia, founded in the sixth century BC by Cyrus the Great or his generals. As the Iranians worshipped in high places, the sanctuary was on a hill, banked up higher and encircled by a wall. Later this was one of the temples to Anahita, frequently attested in Asia Minor, and which show the Persian influence there. In the fourth century AD, many villages in Cappadocia were still populated by Iranians.
Traces of them in Egypt are mainly names only, but a mithraion—presumably a Zoroastrian sanctuary—is mentioned from the third century BC in Fayoum, and “Basilios the Persian” practiced in his community some form of Zoroastrianism in the fourth century AD. Temples let expatriate Iranian communities keep their identity by offering them centers for religious and social life. They also attracted pilgrims for their annual feast-days, bringing together Iranians from elsewhere. Persian Sibyllist oracles were also known, conveying Persian prophecies and expectations.
Christians suppressed Persian temples in western Asia Minor when they gained power after the third century AD, but Khusrau I Anushirvan negotiated with a Byzantine emperor, as late as the sixth century, to have fire temples rebuilt, probably in Cappadocia.
Temple and Diaspora
The Persians seemed to have meant the Hebrew people to have been all of the nations of Abarnahara. The temple was set up in the Palestinian hill country but was meant to be for the whole satrapy. The plan never had the time to take hold before Alexander conquered the Persians—less than a century. The religion had caught hold, especially in the temple state which it financed, but it never had time to unite the various people of Abarnahara into an ethnos. The Jewish priesthood were left in charge of an immensely valuable asset, the temple and therefore the religion, and the wider ethnos of the Hebrews was identified with the Jews of Yehud. Paradoxically, all of those who worshipped Yehouah were now Jews (Yehudim) whether they had ever been associated with Yehud or not. Many had not. So, already at the start of the Hellenistic era, Jews were widespread in Abarnahara and even beyond.
The Persians had encouraged all of those Canaanites and Babylonians who were devoted to Ea, Yah, and Yehu to accept the primacy of the temple state, and had provided a history which explained why they should—the diaspora of Samaria—and why their religion had needed restoration—it had become corrupted through being separated from its cult centre. Thus worshippers of Yehouah everywhere were persuaded they had been led in apostasy and adopted the Persian line that they should join the “remnant” who had remained pure. In Babylonia and even in Iran, many people worshipped Ea and thus became Jews. Even at its outset, Judaism had a diaspora! Before long Phoenician Jews carried the religion into Carthage in north Africa and to large merchant cities in the Mediterranean like Rome.
Judaism was a worldwide phenomenon in a remarkably short time, but it was the Egyptian Ptolemies who stimulated the extension of the scriptures from the relatively short and simple legends left by the Persians when they offered to translate them into Greek to add them to the Alexandrine Library in the third century BC. Much of it was freshly written or extended by redactors working to a Ptolemaic, pro-Greek, anti-Seleucid Babylonian agenda, claiming that the Greek archives allowed them to vastly expand the sketchy notion of Moses, the Jews at first had.
In the second century BC, the Maccabees re-nationalised what had been intended as a universal religion by the Persians. They claimed, as usual, to be puritans trying to keep the religion free of the Hellenization that was supposed to have been forced on them. Needless to say, they were not, but continued the Hellenization, though the nationalization of the cult must have dismayed the more catholic Jews now spread out over the world and thoroughly Hellenized out of necessity. Their dismay became the basis of a newly universalistic Judaism. It was Christianity.
The justification of religious reform is often presented as the need to get back to a more original purer religion. The Persians pretended that their own utterly new set of laws called “The Law”, or now Deuteronomy, had been found and implemented by Josiah 200 years before. It was not true, but was written up in the propaganda history that they were preparing to give the new colony an identity. The Persian colonists were restoring the reforms that Josiah had already introduced but the apostates who had remained in the land, the Am ha Eretz, had undermined. Could any faithful worshipper of Yehouah contradict this?
Certain epigraphic changes dated to the time of Josiah are taken as evidence of the reality of Josiah’s reforms such as the preference for “yhw” in the south instead of the northern form “yw”. Unfortunately, the dating of everything in the Palestinian hills has been botched by the Albright school who refused to accept that anything happened after the exile. They dated everything as pre-exilic, leaving huge gaps in the strata and epigraphy after the supposed “Return”. Many inscriptions like these therefore have to be dated afresh and many will be found to be post-exilic, in the Persian period, when they were thought to have been pre-exilic and attributed to people like Josiah. So, the form “yhw” might be evidence of Persian not earlier Jewish reform.
Anyone who believes the biblical history must wince at Yehouah’s awful injustice to Josiah. He followed instructions to reform the apostate religion, did it successfully, then God sent the Jews into captivity anyway because it apparently was not enough to make up for the apostasy of Manasseh.
Significant archaeological changes usually accompany a conquest or major regime change, they rarely occur with no strong cultural reason accompanying them. While, it is not impossible that Josiah effected a significant reform, it looks unlikely with the record of deviant rulers in both Israel and Judah, and when a clear reason for archaeological changes immediately follows when the Persians send colonists to take over. Indeed, the archaological boundary that ought to be obvious is when the “Returners” return! Even in the biblical scheme of things that ought to be the obvious archaeological break point.
In any case, Josiah never succeeded in centralising the cult in Jerusalem, though it was supposed to have been an important aim, yet that is precisely what the Persians did, albeit not in the times of Cyrus and Darius I as the tendentious biblical history makes out, but in the time of Darius II, who in fact is the biblical Darius, not Darius the Great. An ostracon found at Arad refers to a local “temple of Yehouah”. Curiously, an honest and iconoclastic investigator, like Garbini, who willingly accepts that the crux of Jewish history was the “Return”, can sneer at those (“though of course there are not many of them”) who argue that only the Persian institution of Judaism makes historical sense out of the confusion caused by the spurious history in the bible.
Syncretism and Temple States
Massoume Price in The Iranian confirms that Zoroastrianism made a place for certain foreign gods as helpers of Ahuramazda. The ruling principle was the advancement of reliable communities and the punishment of disloyal ones. Persian kings were ruthless with rebellions, including ones by the Persian satraps and members of the royal household. Groups which rebelled were punished irrespective of race or religion. The Jews were usually loyal and so were prosperous.
Other temple communities were set up besides the Jewish one—Cyprus, Cilicia, Lycia and other places in Asia Minor had their own temple states. Even such remote tribes as the Arabs, Colchians, Ethiopians and Sakai had. The Achaemenian administration allowed them all to keep their religions with apparently little interference but had a chancellery minister of religions, and it is inconceivable that he did not aim to regularize worship to suit imperial policy. The case of Egypt is revealing how discreet the Persians were. Egypt was under Persian domination from 525 BC to about 405 BC, and then from 343 BC to 332 BC. The Egyptians rebelled several times, and Egyptologists think the shahs from Xerxes were disillusioned by Egypt, and paid it little attention. Egyptian civilization was assumed to have continued essentially unaffected by the Persian conquest, and the lack of Persian material evidence in Egypt was taken to corroborate the idea.
A remarkable find in the Western Desert in Egypt shows that the Persians had a policy of regional development. South of the Khargeh Oasis, in the region of Dush, Michel Wittmann excavated an entire buried village at Ayn Manâwîr, assiduously publishing reports every year. Its water came from more than ten qanats (Persian underground canals) discovered there. Perhaps it was intended as a temple state, the temple of Hibis having been built there by Darius, and an undiscovered temple of Osiris was also unearthed. In the temple of Osiris were found hundreds of precisely dated archival ostraca written in demotic. Archaeological and written sources were found together, allowing the texts to date the pottery exactly. The documents themselves are private contracts, drawn up among Egyptians. Not a single Iranian or Persian personal name has yet been found in them, though they are dated by the regnal years of Xerxes, Artaxerxes and Darius, probably Darius II. Thus, the documentation of Ayn Manâwîr covers the entire fifth century BC, which is now particularly well documented. Moreover, for the first time, specialists can certainly date qanats to the Achaemenid period. Previously, qanats were known from the Hellenistic historian Polybius, who writes about Iran:
In this region of which I speak, there is no water visible on the surface, but even in the desert there are a number of underground channels communicating with wells unknown to those not acquainted with the country… At the time when the Persians were the rulers of Asia they gave to those who conveyed a supply of water to places previously unirrigated the right of cultivating the land for five generations… people incurred great expense and trouble making underground channels reaching a long distance.Histories, 10:28:2f
Polybius explicitly credits the shah’s governments with a plan of stimulating regional development. For investing money and labour in bringing the land under cultivation, local communities had free use of it for five generations. Unlike the Babylonian administrators, the Persians were keenly interested in what went on in the empire, but they were astonishingly discreet about it.
Ayn Manâwîr is a village that was created by the Persians, and using a technology that only they had, the qanat, but were happy to share. Surveys show that other nearby sites also had water supplied by the same method at that time. Together with the temple built by Darius, the archaeology suggests a grand plan of regional development. It is reminiscent of the Persian planning of the temple state of Yehud. Ultimately the purpose was trust, control, and improved economics, to make for good governance and a flow of taxes into the regional treasuries, the very aims of the temple states.
Persians occupied the highest positions in each temple state, giving them control of the cultural, legal and administrative traditions of the conquered nations. Nominally, these ethnic and religious minorities followed their own legal code in personal matters such as marriage and family law. The conquered people were given land allotments in exchange for taxes and military service. Among these settlers were all groups such as Babylonians, Aramaeans, Jews, Indians and Sakai. In Susa itself, besides the local population and the Persians, there were large numbers of Babylonians, Egyptians, Jews and Greeks.
After the conquest of the Achaemenian empire by Alexander, the Seleucid Greeks and Parthians followed the same policies. All the main cities had Persian, Aramaean, Babylonian, Greek, Christian and Jewish temples. The Jewish chronicles mention the Parthian period as one of the best in their history. Jews enjoyed a long period of peace and had close contacts with the government. Centers of Jewish life in the Parthian empire were in Mesopotamia at Nisibis and Nehardea. A representative called the “exilarch” represented the Jewish minority at court and also carried out functions of a political-administrative nature. Jews took an active part in organizing the silk trade, supported by the kings and started a community in China.
Philo and Flavius Josephus documented the earlier relations between Jews and Parthians. The Jews took part in the rebellions against Trajan in Mesopotamia (116 AD), adding to their unpopularity in the Roman world after the Jewish War of 66-70 AD, and shortly, in 132-135 AD, they were to rebel under Bar Kosiba and finish up evicted from Judaea, taking many Jewish refugees into the Parthian empire.
In the reign of the Sassanid dynasty from 205 AD until the conquest of the Muslims in 651 AD, oppression of rival religions to Zoroastrianism began. Kidir, the chief Mobad (priest) under King Bahram II (276-293 AD), promoted Zoroastrianism in the empire and persecuted other religions. He declared:
The false doctrines of Ahriman and of the idols suffered great blows and lost credibility. The Jews (Yahud), Buddhists (Shaman), Hindus (Brahman), Nazarenes (Nasara), Christians (Kristiyan), Baptists (Makdag) and Manichaeans (Zandik) were smashed in the empire, their idols destroyed, and the habitations of the idols annihilated and turned into abodes and seats of the gods.
All of these were religions that had been regarded as Juddin, acceptable, in earlier times, and had syncretized enormously with Zoroastrianism.
It is a curious revelation that a large number of Jews, in spite of the freedom given by Cyrus, refused then to return to Palestine, as they refuse today, and Jewish scholars tell us that those who remained in Babylonia looked on themselves as the pick of the Jewry. The 87th psalm when it is unravelled, is a protest that the Lord counts a man born at Babylon as much a Jew as a child of Jerusalem. Jewish learning flourished there, and one of the rabbis lays it down that to live in Babylon is the same as to live in the Holy Land.T R Glover
Judaism was the religion of the Juddin, a syncretic religion for cooperative people set up by the Persians. Yehud was set up as the center of it, and their presence elsewhere was explained by the Babylonian captivity. Few of the wanted to return to a place they had never known, but they accepted Yehud as their origin, the Temple priesthood as their leaders, and the myths planted by the Persians as their own. By the time of the Sassanids, they had forgotten or abandoned the earlier policy of syncretism in the fear that the children were overwhelming the parent.
- For a short readable account of the Persian empire at CAIS, search Google for:
+"(HAKHÂMANESHIÂN) The Empire of Achaemenid Dynasty (550-333 BCE)" +CAIS
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