Judaism
Ezra and Nehemiah II.3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, February 26, 2001
Abstract
A Letter to Artaxerxes
The Aramaic passage Ezra 4:7-23 follows next. The mention of Xerxes in verse 6, Artaxerxes in verse 7 and Darius in verse 24 suggests that the Darius must be Darius II, but no biblical scholar seems to consider this nowadays, all of them assuming it must be an anachronistic reference to Darius I. If Darius II is meant then the “second temple” was built fully 100 years later than is imagined, about 417 BC.
The letter sent shows several misunderstandings that indicate it is not original, Aramaic or not, and had been composed or reconstructed by people who did not fully understand what it meant.
The difficulties of Ezra 4:7-11 concerning the names mentioned as authors of a letter to Artaxerxes have already been considered, and Garbini has given the explanation. The supposed names Bishlam and Mithridates are a misunderstanding of words that meant “on the folded wrapping” because a short summary of the contents were written on the outside of chancellery documents to facilitate the Persian bureaucracy. It shows that the Chronicler had fragments of an original document that he no longer understood.
The letter, apparently to Artaxerxes II, must have been written near the middle of the fifth century. The response somehow was the sending of Nehemiah as governor about 445 BC, after Artaxerxes had stopped the building. The complaint is against the “Jews” who “came up from you to us”. The Jews were not seen as “returning exiles” but people “sent”. They seem to have been ignoring the king’s order and restoring the temple, and refusing the assistance of the native worshippers of Yehouah. L E Browne in Peake’s Commentary says:
Exiles had been coming back from time to time in the course of nearly a century. There is no need to suppose they formed a distinct community in Jerusalem.
Though it is true that colonists had come back in several phases, the story of the “returners” is of a group coming into Judah as an elite, and certainly forming a distinct community, therefore.
Note that in Ezra 4:2, the Samaritans were deported under Esarhaddon, in Ezra 4:10, it is under Osnapper (Ashurbanipal) while in 2 Kings 17, it seems to have meant Shalmaneser.
Egypt Secedes: Megabyxos Rebels
Pericles the leader of Athens had a base at Dor about 468 BC. The Greeks were likely to have supported the Egyptians in rebellion, so the base was of concern to the Persians. In fact, Greek mercenaries helped the Egyptians when they actually did rebel. Just before the return of Nehemiah, the satrap of Abarnahara, the noble general Megabyxos, had to put down a severe Egyptian rebellion (460-456 BC), but then rebelled himself because his honour had been compromized (449 BC). He defeated the king’s armies twice, and because Artaxerxes could not defeat him, but knowing him to be an honourable man, he offered a pact, and the two men seem to have returned to friendship. From then until the middle of the reign of Darius, except for a year of regnal squabbles before Darius II took control of the throne in 424 BC, there was a long period of peace. Advantage was taken of it to fortify Jerusalem and build up a dependent colony in Judah in case the Egyptians should again cause trouble.
The broken up book of Ezra-Nehemiah now continues at Nehemiah 1. Nehemiah is contrite over an event that supposedly happened over a century before. If the disaster were contemporary as the news and prayer imply, the walls and gates of Jerusalem must have been restored after the Babylonian destruction to be damaged again in this conflict. To be honest, we have to assume the latter because Nehemiah 1:1-3 seems undoubtedly to suggest that the Jewish settlers had been punished with the implication that some had been sent into exile while some were allowed to remain behind but destitute. It is hard to see why an event that happened 140 years before should appear as if it were news, if the Babylonian exile were meant.
It is plain from Nehemiah 7:4 that the city had been deserted, so there was no reason to build walls to protect the citizenry. It was built as a fortress. The true reason for the derelict state of Jerusalem and its need for fortification will have been the UDI declared by Egypt. If Megabyxos had punished the colonists for siding with the Egyptians in the rebellion of Inarus, the situation could have been as it is shown here. The Persians had been trying to get a reliable people settled in Jerusalem, because it was nicely placed to guard the routes into Asia. It was not on the direct route, being rather inaccessible on its hilltop site, but that was an advantage for a fortress and a base of operations. The Egyptian rebellion had made the need urgent, because they had sacked the undefended town or it had joined them in rebellion.
Nehemiah’s prayer displays the sentiments of Deuteronomy 30:1-4, so in part might be a genuine fragment, but the rest looks like a pious composition to introduce Nehemiah 2:1. The restorer did not give a full and proper date to his restoration of Nehemiah 1 because the next fragment he had was dated. So he built a composition around a small fragment he had to show Nehemiah’s prayer, and the Jews coming in supplication, but he or another editor then added the wrong year—the same one as in chapter 2—making Nehemiah learn about the problem after he had responded to it. Christian commentators ask us to amend twentieth to nineteenth in Nehemiah 1:1—the Holy Ghost being slack again!
The chapter purports to explain how Nehemiah persuaded the king to change his mind about rebuilding the city. If the story is from the original, it is propaganda, otherwise it is a later romance. Nehemiah 5:14 declares Nehemiah to have been the governor of Judah for twelve years, so our conclusions about the propaganda, or romance, are justified—Nehemiah was a Persian official. Before he was sent on this tour of duty he had been cupbearer to the king, a position that declared him to have been a Zoroastrian, because the king would never accept his drinks from unclean hands, and a trustworthy man, because his duty was to ensure that the king’s drinks were not poisoned. If he was also a Jew, then Judaism was considered an acceptable variety of Zoroastrianism.
The Persian authorities seemed to realize that they had been pussyfooting in Yehud and now wanted decisive action. Nehemiah was sent out with a military escort (Neh 2:9) showing that the times were troubled. Ezra was given no escort. They used propaganda to get the colonists to do the work for them, adding gifts as sweeteners. Nehemiah 3:5 and 3:27 show that even the wealthy who initially objected to doing manual work eventually helped out. But Nehemiah 4:10 suggests the truth that the colonists were a ruling class unaccustomed to such work.
The fact that the workers had to be armed to protect themselves makes the resistance they were facing sound more serious than mere objections. It sounds incredible that the authorities, the Persians, could not keep order and tends to confirm that we are looking not at any peaceable resistance but a troubled period of rebellions when the Persians were far from in control, because the Persian military were busy elsewhere, but they were succeeding in regaining control.
The results of the rebellion of Megabyxos occasioned the complaint to Artaxerxes. Even if the colonists had had permission to restore the temple and the city walls, it would have looked rebellious to chose this time to start, and so Artaxerxes stopped it. The complaint might have been just Jewish propaganda or their assumption. Artaxerxes might have stopped it as a sensible precaution under the circumstances.
Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, is known from an Elephantine papyrus dated 407 BC, that refers to his sons as Dalaiah and Shelemiah. His name seems to have a reference to Baalath, who is Astarte, suggesting he worshipped the older gods of Canaan, but it might be Babylonian (Shunibel or Sanbassar), so he was perhaps a colonist himself, but his sons were plainly brought up as Jews. Perhaps the daughter that married the grandson of Eliashub was brought up in the old religion, but if not, Nehemiah refused even to accept converted local women as Jews, at least so far as the priesthood was concerned. Of his allies, Tobiah also apparently worshipped Yehouah, but is described as an Ammonite. The family of the Tobiads appear again in the Greek period, so they were plainly influential.
Nehemiah in 5 inserts a parenthesis that shows the wealthier of the colonists had been exploiting even the less successful “returners”. These were troubled times and normal economic relations must have been under strain. The hills around Jerusalem were not easy to make a living from, and grain, for example, mainly had to be procured by trade in the market of Jerusalem. In these troubles, the poor were getting poorer and doubtless the rich richer, by exploiting scarcity. People were having to mortgage their children, their plots and even having to sell their children into slavery to survive—and these were “returners!” It might well have been that these poor colonists found themselves cut off by the natives and exploited by their own wealthy classes and so were worse off than either. Nehemiah sought the agreement of the wealthy to end this exploitation. Zoroastrianism always required charitable treatment of the poor.
Charles E Carter is sure that Jews outside of Yehud maintained the economy of the temple state. The assumption always is that many Jews did not return from exile, and it was these millions of wealthy Jews in Babylonia who supported their fellow Jews that returned. The Jews were supposedly in exile for 70 years. The ruling ten percent of a population that left 11,000 behind are thought to have gone into exile—1000 people! They were removed as captives and must have started out penniless and insecure even if they had been ensconced somewhere as local rulers, yet only 70 years later, they had multiplied into millions of successful businessmen, banking in the top banks! Even if it was 170 years because the return was at the time of Darius II not Darius I, it is an impossible achievement. They would have had to double in numbers every generation for ten generations. If such a growth rate is to be defended, it means the exiles were not hindered but rather were favoured by the Persian rulers, they were interbreeding and they were proselytising, so that those who returned were not ethnically the same as those who left. To accept it is to deny the Jews as an ethnic entity identifiable with the Israelites, and to deny them any ethnic connexion with Moses. The “Exile” is impossible, but Christians and Jews always insist upon it.
Yet, Carter is correct. The temple state was set up as the cult of the whole of Abarnahara. It is the people of Abarnahara who are the “peoples of the lands”, mentioned often in Ezra-Nehemiah and plainly different from the Am ha Eretz, who are the locals. The “peoples of the lands” are the Hebrews, and they it is who have to support the temple state. Yehud is like Washington DC, Canberra, Australia, or more accurately, the Vatican City. It was a religious state meant to gather the people for tithing. The three annual pilgrimages will have facilitated the collection of tithes and taxes from the Hebrews, and would bind them in unity. Carter writes:
The sacrifices were a form of taxation, designed to underwrite the priesthood and the temple officials.
And they were the tax men for the Persian state. Nehemiah 10:33-34 imposes a temple tax of 1/3 shekel, in addition to the sacrifices.
Nehemiah is keen to show that he is himself thrifty in the harsh conditions, not calling for the full resources he was entitled to for his diplomatic functions and feasts:
Moreover there were at my table an hundred and fifty of the Jews and rulers, beside those that came unto us from among the heathen that are about us.Nehemiah 5:17
Where is the Jewish faddiness about table fellowship that they were famous for? Perhaps because the colonists were trained as a nation of priests of the Jerusalem temple, they later adopted the attitude of the Zoroastrian priests, who were particular about cleanliness and purity for the sake of their duties, and could be particular about eating alone, or only with those they knew to be clean.
Nehemiah is taken as a Jew, though he must have been a Zoroastrian, but what of the “rulers” and the “heathen?” Jews are distinguished from “rulers” and “those” of the heathen, presumably rulers of the “heathen” nations of Abarnahara not heathens themselves. The rulers, whether of the heathen or the Jews, were Persian officials and administrators, and therefore likely to have been Zoroastrian. If the Jews, as all this seems to suggest, were Zoroastrians too, or crypto-Zoroastrians acceptable as Zoroastrians, then this table fellowship would have been possible within the Zoroastrian laws of purity. Interestingly, the Septuagint omits “and rulers” from this passage. It was translated in Maccabaean times and the Maccabees did not wish to suggest that the Jews did not rule themselves.
Who Were the Prophets?
The next section is simply Nehemiah 6, but it contains an utterly crucial piece of information at Nehemiah 6:6-7. A letter comes to Nehemiah from Sanballat:
It is reported among the heathen, and Gashmu saith it, that thou and the Jews think to rebel: for which cause thou buildest the wall, that thou mayest be their king, according to these words. And thou hast also appointed prophets to preach of thee at Jerusalem, saying, There is a king in Judah: and now shall it be reported to the king according to these words. Come now therefore, and let us take counsel together.
The crucial information is in the words, “thou hast also appointed prophets to preach of thee at Jerusalem, saying, There is a king in Judah”. It is an irrefutable admission that prophets were instruments of propaganda. Sanballat says that Nehemiah was already preparing the people for a coup by having prophets prophesy that he would be the king. It is exactly what we know that Cyrus and other Persian kings did to prepare the ground for his moves against countries like Babylon and Ionia.
Prophets were effectively agents provocateur who would begin whispering campaigns then, when they judged the time right, would make bold prophecies on behalf of their employer to prepare the people and get their support for his takeover, or social changes.
To imagine that the prophets of ancient Israel were anything other than these, is pure deceit. The Persians used prophets to spread ideas that were favourable to them, or alarm. Here it is proved in the bible itself, so Jewish and Christian commentators have always been aware of it. Only their flocks have not, and just in case they wonder, the commentators assure them that these are not true prophets! Thus Browne writes:
It is interesting to note the political use to which prophets were put. We sometimes forget the proportion of prophets who were concerned with promoting true religion was small. The rest were not necessarily followers of false gods, but as mere politicians and flatterers of kings, they were rightly described as “false prophets”.
Outrageous but feeble special pleading? Correct! If it were possible to distinguish true prophets from false prophets, there could be no use for false prophets at all. All prophets would be true prophets. If it is not possible to distinguish them, then prophecy is useless anyway—no one can know beforehand whether a prophet is a fake or not, so none of them should be listened to. How would any Christian or Jew know now whether the biblical prophets were true ones or not? Because they helped set up Judaism? That was the purpose of them as political agents of the Persian kings, so, according to Browne, they are false prophets! The Persian kings made use of prophets or oracles (the later prophecies of Zechariah are described as “oracles” in the bible) to create expectation and doubts. They were propagandists who did just what we read the biblical prophets doing. There is no reason at all to believe that the Jewish prophets were not agents of the Persian king.
Since Ezra at this time introduced the law called Deuteronomy, it is not surprising to find warnings there about prophets trying to persuade people to follow other gods:
If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the Lord thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee.Deuteronomy 13:1-5
Even the reference to bondage in the land of Egypt is not amiss here, since the Egyptians had rebelled and the Persians were keen to keep the people of the hill country on side. Indeed, references such as these will certainly have led to the later elaboration of them into the bogus history of slavery in Egypt in the Bronze Age. The importance of prophecy at this time as a propaganda tool both ways is also highlighted elsewhere in Deuteronomy:
I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him. But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.Deuteronomy 18:18-22
They Persian chancellery knew its own provocateurs, agents and spies, and promised to murder those of the other side, the normal risk of the profession still today, but there is no way an innocent bystander could know in advance true prophets from false prophets. One side or the other must come out on top and that is the only way of telling. The Persian kings were confident of having prophecy on their side—the prophets were their own agents. The earlier kings at least, like Cyrus and Darius, were certain they were battling the Evil Creation on behalf of God, Ahuramazda. They could use prophets as propaganda machines to help their victory, and when it came, it proved that they were doing right and God was on their side. Unless the Assyrians used prophets in the same way, as propaganda, which is possible, most of the biblical prophets are Persian, and their purpose was to get support for the colonists from the native Am ha Eretz.
The genealogy here is the same as the one in Ezra, and is unnecessary. Nehemiah is calling for a conference not a list of ancestors, and the results of the conference are announced in Nehemiah 11:1. The deserted city—it is latter half of the the fifth century BC and Jerusalem is still deserted after 150 years—has to be populated so the leaders are obliged to move in, along with one in ten drawn by lots, and some volunteers. The Jews were hardly dying to get in there, but a populated city is quickly created by these tough and unpopular measures.
