Judaism
Ezra and Nehemiah I.3
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
The Law of God or the Law of the King
Eduard Meyer in 1886 pointed out the implication of Ezra 7:26 for Judaism. The shah ordered them to obey the Jewish law on pain of death. “The law of your god and the law of the king”, in Ezra 7:26, implies the identity of two laws but could imply two separate laws. The conjunction translated as “and” is better translated as “namely”, yielding “the law of your God, namely, the law of the king”. A Babylonian document recording the sale of a slave mentions “datu sari”, the king’s law, but it does not imply a legal code, for any law given the imprimatur of the king was the king’s law. The authoritative Cambridge Ancient History denies any unequivocal evidence of the implementation of an imperial legal code in the time of the Achaemenids.
The nature of law, passed down from the Akkadian culture into the Elamite and Babylonian ones, and held by Cyrus and Darius, was that of the king’s commands expressed as decrees to promote God’s will, or “arta”, the fundamental orderliness that even God was subject to.
In the ancient Near East, any law was based on divine legitimation and so involved religion.P Frei, Persia and Torah (Ed J W Watts)
Kings ruled in the name of a god, and, if the law of a god could possibly clash with the law of a king, the people would consider the god to have it right and not the king. Plenty of religious people today still, Christians as well as Moslems, put their conception of the law of God before the law of the land. Eastern potentates could not have endured two separate and possibly conflicting laws operating simultaneously. The Persian shahs were not at all tolerant of the daeva religions, the religions of the evil gods, manifested by opposition to the agent of the God of Heaven, the Persian king. If any such group of people had defied the king, they would have been punished as being influenced by evil [†]
The Persian authorities needed a legal document containing the basic customs and laws of the community living in Judea to grant religious and political autonomy on a clear juridical basis to this province.J L Ska
M A Dandamaev and V G Lukonin thought the Persians accepted localities into the empire as pseudo-autonomous regions subject to the overriding royal judicial system. The regions were bound to fidelity by political, economic, and religious laws obliging them to do certain things like pay taxes, and in return favouring the ruling elite with tax concessions and privileges. The Persians exploited local institutions for their own ends, but it is absurd to imagine or pretend that they did not ensure that the institutions were suitable to their purpose in the first place. They ensured they were by appointing and controlling local officials, and ensuring their loyalty with concessions and privileges.
Scholars complain that they cannot find much evidence of any central law in Persia, but that is the whole point. They wanted the people to think there was no overall rule, that the localities were indeed autonomous. They wanted to convince people they were restoring the purity of their religious worship, and for that they needed the assured help of the priesthood, which they got by bribery. They were not going to let people do as they liked, but as the Persians liked, and so the religious restoration was a restoration to a religion acceptable to Persia. If people, like the Canaanites, had been practising human sacrifice, it had to stop, and Lo! a manuscript was found in some archive saying the priests had been malpractising for decades in their persistence in human sacrifice when their God had forbidden it. Since the Persians' own archives were destroyed by Alexander and destroyed again by the Moslems, it ought not to be a surprise that anything admitting the foreign policies of the Persians has not been found. The sophistication of Persian foreign policy has to be deduced from what we have, and the Jewish scriptures, interpreted historically and not by dogma, is among the best evidence we have. Gary Knoppers summarises thus:
Persian kings seem to have given local appointees significant leeway to govern their communities in accordance with larger strategic priorities. Achemaenid hegemony was maintained even as local customs were honoured… Persians allowed locals to hold important offices within their territories, but, during most periods, the Persians seem to have restricted entry into the highest offices within the government to members of the Persian aristocracy. The Persian kings preferred to reward good conduct and loyalty from members of other societies by granting honorary titles and material distinctions, rather than providing open access to the highest levels of martial or political decision making. This practice protected the highest echelon of the Persian elite from unwelcome integration, while encouraging local and regional appointees to manifest loyalty towrds their superiors.G Knoppers, Persia and Torah (Ed J W Watts)
The Persian aristocracy had actually failed in this at the very highest level by the time of Darius II, who was half Babylonian, being the son of a concubine, but it remains a good summary of Persian policy.
And thou, Ezra, after the wisdom of thy God, that is in thine hand, set magistrates and judges, which may judge all the people of Abarnahara, all such as know the laws of thy God; and teach ye them that know them not.Ezra 7:25
Blenkinsopp can argue that Ezra was not bringing a new law because Ezra 7:25 spoke of those who knew the laws of your God and those who did not know them in Abarnahara, the latter having to be taught them. If the laws were new ones, few people indeed in Abarnahara could have known them. If they were not new, then why did no one know them except Ezra and a few specialists? Ezra 7:25 is not referring only to Jews, but to all the people of the Abarnahara satrapy, as Michael Heltzer and Lisbeth S Fried argue. Ignorance of the law was even then no defence, and everyone in the satrapy had to know what it was. Blenkinsopp disagrees on the grounds that the clause “all the people of Abarnahara” is qualified by the next one, “all such as know the laws of thy God”. It is how the modern text is punctuated but it still says that the people of Abarnahara are to be judged by Ezra’s laws and so had to know them and be taught them if they did not. Having been taught them, eventually everyone would know them, and so be subject to them! Moreover, the whole of the sense of the passages preceding are that Ezra had command over the treasurers of the whole satrapy, not just Yehud. The ones who knew the laws Ezra brought were the people he had taken with him to colonise the province, and they had the duty to teach the rest.
As for judges and magistrates, no distinction is implied between these Aramaic words, rather the words are meant to explain each other with the conjunction again being “namely” rather than simply “and”, just as the conjunction joining the “law of God” and the “law of the king” is in the next verse. Words concerned with law and order in Daniel and Ezra-Nehemiah are often Persian-Aramaic words, such as those for “police” and “spies” (“hearers”, meaning the ears of the king). The evidence of names in Egypt shows that the Egyptians never gave their children Persian names, yet all judges had Persian names. They were Persians! Persians seemed reluctant to put law and order into non-Persian hands, certainly in Egypt, but probably elsewhere too, possibly including Abarnahara. Fried (Persia and Torah) seeks to persuade us that the Egyptians had no law at all, the decisions of judges being purely their own based on the principle of “ma’at”, being for the Egyptians what “kinatu” was for the Babylonians, and “arta” was for the Persians. Both serve the principle of “righteousness” for Judaism, and Fried is surely correct that the basis of law in the courts of the judges was essentially the righteousness (“ma’at”, “arta”) of the judges, though they had formal laws too, and both “ma’at” and the law were taught in the Houses of Life. Persian judges were fired if they transgressed!
Fried does not deny that there were laws in the ancient near east, and that collections of them like Hammurabi’s were common, there being apparently at least nine such Akkadian codes, and that they were multiply copied and studied. Even so, she says no attempt was ever made to keep these codes current by updating them in response to real cases. Fried tells us these collections were collections of “just verdicts” meant to be examples for the judges of “ma’at” or righteous judgements, but not statutes or precedents to be cited in making a decision. Fried seems to go too far. R Westbrook in Revue Biblique (1985) disagrees with her, though she has a point about using the collections in training magistrates in the righteousness of judgement. Donald B Redford in the same book (Persia and Torah) also disagrees, pointing out that to decree a taxation is to decree a law, and Egyptian taxation receipts have been found. The law was specifically applied.
Parallel Babylonian codes such as the collections of omen texts, medical texts and astrological ones were cited by their users, though the legal codes seemed not to have been. Despite it, we can read “his case will not be judged as an inhabitant of his town”, “the custom of the place” and “the law of market gardeners” (D B Redford), showing that there were local government laws and even laws for different trades. The simple explanation is that judges were not necessarily literate whereas the doctors and scribes versed in prediction were. Judges were like British magistrates or like Justices of the Peace. They were laymen who heard the case and made the decision, but the recording was by a professional scribe, and the same man or another scribe assisted the judge by citing to him the relevant legal cases to help his “arta”, “ma’at” or righteousness. The judge was not obliged to follow the advice of the scribe or lawyer but it is unlikely that he often would ignore it.
Redford thinks that it is absurd to imagine people making codes of law and faithfully copying them out, for no good reason. Thutmose III made laws and established instructions, for the law must be “done as it should be”. Egyptian writing is replete in legal terms. He lists phrases that illustrate his point:
- Laws of the Palace.
- I am one that enforces the laws of the king.
- …who groups his (Pharaoh's) laws and does not frustrate his doctrine.
- The council of 30 for interpreting the laws of his lord.
- Whereaver I presided in court, justice was exact, and the process of law was followed. Ramesses IV
- Enrich your officials that they may enforce your laws.
- Superintendent of the laws of the Perfect God in the Department of Administering Justice.
The Egyptians had offices of “Superintendent of the Law”, and “Custodian of the Law”, both implying papyrus collections of laws or edicts—the same word, “hp”, covered both. Redford cites J-M Kruchton (1981) that judges performed their tasks “the instructions before them, the laws in their day books”. As in the phrase used in Ezra, the law was thought of as written, so that it could be carried as an object “in his hand”. Important decrees specified that they should be written down or even published on inscribed stelae, and, indeed, the scribes ensured that all law was written down at once as part of the law-making process. Laws such as treaties were read out to the people. “The law was not only written down with care but also classified and filed” according to a rational system, Redford says. Conclusively, in Egypt the punishment of a crime was sometimes cited from a “hierglyphic text” or “from the gods”.
The Egyptians postulated a divine underpinning to all law.D B Redford, Persia and Torah
A vast bureaucracy supported libraries, archives and the Houses of Life. Among them were the judges who had their day books, apparently used as legal precedents, in fact. Altering any written record was a serious crime akin to perjury, and the judges were proud to claim they enforced “the laws of antiquity”. It is the perfect situation for a conquering king to come along and claim he is codifying the law for everyone's benefit, when he really has a large commission of scribes altering all the relevant laws according to Persian chancellery models.
Curiously, scholars found that in the Saite period a considerable amount of editing went on, so that important texts like the Going Forth By Day were substantially changed. The pharaoh, Ahmose II (Amasis), immediately before the Persian conquest, reformed the Houses of Life! Even his predescessors like the priest of the Theban “temple state”, Mentuemhat, boasted of their restoration of the temples and the law, and the twenty fifth and twenty sixth dynasties immediately preceding the Persian conquest were noted for their “archaizing tendencies”—their whole style was artificially old! Redford concludes:
Egypt entered the last quarter of the sixth century BCE with perhaps the most sophisticated legal system in the world. It may now be asked what Darius, a late arrival on the scene, whose ancestors had but recently emerged from breech cloth, wanted with this law… Darius was doing the Egyptians no favours by having this law written out—again!
Redford does not answer the question he tells us may now be asked, but it is legitimate to ask it. If Darius was doing the Egyptians no favours in spending 16 years rooting around their religious and legal schools supposedly codifying their laws, then what was he doing? It ought to be obvious that what he was doing is what Persians did in Yehud—ensuring that the laws and religion of Egypt suited the Persian kings.
The Persians might have worn trousers but they were not uncivilized, being the inheritors of the civilization of Sumeria, Akkadia, Assyria and Babylon, whereas the Egyptians were in the so-called Third Intermediate Period, a time of chaos. No Egyptologist has the wit to realise that the sixteen years the commission of Darius spent in Egypt was spent altering the Egyptian records, and these alterations have been seen as actual historical changes that seemed to precede the Persians, so that the shahs could deny it was they that had made the changes. Just as the Persians introduced Deuteronomy under the pretext that it had already been introduced 200 years before by a king of Judah called Josiah, they did the same thing in Egypt, a task that took some doing, but which has fooled the most eminent of scholars since. Like the kings of Judah, much of the Third Intermediate Period in Egypt might be fiction, a thorough jumbling of recent Egyptian history by the Persian commission to provide legitimacy and therefore acceptance of their own rule. Redford accepts a tradition, citing R A Parker, that books and writings and new writings were brought to Egypt by Darius. If Darius was interfering with the records by restoring them, then a batch of substantially edited records intended to look as if they were pre-Persian, in other words, archaized, ought to be anticipated. It is just what scholars have found.
All that was needed in Yehud, Blenkinsopp thinks, was that the sense of the law had to be properly taught (Neh 8:8). It is hard to see how this makes any difference at all. These people who had had a law for a thousand years did not understand the sense of it? If the sense of a law that is supposedly well known has to be taught, then how well known was the putative law? And when a law is given a new sense, how is it the same law? The whole point of the Persian approach was that they aimed to be seen as not interfering, but as being helpful—helping the people restore normal religious service. That was their ploy, but really they were imposing their own laws, laws that suited them as rulers, and that shines through, now! They were subtle. So subtle that it has taken until now for historians to realize it. They have been beguiled for too long by Persian propaganda put over as religious necessity. Biblicists even make out that the Persian officials were being manipulated by God’s clever people, though they were too stupid to realise it. The whole sense is the opposite. The Persians had a consistent policy of implementing their own policies but contriving to present them as being with the agreement of local people. The people were fooled by it, and so accepted it quiescently.
The fact that the Jewish law is the only one mentioned in the decree (Ezra 7:14, 21, 25) and that the penalties for infraction of the laws, listed in descending order of severity, are characteristic of Persian rather than Jewish penal practice, suggests the conclusion that the Jewish law Ezra was authorized to enforce is now invested with the authority of the monarch, and therefore is, in effect, royal Persian law as far as Jews in the satrapy are concerned.J Blenkinsopp, Persia and Torah
In fact, the passages cited make no mention of Jewish law but the law or laws of “your God” or the “God of Heaven”, so the singular Jewishness of the law is deduced from the belief that Ezra is a Jew. Ahuramazda was also the God of Heaven, and would have been Ezra’s God, had he been a Persian not a Jew. Fried accepts that Ezra’s “God of Heaven” (Ezra 7:12, 21, 23) was a “local manifestation” of Ahuramazda, and notes that Thomas M Bolin, in a discussion of the Elephantine temple in the context of Persian religious policy, came to the same conclusion (1995).
Interestingly, the expression “law of Moses” only appears 14 times in the Jewish scriptures and six of them are in books speaking manifestly of the Persian period, Ezra-Nehemiah, Daniel and Malachi, with two more in Chronicles, usually accepted as being closely related in composition to Ezra and Nehemiah. Three are in Joshua, parts of which are Persian, Joshua properly being the Persian priest sent with the early “returners”, and the remaining three are in the Deuteronomist’s book of Kings. The “law of Yehouah”—where Yehouah is invariably translated as “the Lord”, reminding us that the “law of Ahura Mazda” is the “law of the Lord” Mazda—is the preferred expression in Chronicles where it occurs eight times out of 18 occurences in the Jewish scriptures. Variants such as the “law of God”, the “law of the God of Heaven” and the “law of thy God” all appear in Ezra-Nehemiah except for three instances in Joshua, Hosea and Psalms. So, overwhelmingly the Jews spoke of the law, but they understood by it, when obliged to be clearer, the “law of Moses” or the “law of God”, and these clarifications appear almost entirely in the explicitly Persian books. Hans Heinrich Schroeder concludes that Ezra, as the “scribe in the law of Moses”, was an official of the Persian court.
Justice is first and foremost fidelity to the rule of Ahura Mazda and to the power of the king.Pierre Briant
The law of the king and the law of Ahura Mazda have merged. The will of the king is the will of God.Lisbeth Fried, Persia and Torah
A popular ploy of believers faced with an unattractive hypothesis about their scriptures is to set up a straw man to knock down rather than answering the actual point. It happens in this context too. They pretend that the Persians imposed the whole of the Pentateuch in its more or less final form on to the Jews, rather than initially Deuteronomy alone. It is easy to show that the whole Pentateuch is not Persian! Blenkinsopp asks:
The legal compilations in the Pentateuch are inseparable from their narrative contexts and themselves contain a fair amount of narrative and historical reference… Must we then suppose that the imperial authorities either mandated or auhorized the juxtaposition of the larger narratives in which the legal compilations are embedded, and then checked them to make sure they presented no threat to the pax Persica?
Er… No, Joseph! Not that Blenkinsopp thinks it. We must imagine he is raising the question rhetorically because others ask it in all seriousness. Of course, the Pentateuch was never given fully formed, whether by man or by God! It grew by a quite complicated process in an obscure period of history. Lisbeth S Fried tells us that the initially terse basis of the Jewish law was successively glossed by copyists, each seeking to clarify an expression such as “temple servants” (Ezra 7:24) by exemplifying it. Some of the books now in the Jewish scriptures include things the Persians cannot have sanctioned. The idea of a messiah is unquestionably Persian, but the Persian Saoshyant was the saviour of the world in a sense much more like the Christian one because he was to restore Ahuramazda’s Good Creation, free of the harm done by Angra Mainyu. The Jewish messiah was much altered by the resentment against the Seleucid Greeks and became a warrior national saviour epitomized by the Hasmonian brothers.
The seed planted by the Persians, besides the saviour concept, was that this minute country could become a great nation provided they were obedient and righteous. In Nehemiah 11:23, Nehemiah lays down the commands made by “the king” for the daily duties of the Levites. An abstract king appeared also on the “Passover letter” of Yeb. Does it mean king David, as the Chronicler does? In Nehemiah 11:24, a man, Pethahiah, is spoken of as the king’s advisor concerning all matters of the people. The king being spoken of can hardly have been a local ruler, for Yehud was tiny, and its king could hardly have needed a man to advise him about the people. The man who needed such an advisor was the shah in Susa or Babylon, Artaxerxes or Darius. J Blenkinsopp candidly admits that the Chronicler likes to backdate Persian practices to the time of David. 1 Chronicles 23-26 deals with the concerns of Nehemiah in mythologized detail, but attributes it all to king David! This and other evidence suggests to Blenkinsopp that the Jewish David is a mythologized Darius—actually Darius II. The Maccabees, once they had set up the Jewish free state, embellished the myth of Darius II as the founder of the Jewish state, into the myth of David, the founder of a Jewish empire!
Suffice it to say, the Persians gave a law and began the process of justifying it by giving the Jewish state a bogus history within which the details of the law would be clarified. The lines and tone of the Jewish scriptures were set, but much of the writing followed after the Persians no longer were in charge. The Persians said the Jews had been enslaved by the Egyptians, meaning their country had been occupied by them, but later the fantastic myth of Moses and the Exodus was added by the Ptolemies to explain the name Moses as Egyptian, and was adjusted by the Seleucids, then the Maccabees and the Herodians. So, none of this was Persian.
Lester L Grabbe has noted that the preface to Ben Sira by his grandson speaks of “the law, the prophets and other books” in the second century BC. Here “the law and the prophets” are plainly well accepted, but not so the others that are mentioned so vaguely. Grabbe thinks it is because “the law and the prophets” were Persian but “the others” were later additions.
The Chronicler seems to have been the trade union representative for the Levites. In Chronicles 17:7-9, it is Jehoshaphat (Yehouah is the Judge) who teaches the law of Yehouah to the people.
Therefore the Lord stablished the kingdom in his hand, and all Judah brought to Jehoshaphat presents, and he had riches and honour in abundance. And his heart was lifted up in the ways of the Lord. Moreover he took away the high places and groves out of Judah. Also in the third year of his reign he sent to his princes, even to Benhail, and to Obadiah, and to Zechariah, and to Nethaneel, and to Michaiah, to teach in the cities of Judah. And with them he sent Levites, even Shemaiah, and Nethaniah, and Zebadiah, and Asahel, and Shemiramoth, and Jehonathan, and Adonijah, and Tobijah, and Tobadonijah, Levites, and with them Elishama and Jehoram, priests. And they taught in Judah, and had the book of the law of the Lord with them, and went about throughout all the cities of Judah, and taught the people.2 Chronicles 17:5-9
The word used for law is “torah”, showing that the books of Chronicles are after the Persian colonization, yet Jehoshaphat is supposed to have been a ninth century king. He is doing in the ninth century what Ezra did 500 years later. Plainly, Jehoshaphat is part of Ezra retroscribed into an earlier mythical history. Ezra appointed judges and this mythical king was the Judge of God. Ezra brought priests to teach the law, and that is just what we find this king doing.
