Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, February 26, 2001

Abstract

Reading the Law

A most important passage follows in Nehemiah 8 where Ezra reads the law to people who already putatively had the most comprehensive law since Hammurabi—the law of Moses. They are supposed to have had it for a thousand years, and the Second Law, or Deuteronomy, they are supposed to have had for about 200 years. “They had forgotten them!” the “scholars” of the Jewish and Christian persuasions tell us. S Mowinckel (1965) lists the hypotheses and their proponents about “The Book of the Law of Moses” which Ezra read (Neh 8:2-15):

1. Deuteronomic Laws—Laurence Browne, Raymond Bowman, M F Scott, Ulrich Kellermann;
2. A collection of legal materials—Rudolph Kittel, Gerhard von Rad, Martin Noth;
3. The Priestly Code—Abraham Kuenen, Bernhard Stade, W H Koster, Eduard Meyer, W O E Oesterly, Adolphe Lods, Hans-J Kraus;
4. The Pentateuch—Julius Wellhausen, Ernest Sellin, Hans Schaeder, Otto Eissfeldt, Wilhelm Rudolph, Kurt Galling, Sigmund Mowinckel, William F Albright, John Bright, Frank Cross and James Sanders, but C Houtman objects that legal citations in Ezra-Nehemiah do not come from the Pentateuch, nor are supposed Pentateuchal citations quoted verbatim.

Only the first or second can be right. The Priestly Code has to be much later, being the elaborate rules of a well established sacerdotal centre. Ezra leads the group of Levites in teaching the law, obviously working in a senior capacity. Here he is called both “priest” and “scribe”. In fact, Ezra reads to the colonists and the Am ha Eretz a covenant, an enforceable treaty in the form of a statute like the one the biblicists tell us they had had since the time of Josiah. The law read out by Ezra was a law that had to be kept. Ezra imposed it firmly under threat, and the people wept! Some say they wept in joy but they were commanded not to mourn! David A Smith, in the Lutterworth Dictionary of the Bible concedes that the response was grief, but it soon turned to joy! It was the law of Mazas, Ahuramazda, called Mazas by the Assyrians, Moses by the Jews, or perhaps Misa (Mica), the name of Mithras in the Persian dialect. Jewish sages have thought of Ezra as the second Moses. He was the first Moses, unless Ahuramazda or Mithras is considered the first. It also begins to look like more than a coincidence that his brother is Aaron, in Hebrew letter equivalents, “Ahrwn”. Besides the final “nun” the word looks to be a mishearing of Ahura (Aura, Oura), and the “nun” is easily explained from its assimilation into Hebrew as meaning “his brother”.

Ezra read out Deuteronomy! Deuteronomy, charges the priests (Dt 17:18 and 31:9-13) with a public reading of the law to Israel. Ezra teaches Torah to the community, acting the way a priest would. The name Deuteronomy does not imply that some law went before it except in the minds of scholars who cannot think. Deuteronomy is a name given to a biblical book by Christians because they thought there already was a first law—the law of Moses. The truth is that Deuteronomy was the law until the priests of a later date, when the temple was up and running, wanted to add as many layers of sacrificing, tithing and taxing as they could to extract the maximum revenue from the population. John How is sure Ezra’s law is Deuteronomy. The parts reminiscent of the Priestly Code (Neh 10:38-39; 12:47) were additions by the Chroniclers—priests.

The form of the law is exactly the form of ancient near eastern treaties. Christians want us to believe that God chose a legal form for his covenant with the people that the Semites of the fertile crescent knew well. If this pathetic lunacy were not so ingrained and prevalent among biblical scholars it would be risable. Indeed it is, but there is no historian who has the nerve to tell the religious dogmatists to do something useful like sweeping roads or digging out cesspits, leaving scholarship to professionals who do not need to call upon the hypothesis of God’s finger at every juncture in Palestinian history.

David C Deuel calls Ezra “an Old Testament pattern for expository preaching”, when he means that Ezra is the Old Testament pattern of expository teaching.

If Judaism followed the pattern established by Ezra and if the church took many of its first practices from Judaism, is it possible that expository preaching has enjoyed an unbroken succession of “pulpiteers” from this early period?

Need he ask? He points out that Larsen had already said:

Preachers today stand in this awesome succession. We are the descendants of those incendiary spokesmen for God in all their variety and diversity.

David L Larsen, The Anatomy of Preaching (1989)

The shape of the ceremony when it was read out became the traditional shape of Jewish and Christian services which centre on readings from the legally binding books and an exhortation to obey. Psalms and suitable prayers reinforced the message: “Obey the law and you are saved. Do not obey and you are doomed”.

The people could not understand what was being said, though Ezra was a Jew reading out the law of Moses, we are assured. A large number of assistants were needed to “interpret” Ezra’s words for the crowd and to explain precisely what they meant—the “sense”. Biblicists know that Ezra 4:18 refers to “translation” not to “explanation”, and sometimes they will admit it in a footnote while going on then to treat the meaning as explanation. “Translation” here means “interpretation” or “explanation”, they say. It means “translation” because Ezra is a Persian and he is reading in Persian. His assistants translate the Persian words and explain them to the assembled throng.

In the ritual the people call out, “Amen, Amen!” This now means “quite so” or “truly”, repeated twice, as Jesus did in John’s gospel, but oddly enough Artaxerxes was called “The Mindful”, in Greek, Mnemon, so the people are actually calling out Artaxerxes’s name in Greek! Whether this is a bizarre coincidence or whether for some reason Ezra was reading the law in Greek, inviting the crowd to respond by repeating the Shahanshah’s name in Greek, will never be known. It seems doubtful, except that the same law might already have been used in the Greek colonies in Asia, so Ezra had it to hand in a readily usable form—but in Greek! In any event, the calling out of “Amen” to acknowledge a religious statement has never ceased since, in Judaism and Christianity.

The Festival of Booths

Ezra in the passage next entered has the colonists celebrating the festival of Booths. The Chronicler tells us that the Jews had not been celebrating the Feast of Booths since the time of Joshua. For you scholars at the back there, this means it had never been celebrated. It was supposed to have commemorated the time God spent with the Israelites in their tents in the desert. They had to have settled down for it to make sense, so it could only have been celebrated in the time of Judges, according to biblical chronology. It would not occur to a Christian or Jew that the Chronicler is actually leaving clues to take the rise out of the gullible believers. These people in reality had never spent any time in the desert in booths, so what was the point? The people who had lived in booths in the desert, or Eurasian steppes, were Iranians.

Zoroastrians had a harvest festival in the autumn dedicated to Mithras, and we have to conclude that Ezra was really introducing a festival to match that of Mithras. Booths is held from 15 to 22 of Tishri which corresponds to the end of September and beginning of October (sometime in the interval 20 September to 19 October) in our calendar. Mithras (Mica) became the Jewish archangel Michael, and Michaelmas Day is still, to this day, 29 September in the Christian calendar. Also significant is that Booths required the sacrifice of seventy bulls over the whole period of the festival, and Mithras is associated with bull sacrifice.

A bundle of twigs called the “Four Species” are ritually waved throughout this festival, a habit that has no scriptural explanation except that the booths were to be made of twigs:

Go forth unto the mount, and fetch olive branches, and pine branches, and myrtle branches, and palm branches, and branches of thick trees, to make booths.

Nehemiah 8:15

Zoroastrian priests always carried a bundle of twigs called the “Baresman”, and we can deduce that the “Four Species” being waved are a memory of the Zoroastrian origins of the ceremony of booths.

The purpose of the festival for Ezra was that the new law had to be ceremonially taught for a week every year. But the original period of the ceremony did not match that adopted later—it was not set on the fifteenth day of the month as it now is. This first one was held on the second day of the seventh month. It shows that the traditional date set in the Mosaic law did not precede this law of Ezra. Ezra, in short, was founding the tradition, and later it was moved by the priests to make way for the Day of Atonement that was comemorated on 10 Tishri (Lev 23:26-32).

The Chronicler mentions the Festival of Booths elsewhere in his long history (2 Chr 5:3; 7:8; Ezra 3:4) but these simply show that the editor called the Chronicler was writing at a later period, when the feast had become traditional, and it had been customary to retroject it into the past, much of which was a mythical justication for the priestly extortions. A Guillaume explains to us, in a commentary on Chronicles:

The doctors of Islam shaped the laws of millions of Moslems by reading back into the origins of their religion the conditions and ideas of their own age: how customs and laws introduced by Mohammed became de rigueur by the simple expedient of claiming for them his precept or example.

It is remarkable that Christians like Guillaume could write this without a hint that they had noticed the same could have happened in Christianity and Judaism. Guillaume wrote in about 1920, but there is little evidence that many Christian scholars, or anyone with influence, have noticed it until this day. To make it utterly clear—the whole bible is built on the same principle. Guillaume might have been a genuine Christian idiot savant because he asks in wonder or deceit:

Why was it that Israel’s great saints had lived as though the law had never been given?

Despite what he said about the Moslems, it never seemed to occur to him that much Jewish scripture is fabricated at a much later date and retrojected into the past. Later laws concocted by the priesthood not more than about 200 years BC are retrojected into a distant antiquity to give them a caché that they could never otherwise have had. They invented a character to explain why their law was called the law of Moses, a name that they came not to understand because their god was called Yehouah not Moses.

This part of Nehemiah shows the foundation of the feast of Booths and indeed of the central elements of Judaism, in the time of Ezra. No one can seriously believe that the native people had forgotten these traditions from their inception until the time of Ezra, or that an official of the Persian king should turn up with records of a detailed law that the people for whom it was intended had forgotten for a long time. Ezra instituted the feast and the readings of the law that became the basis of our modern patriarchal religions.

Separating Husband from Wife

Now we come to Ezra’s most offensive act, the case of the foreign women in Ezra 9-10, when the members of the assembly brought the matter of intermarriage to Ezra. Marital relations with the Am ha Eretz were forbidden in the law:

When Yehouah Elohim shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou, and when Yehouah Elohim shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them. Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them. Neither shalt thou make marriages with them. Thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods.

Deuteronomy 7:1-4

Ezra deplores the situation, claiming that it will provoke God to anger and cause God to destroy the community, but it is the assembly or part of it that confesses the “sin”. Shecaniah, not Ezra, suggests that the assembly cause those of its members who have married foreign women to divorce them (Ezra 10:2-4).

Ezra made the whole of Israel swear to do as he wanted, and obliged the Jewish men to divorce their wives and cast off them and their children, or have all their property and rights removed. We have to return to Ezra 9 to follow the proper sequence of events. The mention of the ninth month in Ezra 10:9 confirms the correctness of the restored order of the work. The chronology is right.

Some colonists had married wives of the native people—people who were supposed mythically to have been ethnic Jews, even if they had strayed from proper practice, as Jews and Christian pretend. The complaint is against the uncleanness of the men of the land, the native inhabitants of the hill country who were the same people as the “exiles”, but the Chronicler picked out Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. There is only one reason why ethnic mixing should have been forbidden, since there is not a shread of evidence that the Israelites were ethnically different from Canaanites. It is that the real complaint was against Egyptian women, because Egypt had declared UDI. So, the problem sounds ethnic—but it is really religious. The basis of it is the Zoroastrian one that marriage should be within the religion. The people who are called to Jerusalem are the “children of the captivity”—the colonists.

Blenkinsopp objects that there is no law in the whole Pentateuch calling for those who have married local people to divorce them and abandon them with their children “according to the law” (Ezra 10:3). It can hardly be meant as a serious objection. If membership of the community meant not marrying non-members, then none of them could marry non-members and remain members! It follows that they had to divorce their wives and children to remain members of the Jewish community. If they refused, they could no longer be Jews and were treated as if they were natives themselves. It might have been that the law about divorce was explicitly stated, but at a later date the locals had joined the club by taking up the proper worship of Yehouah, and perhaps the proscription seemed superfluous, and so was dropped. It remains true, though, that a Jew must have a Jewish wife for his children to be considered Jews, and some Jews ignore even this.

Lisbeth S Fried adds an interesting observation on Nehemiah 13:23-25, where the governor punished the Jews who had taken foreign wives, by beating them and pulling out their hair. A text from Babylon, contemporary with Darius II (420 BC), uses the same phraseology as the Nehemiah passage and shows that plucking the beard was a deliberate humiliation used as a punishment by the Persians.

Josephus says Bagoas had offered to make Joshua the High Priest in a tendentious account which accuses Bagoas of polluting the temple, entering it in his capacity as governor to investigate the crime. Answering protestors, Bagoas, whose very name (Bagayavahu) includes the Persian word for God (Baga), and who must have been a Zoroastrian, declared, “Am I not purer than he that was slain in the temple?” He was! Nothing was more impure than a corpse and no corpse worse than that of a dead priest. Bagoas was accusing the colonists of hypocrisy, and imposed an additional tax on their sacrifices for seven years.

What the basis of the quarrel was between the brothers is not stated, but the fact that Bagoas did not punish Johanan personally for a heinous murder shows that he was not plotting against him as Josephus says. Ezra (Ezra 10:6) spends the night with the murderous priest, Johanan, apparently condoning his action. Ezra must have considered the murder justified, and he had the power of life and death, so had the same view as Bagoas. Persian interests must have been served by the murder which, to judge from the subsequent actions of Ezra might have been connected with mixed marriages of temple officials and priests with women of a different religion, most probably Egyptian women being the main concern, as offering both religious and loyalty problems.

Ezra speaks of the transgressions of the colonists, “those that had been carried away”. He means not the ones that had just returned with him, but the previous colonists who had made a bit of a pig’s ear out of their duty. Down to the Dead Sea Scrolls words like “the Captivity” (the Golah) or “Captives” was a word of honour for the colonists. It is taken to refer to their captivity in Babylon, but the Babylonian Jews were obviously not captives and some, to judge by their names, did extremely well. Ezra is supposed to have been a Jew who became a Persian official. Nehemiah is the same, according to the bible. How are these people captives? The truth is the “Returners” were captives of Persia. The name The Golah became a name of pride for the colonists and used to distinguish them from the colonized. Ezra speaks of the “remnant”, a way of denoting the colonists as special as the Righteous Few while the Am ha Eretz and the apostatizing “returners” were unrighteous. He states clearly (Ezra 9:9) that they are still in bondage:

For we were bondmen; yet our God hath not forsaken us in our bondage, but hath extended mercy unto us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and to repair the desolations thereof, and to give us a wall in Judah and in Jerusalem.

It is powerful propaganda. Ezra all the time speaks of “our God”, implying, if he was a Zoroastrian, that the gods were the same one, yet, if he really were Jewish, he continues the propaganda of Cyrus that the Persian kings were the agents of the Jewish God on earth. In the next but one verse he declares with utmost clarity that this is the time when the Jews possessed the land:

The land, unto which ye go to possess it, is an unclean land with the filthiness of the people of the lands, with their abominations, which have filled it from one end to another with their uncleanness.

This is just tha attitude of the Persians to the “daevas”, the false gods of the Evil Creation that had to be destroyed and not compromized with. Plainly, Yehouah was a Yazata not a daeva, but the Baals were daevas. There is no recognition here at all that the people of the land were themselves Israelites that had been left behind, there was no interest in them at all while they remained attached to their Baals, and there could be no intermarriage. At least in its concept of a good and an evil creation, Zoroastrianism has a theological basis for separation, but Judaism has none except an assumed superiority. Doubtless the women that the earlier “returners” had married had also been worshippers of Yehouah, but in the native Canaanite style. This is what the remnant had to stamp out and the reason why those of the restored faith had to divorce them. The apparent quotation from Deuteronomy (Ezra 10:11) seems to have been edited in the law itself (Deut 7:1-3) to get rid of Ezra’s statement that the land was unclean.

Like a good statesman and diplomat, Ezra gets the cooperation of some senior men, and examined the cases of mixed marriage over a two month period. The outcome is a list of those found guilty—only 111. It shows that the number of earlier colonists must have been small.

The Law is Deuteronomy

The action now moves back to Nehemiah chapters 9 and 10. In Nehemiah 9:6, God is described in relation to the heavens and the “heaven of heavens”, perhaps a suggestion of a heaven behind the heavens, a Zoroastrian idea because Ahuramazda is often described as wearing the “massy heavens” as his cloak. The nations in verse 9:8 are most of the nations already mentioned in connexion with the mixed marriages, yet it is supposedly referring to Abram, 1500 years before. And the covenant that the writer has just shown being introduced by Ezra in now cast back into the mythological past, showing that this, to the end of the speech, is all later composition. Its situation is manifestly false being a joint speech by eight Levites, and a long one for them to keep in synchronization, though modern versions attribute it to Ezra, as is likely to be correct.

The end reverts to the law and suggests that the law brought by Ezra was Deuteronomy (Ulrich Kellerman, 1968). The feast of Booths was celebrated on the second of the seventh month. In JED of Genesis no date is given and in P it appears as the 15th day of the seventh month. P was evidently the final modification of the law. The reading of the law in Nehemiah 8:2-18 corresponds with Deuteronomy 31:11 but does not appear in P. The rejoicing and the paradoxical command not to mourn matches Deuteronomy 16:14-15. Gifts for the poor in Nehemiah 8:10 matches Deuteronomy. Women and children are introduced in Nehemiah 8:2 and also in Deuteronomy. Only the Holiness Texts (Lev 23:43) identify the Festival of Booths as a memorial of the Exodus.

Most significantly, P specifies the tenth of Tishri as the Day of Atonement, yet in this account it is not mentioned. Even though a solemn assembly is called on the eighth, nothing is said about the famous fast of the tenth, showing it was a later invention, yet is prescribed in P. This account makes a use of a law and events that back it up that precede the writing of P, the Priestly Code, and the Holiness Code of Leviticus. Indeed it implies that the Chronicler might not have known it, suggesting that it was later even than the historian.

Moreover, the introduction of the covenant in Ezra 10 has no hints that there had supposedly been a history of Israelite covenants. Whatever seems possibly to reflect them turns out to be common to all of the covenants, therefore giving no indication of priority, while what seems particular to this one does not look genuine—it is probably interpolated. Thus Nehemiah 10:33 begins an excerpt from P to explain the use to which the temple tax is put. The explanation would have been superfluous in context, so seems to have been added for non-Jewish readers! Nehemiah 10:36b-39 is an addition that echoes P but also echoes unnecessarily what has been said in the previous two verses. Otherwise, Nehemiah 10:20 on mixed marriages is Deuteronomy 7:3 and has no parallel in P. Forgiving debts in the sabbath year (Neh 10:31) is Deuteronomy 15:2.

The temple tax of Nehemiah 10:33-34 is only a third of a shekel, a sum that appears nowhere else. Elsewhere, in the P scriptures, it is given as 1/2 shekel (Exod 30:11-16); 38:25-26), and it is the same in both of the books written in Roman times by Josephus. Tax rarely falls once instituted, and so 1/3 shekel is the likely original level set by the Persians. After the fall of Persia, the priests were free of all restriction and raised the tax to make themselves rich. Thereafter, the support base of the temple rose anyway, so the priesthood had a rising income without having to raise the tax further. The conclusion is that Deuteronomy and its source, Ezra-Nehemiah, preceded P.

The minimum age of Levites is set at 20 in Ezra 3:8, but has risen to 30 in Numbers (with one anomaly, 25, perhaps showing a staged increase), and seems to correspond with the 30 years implied in the gospels with respect to the admissible age of Jesus, and so too of the Essenes. Note too, that in Exodus 28:42 and 39:28, a work from the Ptolemaic period, the priests had to wear linen trousers, the characteristically Persian garment, stemming from them having been horsemen. Moreover, Exodus has the priests wearing a linen girdle matching the Zoroastrian kushti.

And a girdle (abnat, cf Persian navote, new born) of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, of needlework, as Yehouah commanded Moses (Persian Mazda).

Exodus 39:29

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