Judaism
Ezra and Nehemiah I.2
Abstract
If Moses had not preceded him, Ezra would have been worthy to bring Torah into the world.b Sanh 21b
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, February 26, 2001
Abstract
Am ha Eretz
Ezra 3:3 already spoke of fear of the “People of the Land”, the Am ha Eretz or Dallal ha Eretz (Poor of the Land), the people already living in the Palestinian hills when the colonists moved in under Persian protection to settle. At the inception of the temple, while some were rejoicing and some were weeping, we hear that there were “adversaries”.
Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the children of the captivity builded the temple unto the Lord God of Israel; Then they came to Zerubbabel, and to the chief of the fathers, and said unto them, Let us build with you: for we seek your God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither.
These were the natives who, according to the supporting mythology, had been left behind when their rulers were taken captive. If so, the rulers no longer wanted anything to do with them. Though they had lamented in the ruined temple for seventy years, and now were supposed to have been weeping with joy, the returners ignored them because they were “adversaries”. These people were themselves deportees from the Assyrian period and knew it. The ruling Samarians were deported from Bit Adini, the area around Harran in Syria, the Aramaean homeland, and, oddly, next to a small state called Yauda whose capital city seems to have been called Samal. Esarhaddon, the Syrian king had sent them to Israel from these small Aramaean states to worship the same god, Yehouah, as the colonists. They were utterly rejected:
Zerubbabel, and Jeshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers of Israel, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the Lord God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us.
Only the Yehudim, the people sent by the Persian kings as colonists had the right to build a temple and restore a religion, and it must have been to a particular and different specification from that already in situ. Had the “returners” been simply restoring the old temple, what possible objection could they have had against accepting the assistance offered by the native Yehouah worshippers? They could have had none. It is plain that the colonists were doing something that they knew would not be acceptable to the natives in any case, and so they refused assistance from the outset. Judaism was to be a new religion based on an ethical Yehouah of the Ahuramazda mould, not a fertility religion based on the mould of the Baalim of the natives.
The hostility between the Samarians and the Jews began and never ceased. The story has it that the Samarians were able to hold up the work for twenty years, but it seems most likely that Sheshbazzar could only make a formal beginning in the reign of Cyrus, and not enough colonists were sent until Zerubabel and Joshua came in the reign of Darius. The hostility of the natives obviously emerged when they were refused leave to help in the reconstruction, and that was when enough colonists had returned. Once there were enough colonists, protected by the Persian satrap, the locals would have been unable to stop the work. Sabotage, however, was possible and the account suggests that measures had to be taken to prevent it.
The Temple Treasure
The vast treasure returned also must be queried. It all supposedly happened as soon as Cyrus captured Babylonia. The problem is that unless the kings of Babylon meticulously kept captured treasure in depositories, how could it have been gathered together so easily to return it? Captured treasure, like that captured by the conquistadores in America, was put to use, to pay soldiers and to build new buildings. It was not just stored, it was melted down, spent and otherwise dispersed. How then was it still hanging about fifty or seventy years after Jerusalem had been razed by Nebuchadrezzar?
The Book of Ezra tries to explain that it was kept in a temple called “The Temple of Babylon!” Yet Babylon had many temples and, if one was called the Temple of Babylon, it must have been to Marduk, the Babylonian god. Why should priests of Marduk want ritual objects that were meaningless to them? They would have had them recast as objects suitable for their own religion. Furthermore, the Palestine hill country was never so wealthy that any pre-Babylonian temple in Jerusalem would have had a vast treasure, whatever the bible might say about the mythical Solomon. These hills were impoverished.
The only answer, if Ezra is correct, is that Nebuchadrezzer set up a temple to Yehouah somewhere in Babylon. It must have been a Canaanite temple like the one in Elephantine in Egypt, but might have been a centre for worship of the Baal Yehouah of the deported Canaanites. Commonly conquerors would carry off idols, images of gods, and set them up elsewhere for superstitious reasons—they hoped to have the favour of the god. If Canaanite Yehouah had an image—a bull, one would guess—then that might have been carried off and used to set up a Yehouah cult elsewhere.
Had Yehouah already been a Babylonian cult, even if not a major one, then it would explain the Jewish names in the accounts of the Babylonian bank of Murushu in the fifth century. It is falsely assumed that the Jews were taken into captivity to the city of Babylon. There they flourished and that explains the presence of Jewish names on Babylonian tablets. A few thousand deportees, or myriads, could hardly have had much impact from a condition of slavery in about three generations.
The deduction is based on Semitic names incorporating “Yahu” or “Iah”, and “El”, considered to have been Israelite names for God. And so they were—but not only Israelites worshipped them. People other than those in the geographic place worshipped these gods, and, if it is maintained that any worshipper of El is an Israelite and any worshipper of Yehouah is a Jew, then it has to be recognized that Israelites and Jews always lived in places other than in Israel and Judah, and the manner in which they worshipped must have been different in these different places.
Yehouah and El were Canaanite gods not just Jewish and Israelite ones. Indeed, El was also worshipped for centuries in Mesopotamia. Added to that was the deportation of the Israelites by the Assyrians, and they must have had names in “Iah” and “El”. If they were allowed to keep their names then they would have been passed on, at least grandfather to grandson, a common preference in those times, presumably so that fathers and sons could not be confused. It seems the Persians decided to rationalize religions in an acceptable way, by unifying divers gods under a Mazda-like cloak as the God of Heaven. Iranians called those who followed these non-Zoroastrian religions Juddin.
When the Persians had decided to set up a Jewish colony in Jerusalem supported financially by the Hebrews of Abarnahara, they might indeed have taken some cult objects from a temple of Yehouah in Babylon to Jerusalem, but the image of a bull would not have been one of them, even though Persians revered bulls. They used no images themselves for their High God, Ahuramazda, other than a winged disc, and this is the most likely image used in the temple of Yehouah. The rest of the ritual paraphernalia mentioned, where it is not exaggerated for propaganda purposes, was donated out of the Persian treasury. The king aimed to get the money back with interest once the colony and its temple had been established.
A Letter to Darius
The report continues at Ezra 5:1, the Aramaic section having been wrongly inserted. The official mentioned is Tatnai (Tattenai, Tatannu), satrap of Abarnahara, a man with an Assyrian name, and his sub-official has a Persian name. A T Olmstead reports, “Ta-at-t[an-ni] (Tattenai) governor (pahat) of Ebirnari (Abarnahara, in Persian times)” appears in a Babylonian document of 502 BC. Abarnahara was what was essentially to become the empire of David in mythology. It covered Cyprus, Phœnicia, Syria, Palestine and West Arabia, the places whose treasurers had to support the new temple.
The Samarians evidently complained to the governor and the satrap about what was going on. The start of the reign of Darius was troubled and possibly the satrap thought they had a point. Cyrus had issued his policy on thousands of cylinder seals and it is inconceivable that Tatnai did not know imperial policy, so that was not the issue. But he might have thought it a good idea to humour the Samarians for awhile, pretending to be sympathetic then coming back with the message that it was out of his hands. Persians were generally rather subtle rulers, a fact that is usually ignored. The search for the decree by Darius I looks unlikely and might have been the satrap’s propaganda to allow the Samarians to save face.
Some complaint of the Canaanites presumably against the colonists was made in the time of Xerxes (Ahasuerus) but only a fragment remained for the editor and he could add nothing, so it appears alone in Ezra 4:6 testifying only to the fragmentary nature of much of the bible, and showing that it is a valient attempt at reconstruction. It also suggests that when long, more or less complete, stories appear like the sagas of Joseph, the Exodus, David and Solomon, they are late romances added to the fragments salvaged from the destruction of the civil war, and therefore inventions so late that they precede the time of Jesus by only about a century, not the millennium or two that biblicists think.
Ezra
Now Ezra appears on the scene—or did he? The seventh year of Artaxerxes I would have been 458 BC whereas the seventh year of Artaxerxes II was 397 BC. The editor does not know the sequence of Persian kings and makes no effort to distinguish one Artaxerxes from another, but seems to think Artaxerxes preceded Xerxes, who has little role in this story. Ezra was a contemporary of Johanan (Ezra 10:6) and Nehemiah was a contemporary of Eliashub (Neh 3:1) but Johanan was the son of Eliashub, so Ezra seems to have been a much younger man than Nehemiah and might have appeared a generation later in the reign of Artaxerxes II. What is more, the list of High Priests (Neh 11 and 22) shows that Johanan or Jonathan was actually a grandson of Eliashub, and the Elephantine papyri show he was High Priest in 408 BC. Ezra seems to have “returned” much later than Nehemiah. Note that he is not listed as a leader of the “returners” in Ezra 2:2 or Nehemiah 7:7.
Ezra is always considered to be a Jewish High Priest and concerned only with Jewish matters (though he is never called a High Priest or listed among them in the genealogies). David Janzen, in JBL (2000), goes all around the mountains to return to the point of departure. Ezra was a priest and scribe who served as administrative head of the temple community. The letter of Artaxerxes is spurious, merely a midrash which it is unhelpful to bother trying to understand, and Ezra’s work is simply as administrator, priest, and scribe working within the framework of the temple assembly in Yehud. Ezra functions simply as a temple official, albeit on a number of levels, and had no mission. The Ezra narrative admittedly seems to contradict itself:
- while Ezra is not a high priest, he appears to act like one,
- while he is not a satrap, he appears to wield satrap-like powers,
- while he is sent to enforce the law in Yehud, it is the community that actually appears to exercise legal authority,
- while he comes to restore the cult, supposedly it has long been functioning
His position was a peculiar one. But it will not do that Ezra was just a temple official! Artaxerxes informs Ezra that the royal treasuries are obligated to provide resources to the temple in Jerusalem and that they are not to tax the temple clergy (Ezra 7:20-24). He also authorizes Ezra to appoint judicial officials throughout Abarnahara, the satrapy of which the province of Yehud was a part, and to teach the law of God there (Ezra 7:25-26).
Joseph Blenkinsopp in his 1987 JBL paper argued that the biblical descriptions of the missions of Ezra and Nehemiah made sense because the actions that they took were not dissimilar from those of the Egyptian, Udjahorresnet. The characteristics of Udjahorresnet acting on behalf of the temple of Neith are the same in kind as Nehemiah acting for the Jerusalem cult. The inscription on his funerary statue says Udjahorresnet defected to the Persians when they invaded Egypt in 525 BC, became a local advisor to Cambyses, informing him of Egyptian customs and religion, and thereby won the king’s approval to restore the cult at Sais.
He presents it as an act of restoration of normal religious practice on behalf of the local worshippers and approved by the kindly shah, here Cambyses. The shah commanded the expulsion of foreigners from the temple, the removal of ritual impurity, the appointment of legitimate cult personnel, the restoration of traditional worship and the Houses of Life. And what were the Houses of Life? They were training schools concerned with the recording of religious law and its interpretation.
Another Egyptian example comes from Elephantine, where a letter has been found from the satrap of Egypt, Pherendates, wriiten in 491 BC, in the reign of Darius I, to the priests of the temple of Khnum in which he told them of a decree of the shahanshah for the selection of chief priests. It looks like a direct interference, unlike the usual more subtle approach, unless subtler approaches had failed. Darius had spent some time codifying Egyptian temple practices. The priests of Khnum perhaps were defiant, and the apparently direct Persian intervention was a response to the “abnormal practices” they persisted in following. The Persians will still have claimed to have been restoring proper practice, and their first step was to appoint compliant people, not dissenters, as priests.
Herodotus describes a case of the same ploy being used in a different context. After the Ionian rebellion, Artaphernes, satrap of Sardis held a council of the cities’ representatives to agree on how conflicts should be handled, before they were assessed for taxation. Evidently the Persian satrap met the Greeks to “facilitate” a local agreement. Naturally, it would be one agreeable to the suzerain, but would emerge from a local council. It could therefore be presented as the Persians merely responding to the wishes of the locals.
Another case is the inscription found at Sardis in 1974, being a Greek copy of an original monument set up in year 39 of Artaxerxes (426 BC or 365 BC). The hyparch of Lydia set up statue of Zeus and founded rules for his proper worship. No one who worshipped other gods such as Sabazius, were to worship this one, called Zeus of Baradates, a mixed Greek and Persian title. Idiosyncrasies of the style suggest the Greek was a translation out of Aramaic, so here seems to be another local cult set up with its own laws, but approved by the Persians. Pierre Briant declared that none of this illustrates…
…how the Persian community at Sardis fell back upon its own religious traditions. Quite the contrary, it indicates the intense intercultural exchanges between Persians of the imperial diaspora the local elites.
The Persian ploy was to present changes in religious practice and law as restoring some religious norm on behalf of the local people. The shah simply approved the desired changes, thus giving them the force of imperial law, and so Frei calls the ploy “imperial authorization”. Of course, even though the changes are dressed as having been a local initiative, as Erhart Blum showed, they rarely were, the king, or rather his chancellery, being the true author of the changes.
The Persians succeeded so well in spreading the propaganda that they would respond favourably to local requests that it is still believed, doubtless helped by the bible which spreads the same propaganda. It has become so strong a tradition in Daniel that Darius is bound by it and has to do what the satraps and councillors request, landing the hero in the lion’s den! Joseph Blenkinsopp, a scholar in a catholic college, notes the shahs’ willingness—to judge by widespread evidence from across the empire—“to regulate, one might almost say, micromanage, local cult practice”. And, “interest in the operation of local cults seems to be the one exception to the noninterventionist policy” imagined of the shahs generally. Catholics can hardly be keen to admit the Jewish religion was created as a matter of imperial policy by the Persian Zoroastrian shahanshahs, but that inference draws closer once the shahs are seen to be interested in regulating local cults. Darius was furious that Gadatas, one of his officials in Ionia, had taxed the sacred gardeners of Apollo of Magnesia, despite his “policy about deities”. Persian policy was to keep the priests of local cults on side by allowing them taxation privileges (“ateleia”) in return for keeping order—helping to collect taxes and enforcing the law through their cults.
Many scholars have found it significant that in the letter and elsewhere in the Ezra narrative, Ezra is called a “scribe” as well as a “priest”. The word scribe was used in two basic senses in the Persian period:
- someone who has the ability to read and write and who is called upon to transcribe legal documents;
- officials within the administration.
We use the word “secretary” in equivalent ways, as someone who transcribes letters and as a senior government official like a Secretary of State. Legal documents or letters from Persian officials mention the name of the scribe who wrote out the letter. An order from Arsames to his officials in Egypt states that “Nabuaqab wrote”, and that “Nabuaqab is the scribe”. In the same letter, Arsames writes that “Anani the scribe is chancellor” and since Anani is not the scribe who committed Arsames’ words to paper, here “scribe” means “chancellor”, the “overseer of the order”. Anani will see that the order is carried out.
This double description of someone as “scribe” and “chancellor” is known elsewhere from the Persian period. A cuneiform document from 486 BC. concerns an order given by a satrap to two men regarding a certain amount of barley, and both men are referred to as “sepiru” (“scribe”) and as “bel temi” (“chancellor”). These titles appear in the introduction to the letter of Ezra 4:11-16, part of the correspondence between “Rehum the chancellor and Shimshai the scribe” (Ezra 4:8) and Artaxerxes. Artaxerxes orders that the building of Jerusalem come to a halt, and that Rehum and Shimshai enact the royal decree in Yehud. A cuneiform text also refers to “a scribe of the satrap of Egypt”, who worked at the royal court and who kept the satrap informed of what was going on there.
So, a scribe was an official position within the Persian administration, and the “Scribe of the God of Heaven” was an office of the Persian government. Scholars who accept the validity of Ezra’s mission look to the title of scribe to explain his position vis-à-vis the royal administration. Did scribes do the types of things Ezra was commissioned to do according to the letter—teach the people about the law and appoint legal officials? If scribes represented higher ranks in their absence, then Ezra could have received a commission from the shah to introduce Jewish law to Abarnahara and to appoint judicial officials who would act in accordance with it.
H H Schaeder has concluded that Ezra was a High Commissioner for Jewish Affairs but it is difficult to understand why an officer responsible for Jewish affairs should have been needed at the Persian court. To suggest that a tiny colony should require its own minister of religion in the chancellery is absurd. However, if Jewish here pertains not to Yehudim but to to “Juddin”, the Persian description of non-Zoroastrian religions, the title and position would make complete sense.
It seems Ezra was a senior minister responsible for religious affairs in the empire, and this can only add to the suspicion that Ezra is an abbreviation of Zoroaster. Zoroaster was a title of officials of the Zoroastrian religion at Rhages under the Medes and doubtless remained the same under the Persians, though officiating at the new capital. What could have brought such a senior religious authority, a man senior to the satrap, to Yehud?
Josephus tells us that it was that Johanan had murdered his own brother in the temple! If the colonists had been given the task of setting up an official religion—a religion of the Good Creation—then this was a serious matter. More so in reality because it will surely have been a symbol of the dissension between the Samarians and the Jews. The governor of Yehud, Bagoas (Persian Bagavahya, Bagoses, in the Elephantine papyri) had reported the murder to the satrap of Abarnahara, and thence it reached the office of the minister of religious affairs at the king’s court. Ezra sought the permission of the king to go and sort it out in person:
Forasmuch as thou art sent of the king, and of his seven counsellers, to inquire concerning Judah and Jerusalem, according to the law of thy God which is in thine hand.Ezra 7:14
Artaxerxes II came to the throne in 404 BC. From the dated letters of Elephantine, Bagoas was governor of Yehud in 410 and 407 BC. Egypt declared itself autonomous about this time, and remained semi-independent for sixty years, so suddenly Yehud became an important place as an outpost once more. In these conditions of uncertainty and change, Johanan seems to have decided to get rid of his troublesome brother. The fact that the satrap did not punish the High Priest suggests that Joshua was considered a trouble by the Persians. Instead sacrifices were taxed implying a more widespread dissension in the worshipping population and Ezra, the senior minister for religious affairs, was sent to sort it all out.
