Judaism
Ezra and Nehemiah III.1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 09 August 2005
Abstract
When was the Dedication of the Walls?
The final episodes are the ceremony of inauguration of the walls and some incidents in a second period of office after Nehemiah had been away for an unspecified time period. Few people seem to notice that the dedication of the walls takes place in this second period of office, not the first twelve year period. In Nehemiah 13:4 Nehemiah writes, “Now before this”, referring to the dedication of the wall, and proceeds to describe an incident that occurred in his furlough between his periods of duty (Neh 13:6). The dedication must therefore have been on his return in his second period of duty. Building the walls cannot have been an easy task, despite God’s finger, and with a limited work force will have taken years not the two months of Zerubabel. Josephus says it took two years and eight months. It seems it took over twenty years, which is more credible, especially if the task was held up for a long period by royal command.
The incident was that the former opponent of the temple reconstruction, Tobiah, obtains a room within the temple, polluting it. Nehemiah once more solves the problem, and another—that various Levites had not been paid and so had returned to the fields to make a living. Nehemiah then prays to God using the sentence “wipe not out my good deeds”. The Zoroastrians believed that they were saved on the basis of their deeds, their good deeds and wicked deeds being accounted in the Book of Life for the Judge to consider when judgement of the soul was made.
Ezra the scribe led the procession in Nehemiah 12:36, so he was attending the ceremony too. Doubtless it was the sort of duty a man in his high office had to perform. If this dedication of the walls happened in a second period of office of Nehemiah beginning about 430 BC, it could have been in the reign of Darius II (424-404 BC). Nehemiah 13:1 says that the occasion of the dedication of the walls was the same occasion as the reading of the law and the introduction of the feast of Booths. Nehemiah 13:3 seems to correspond with Nehemiah 9:2 in saying that the Jews then separated themselves from foreigners, also tying the two events together. At about the same time (419 BC), a papyrus directs the Jews of Elephantine to keep the Passover, suggesting that the Persian Office of Religious affairs had decided to regulate Judaism everywhere.
The dating of Ezra might, therefore, be neither Artaxerxes I or Artaxerxes II but Darius II. The compiler, unable to distinguish between these Persian kings thought “year seven of Darius” meant Darius I, and was impossible, so rejected it in favour of Artaxerxes—who had already been mentioned in the context of Nehemiah—because the two men were contemporaries at the dedication. Ezra really came in year seven of Darius II (417 BC) specifically to dedicate the walls and to introduce the new law. It was an opportune time because the Egyptians were again rebelling, and a reliable fortress and loyal people in Jerusalem had become a necessity. He discovered the mixed marriages and had to deal also with the separating out of people, that Nehemiah’s had been unable to complete. Ezra was therefore never a “returner” and could not appear in lists of them, and was never a High Priest of the Jerusalem temple, though he was the senior priest in the Persian empire.
Darius I or Darius II?
It would have to be considered whether Zerubabel was another name for Ezra that has falsely been associated with Darius I when Darius II was correct. In other words, was the return under Darius I or under Darius II? Some clues are:
- The word for a local governor used of Nehemiah, “Tirshatha”, is possibly anachronistic applied to a Zerubabel in the time of Darius the Great, but fine for one in the time of Darius II.
- In the lists of Ezra 2:2 and Nehemiah 7:7, Ezra does not appear, but Zerubabel does. Though Ezra was not a “returner”, the Chronicler thought he was, but seemed to know he was already listed as Zerubabel.
- The mention of “Darics” in Ezra 2:69 is likely to be anachronistic if Zerubabel was coming in the second year of Darius I. Darius introduced them, but it is hard to imagine them in use at such an early date—the time of the later Darius seems more likely.
- Much of chapter 3 anticipates the later reforms of Ezra, though the complier mistakenly includes some Priestly Code (burnt offerings).
- The hostility of the Am ha Eretz in Ezra 3:3 suggests a later date, after their offer to assist had been rejected.
- The whole of Ezra 5:1 to Ezra 6:18 is in Aramaic, presumably to give the impression it is official, but Elamite was the chancellery language until Artaxerxes I introduced Aramaic. If the record is based on a genuine document, therefore, it is more likely to have been from the time of Darius II.
- The three references in Ezra 5 to Abernahara (“Beyond the River”) is anachronistic in the time of Cyrus or Darius I, but not in the time of Darius II, because the satrapy was introduced in the time of Xerxes.
- Though Tatnai seems to have been an official of the first Darius, the lost edict must be a romance if the Darius is the first one, ruling only eight years after Cyrus, but would be credible if this Darius is a hundred years later.
- The decree of Cyrus, according to Ezra 6:2, was found on a roll, presupposing the use of Aramaic, but it would have been on a tablet in cuneiform in the time of the early kings of Persia.
- The statement of Ezra 6:14 mentioning the three kings Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes would not be anachronistic in the reign of Darius II.
- In Ezra 10:16, the word translated “to examine” (l’drosh) actually says “Darius” (l’dryosh), as if it were part of the date—the year and name of the king, though the year is absent. If Darius II was intended, a scribe knowing only Darius the Great has garbled it to correct an apparent error.
- Nehemiah served Artaxerxes I in Susa, but Ezra, an important minister, seemed to serve the king in Babylon. In the reign of Darius II, the palace at Susa burned down and the king, who was half Babylonian, spent more time with his court in Babylon than earlier kings.
- It is unlikely that the Persian royal archives were kept at Babylon so soon after the Persian conquest, but is a valid assumption for the later Darius whose capital Babylon effectively was. The record was found at Egbatana, where the early archives would have been kept.
- The Jewish scriptures confuse Persia with Babylon. Artaxerxes king of Babylon (Neh 13:6), Artaxerxes king of Persia (Ezra 7:1). Cyrus king of Babylon (Ezra 1:1f, 3:7), Cyrus king of Persia (Ezra 4:3). Jews coming from Babylon before the time of Darius II would not have made such an error.
- If the temple were completed in the last month of the sixth year of Darius II (Ezra 6:15), the final dedication ceremony of the rebuilt city and the appearance again of Ezra to read the law would make sense in the following year.
The compiler has confused the reigns of the two kings, introducing certain anachronisms. The initial restoration of Jerusalem after the victory of Cyrus was a purely civil matter carried out by Sheshbazzar but, as a Persian administrator with no associations with Jewish affairs, and moreover assisted by the native inhabitants not any colonizing Jews, his role has been cut to the rump. This was the view of W H Kosters in his dispute with J Wellhausen, so long ago that everyone has now forgotten it. Kosters had also noticed that the dedication ceremony was in the second period of Nehemiah, but Wellhausen’s great personal prestige quashed Kosters’ correct hypothesis, which was too radical for biblicists.
The Chronicler had put in an early return under Zerubabel. Ezra had been mistakenly identified with the mythical apocalyptic Saoshyant Zerubabel (Babylonian Zarathustra), and thought to have been a governor. He has the title “Salvation of Yehouah”, Joshua, and has therefore been mistaken for two separate people within the one story—which one was the putative messiah? The implication of Nehemiah 12:32 is that Hoshaiah led the group that Nehemiah 12:36 says was led by Ezra. Hoshaiah is a variant of Joshua, also meaning “Salvation of Yehouah”.
Zerubabel and Joshua in this scheme begin to look more unlikely and more like the ciphers they actually are. Both are the same eschatological saviour (saoshyant) mistaken by later chroniclers as historical figures and falsely made to return on the example of Ezra and Nehemiah. They also had to be found places in the genealogies by those who compiled them later. The genealogies are of limited value. The list of High Priests in Nehemiah 12 is only partial, so how can anyone have faith in the extensive lists when a relatively short one is inadequate? Here they are anachronistic themselves, as is shown by the fact that Jaddua, the High Priest in the time of Alexander the Great finishes the list (unless there was another unknown Jaddua). However, just before then, in Nehemiah 12:22, Eliashib a priest contemporary with Nehemiah (Neh 13:4) is spoken of in the context of “Darius the Persian”. It cannot be Darius the Great, could be Darius III, since Jaddua is also mentioned here, but probably means Darius II, the Darius who saw all this happen.
The genealogies were all compiled years later because of the requirements of purity of stock that Ezra imposed. M Dandamaev has shown that the practice in Persian Babylonia was to link cult membership with citizenship by heredity. Not until this practice had been set up in Yehud would genealogies have been necessary or made sense. In Nehemiah 7:5, the “finding” of “the book of the genealogy of them which came up at the first” is attributed to Nehemiah in his own words, but such books are not simply “found” and the whole of this section with its genealogy is plainly a later insertion, doubtless by the priests.
The presence of mythological figures in these genealogies proves that they are inventions. They were used to establish the status quo, and who had different genealogies to contest whatever they said? The Persian rules linking citizenship and heredity made these genealogies into fictional title deeds like those forged in large numbers by medieval monks to allow the church to grab land to which it really had no entitlement. As anthropologist M Fortes points out, the lineage genealogy was not meant to be accurate but stood for the current class structure legitimized by being “projected backwards as pseudo-history”.
The Chronicler probably had no idea that there was more than one Darius and more than one Artaxerxes. He also could not imagine Jerusalem without the properly functioning temple he was used to, nor accept that for a hundred years after the edict of Cyrus, effectively no colonization had occurred, even though Yehud had been apparently designated a temple state and a formal foundation had been laid. He therefore decided that Zerubabel was a different man from Ezra, and had arrived in the reign of the great Darius, not the lesser one, and the myth of an early return thus began.
Overlooked by biblicists—with good reason, they think, since it exposes too well the biblical scam—is that Josephus (Contra Apionem, 1:8) says explicitly that the canon of the law and the prophets was closed after “the reign of Artaxerxes the king of Persia who reigned after Xerxes”. The king who followed Artaxerxes was Darius II! So, Josephus knew the Jewish law and the prophets were set out when Darius II was the king of Persia and was actually pointing it out. This clinches the overwhelming evidence for it.
Population
K Hoylund has noted a change of Persian foreign policy in Palestine from the mid-fifth century, suggested by the construction of a chain of fortresses. More fortresses of the same period are much further south in the Negeb, indicating Egypt as the perceived danger. Under the Persians, the Phœnicians controlled the whole of the coastline into Philistia—Ashkelon was Phœnician—and the Plain of Sharon. Herodotus confirms that the Phœnicians were treated well by the Persians, having willingly surrendered to them, and they provided them with a Mediterranean fleet. A Phœnician inscription by Eshmunazor, king of Sidon, says the Shahanshah or Adon Milkim (Lord of Kings) gave him Dor and Jaffa. Dor and Ashdod became the centres of their own districts, as was Lachish, which seemed to control the Shephelah. Lachish might have been a frontier town between Persia and Egypt when Egypt seceded from the empire, as it often did, so Yehud in the hills and the Negeb with its line of forts would have been essential to Persian defence. From this time, Jerusalem was repopulated and Yehud began to become important, and Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem with the mission to build up the walls of the city.
The bible tells us 800,000 (2 Sam 24:9) or perhaps 1,100,000 (1 Chr 21:5) men drew the sword in Israel, and 500,000 (2 Sam 24:9), or 470,000 (1 Chr 21:5) men drew the sword in Judah. It requires no genius to realize that the populations of these countries would have to be a minimum of four times bigger. Yet, Charles E Carter of Seton Hall University, NJ, using the most up-to-date surveys, finds the population of Yehud was 11,000 at the start of the Persian period and increased to 17,000 a hundred years later. Most of the sites in Yehud (67 percent) were small villages of less than 125 people. About 25 percent had a population from 125 to 300, and only 10 percent were bigger. Of these only four were bigger than 600 people, and the settled part of Jerusalem was about 1500. The total population of the Palestinian Hills was only about 60,000, according to M Broshi and I Finkelstein, over 100 times less than the bible claims.
The lists in Ezra and Nehemiah suggest about 40,000 returners. Comparison with these surveys show that the lists were not of contemporary returners, and earlier estimates of the population of Judah as 200,000 had been made to accomodate this spurious biblical data. If 17,000 was the maximum, it also includes the native people—supposedly the brethren of the “Exiles”—who were stripped of their land by the colonists to become labourers or slaves. Such a small population could not have supported a literary tradition such as that supposed that produced or treasured the works of the prophets and the ancient works of Moses. Indeed, it could not have built let alone supported a substantial temple. The traditions relating to Solomon having assistance from Hiram of Tyre will reflect the truth that the “second” temple was built by the people of the Persian Satrapy of Abarnahara, not just by its tax collectors and sacerdotal arm that were called Jews.
Who were Jews?
Mark Hamilton asks, “What defines a Jew?” For Jews, the distinction is circumcision. Discussing circumcision (Histories 2:104), Herodotus says Colchians, Cappadocians, Egyptians and Ethiopians were all circumcised and the habit came from the Egyptians or the Ethiopians originally. The Syrians he distinguished in name from the Phœnicians but says that both are circumcised. Noting elsewhere (Histories 7:89) that the Phœnicians and Syrians of Palestine furnished triremes to the Persian navy, Herodotus seems to regard the Syrians of Palestine as being, in practice, the same as Phœnicians. The “Syrians of Palestine” must be the Jews.
It was under the Persians that “Jew” became a religious term. The Danish anthropologist, Fredrik Barth, has pointed out that ethnicity expresses itself most clearly at the boundaries. One can spot a Jew when they are dealing with non-Jews.
The Elephantine papyri portrayed a Jewish military colony, but the Jews there were not like those portrayed in the bible. Their religion was not solely devoted to Yehouah, confirming that the homogeneity of biblical monotheism misrepresented a polytheistic religion in Israel. The Elephantine community was part of a larger Aramaic-speaking garrison stationed at the First Cataract (Syene) to guard the frontier with Nubia. This had been the border of Egypt since the Old Kingdom, and, according to Herodotus (Histories 2:30), there had been an Egyptian garrison here from the time of Psammetichus (mid-seventh century BC), though he does not call them Jews, observing that the garrison were Persians. In the Roman era, it was the base of Legio I.
The Elephantine papyri show the boundaries of Jewishness at Elephantine did not concern:
- the family—intermarriage was possible, whether frequent or not,
- business—interethnic business was common,
- law—the business papyri are like other Aramaic and even Mesopotamian legal texts of the same time period,
- settlement patterns—Jews and non-Jews lived as immediate neighbours in Elephantine,
- proscribed ideas—Jewish reading material included the wisdom tale of Ahiqar, which referred to non-Jewish deities.
In several legal papyri the party involved is identified as a “Jew of Elephantine” or an “Aramaean of Syene” (Syene being a town on the east bank of the Nile opposite Elephantine Island). “Aramaean of Elephantine” appears occasionally and “Jew of Syene” once. This naming occurs only in the introductions of a legal contract, never in the list of witnesses, even when the names in the list are of different linguistic origins. Equivalent distinction are not made elsewhere such as in the Samaria Papyri. But Masheiah bar Jedaniah was called an Aramaean of Syene in 471 BC, a Jew of Elephantine in the 460s and 450s, and an Aramaean of Syene again in the 440s. Similarly, Meshullam bar Zaccur was an Aramaean of Syene and a Jew of Elephantine. Anani bar Haggai was an Aramaean of Elephantine and a Jew of Syene.
The Jewish temple was the center of community activities. A list of names (and patronymics) and their contributions to “Yehouah the God” is dated to “year 5”, presumably of Darius II. So, the tally was made in 419 BC. The names are arranged by century, followed by the name of a commander. The commanders have Babylonian names, Siniddin, Nabuaqad. These centuries seem to be the equivalent of the Roman military units, subunits of the “daglin” referred to throughout the papyri. Some of the contributors’ names in the list are Persian, Hori, Bagaphernes and Vashi. The money was divided among Yehouah, Eshembethel, and Anathbethel.
How are these peculiarities to be explained? The simple explanation is that Jew and Aramaean meant the same. The whole district seems to have been called Syene, not just the town of that name, so included Elephantine. To judge by names, worship of Yehouah signified a Jew. Some Aramaeans were called Jews because they worshipped Yehouah, rather than because they came from Judah, but these Jews had a temple which Yehouah shared with other deities. Yehouism at Elephantine did not exclude worship of other deities, and the Jews worshipped Eshembethel and Anathbethel with other Aramaeans. Outsiders could enter the group, perhaps through intermarriage, as long as they participated in this worship. What is important is that the community’s definition of its religion was different from the biblical norm.
Judea and Samaria were at the center of the Jewish community. Hamilton agrees that the bible was put together at this time, and it portrays Jerusalem as the center of Judaism. Too little is known about Samaria, but the Persians were obviously setting up a temple state in Yehud.
Eight of the papyrus letters show a steady escalation of tension during the last decade of the fifth century between the Jewish community and the Egyptian Khnum priesthood on Elephantine island. The Yehouah priests Jedaniah and Uriah are said to know that “Khnum, he has been against us from the time Jedaniah was in Egypt until now”. Eventually, the Jewish temple was destroyed.
Why would Egyptians have felt threatened by the Jewish temple? The likely reason was that temple served an army of mercenaries. At a time of Egyptian nationalism, the temple seemed an insult to Egypt itself. Nominally the garrison was to guard against Nubia, but in practice it was an occupation army, or was seen that way. One could understand destroying the temple as an episode in the mounting unrest which led to Egyptian independence c 403 BC. The Jews may have been disliked by the Egyptians, but, for the Persians, they were keepers of the peace.
Curiously, a Persian commander helped to destroy the temple. Vidranga, the Persian commander or “frataraka”, connived with the Egyptian troops to demolish it. Had Vidranga attacked the temple without any motivation? The revised draft of a letter, appealing to the governors of Judea and Samaria, for assistance, suggests he was bribed, but not the first draft. A later note observed that the Persian government had always protected the Jewish temple, even when Cambyses had destroyed Egyptian temples in the same area. The most likely answer to the plot is that Persian policy was to destroy all Jewish centers except the one being sponsored by the Persians in Jerusalem.
The “Passover Letter” is by one Hananiah, an emissary of Darius II. It does not mention the Passover explicity—the subject being deduced from the month Nisan and the reference to leaven—but mentions a decree of Darius II issued in his fifth year (419 BC) to Arsames, his satrap in Egypt. A line is missing, that must name the people to whom the instructions are directed, then what seem to pertain to the Passover rituals follows. The text implies the instructions are part of the decree, and there is certainly no space for a new source to have been introduced.
The Jewish garrison was to keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread as, apparently, a mark of proper Jewish behavior. Mark Hamilton confirms that “support of religious unity within ethnic groups was an important part of Persian domestic policy, as the careers of Ezra and the Egyptian scribe and reformer Udjahorressnet indicate”, but here the existence of the letter suggests that there was disunity over the celebration. J Blenkinsopp thinks the aim was simply for the Elephantine temple to “align its religious observances with Jerusalemite praxis”, for the decree could not have been stipulating a new observance, “since we know that Passover was already being celebrated in the community”.
Indeed, papyri in the Bodleian Library and in Berlin refer to the celebration of passover at Yeb early in the fifth century, but neither suggest it ws a celebration of an escape from Egypt or was connected with someone called Moses. The Bodleian papyrus asks a man called Hoshaiah when he would be celebrating the festival. Was the date arbitrary or was this the priest whose duty it was to set the date of it? Either way, as the nature of the celebrations being prescribed is not described, Blenkinsopp is in error to make the assumption they are. The old harvest festival was being celebrated around the time of the spring equinox. And no one questions the content of the letter which shows the Persian king was interested in regulating the cult practices of the Jews of Elephantine, if no others. Since religion was a means of effecting laws to keep subjects law abiding, it was obviously of interest to an emperor to regulate cults.
Some scholars assume that the Elephantine Jews had not observed the feast before, but the “Passover Letter” gives only the briefest instructions as to keeping the feast (no leaven in houses) and it seems the local priests must have known what the ritual was. The Passover was a Canaanite seasonal celebration that the priests were celebrationg in a traditional way that differed from the a new interpretation being placed upon it by the Persian colonists in Jerusalem. If the lacunae in this letter leave it uncertain, other examples confirm it, so that “unambiguous examples… increase the likelihood of the more ambiguous examples”, as Peter Frei puts it. Thus, the romance in the Jewish scriptures called Esther depicts the Persian king doing precisely what the Elephantine letter suggests—setting regulations for a Jewish festival, Purim. Even if Esther is entirely fictional, its presence in the scriptures shows there was nothing unacceptable to Jews about one of their festivals being set by a Persian monarch.
In the correspondence between Elephantine and Judea, the worship of Aramaean deities never arises. A E Cowley, implies Judean approval for the rebuilding of the Elephantine temple and the resumption of the grain and incense offerings. Since the Judeans cannot have approved of the worship of Aramaean deities, this approval means either that they were unaware of the other deities of Elephantine, or that a condition was the removal of them. Nothing is known about any rebuilding ever taking place and it seems unlikely.
A shocking episode in Ezra-Nehemiah is Ezra’s enforcement of the ban on intermarriage. With a few exceptions everyone agreed with Ezra that intermarriage was certain to provoke divine wrath. Ezra persuades his audience by a prayer, which seems to reflect Deuteronomic theology, depicting intermarriage as revolt against Yehouah. Foreign husbands (Ezra 9:15; cf Neh 10:31) were included as well as wives, so the rule against intermarriage does not assume that a Jew is the offspring of a Jewish woman, but two Jewish parents. Ezra 10:18-44 lists the men who had married foreign women. The whole proceeding seems irregular in terms of Near Eastern law, but matches Zoroastrianism. His concern is with the purity of the community and the maintenance of its boundaries.
Ezra-Nehemiah often refers to the Persian government. The central authority is behind the reconstruction of the temple, the legal reforms of Ezra, and the fortification of Jerusalem. According to Ezra 4:1-5, the local inhabitants of Judea sought to help the colonists rebuild the temple because they too worshipped Yehouah. Zerubbabel declared their claim invalid. Zerubbabel says:
For we alone will build for Yehouah the God of Israel just as King Cyrus, king of Persia commanded us…
The exiles were claiming to be the true Jews because the Persians said they were. The imperial letters, considered to be based on genuine ones, show that the Persian government favored a pro-Jewish policy in Palestine. Jewishness was first of all displayed in religion. The community cooperated to build a temple, and then a wall which, whatever its significance as a defence in the increasingly unstable region, Nehemiah depicted as a testament to piety. Ethnicity was a matter of descent. Nehemiah 10:28-39 is a requirement for Jews of Jerusalem to collect tithes and taxes for the Persians and store them in a treasury. They also agree to avoid miscegenation, keep the Sabbath, holidays, and the Sabbath Year.
Ezra-Nehemiah contains genealogical lists purporting to be a census of the returning exiles. In Ezra 2:61-63 (Neh 7:63-65), the priestly genealogy did not include the descendants of Hobaiah, Hakkoz and Barzillai, people who believed themselves to be, and were believed by others to be, priests. Yet since their names were not in the authoritative genealogy, they could not function in the role. The genealogy did not indicate Jewishness, but priestly status. Focusing attention on the lineages apparently enjoyed Persian encouragement. The policy of the community allowed them to view themselves as recreating pre-exilic Judah. Core ethnic behavior meant a reassertion of what was believed by the ethnos to be its true historical identity.
Ethnicity
Commentators talk incessantly of ethnicity being the distinction between the “returners” and the Am ha Eretz, and the source of the mixed-marriage problem in Ezra-Nehemiah that is now such an embarrassment to Christians, if not Jews. They forget that the people returning were supposed to have been of the same ethnic stock as those left behind to become the Am ha Eretz. Harold C Washington of Saint Paul School of Theology, Kansas City, notes that the land was left to “the vinedressers and the husbandmen” (2 Kg 25:12) when the landowning classes were carried off by Nebuchadrezzar. Ezekiel would have none of this in his role as an official propagandist and declared to the colonists that God had given them the land “as a possession” (Ezek 11:15), so they had God’s sanction to dispossess the natives of the land:
Thus saith the Lord God, I will even gather you from the people, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.Ezek 11:17
Any ethnic mixing that occurred must have happened to those in exile. The problem of mixed marriage, if it is interpreted as ethnic in origin, is proof that the people being returned were not the descendents of those who left. They were colonists who thought nothing about the locals or their religion because they had a clear mission to introduce a new form of worship based on Zoroastrianism. Washingtom says:
The returning exiles responded to local opposition by conceiving themselves typologically as the generation of a new conquest.
The truth is that this was the conquest! The myth built later was probably begun as an allegory of the taking of the land by the “captives” sent by the Persians to colonize this part of Palestine. Judges tells the story, the first administrators of the country being magistrates appointed by the Persian officials. The various tribes and the opponents they meet are groups of colonists and the local Canaanites that they had to displace. In Joshua, the whole thing was multiplied even further, the conqueror of the land, Joshua, doubtless being based on the legendary High Priest of Haggai, and then the tribes moving into the land of milk and honey had to have an origin, whence the Exodus myth.
The colonial elite had to be supported by the peasantry of agrarian natives, but how were the peasants made to give up part of their wealth for the layabouts in the city? The peasantry can only resent coercion by military might. Better is to get the peasant to agree willingly. That is why gods were invented. As soon as the peasant can be persuaded that ill-fortune will come of them failing to please the gods, the elite is secure. The purpose of the temple was to support the local elite of temple functionaries supposedly serving God but really serving the Persian king. In Nehemiah 10:37, a function of the levites is to collect the “levy”, the taxes.
Ezra 6:21 admits that there were people from among “the filthiness of the heathen of the land” that were admitted into the community of “returners”. How did they differ from the other who remained filthy and were rejected? The verse shows it was on the basis of acceptance of the new cult. Plainly the filthy people wanted to stick to their filthy practices—their age old religion, one god at least of which (Yehouah) was the same as that of the cult being imposed.
At first, the conversion index must have been slight. Why should the local people be persuaded to convert to a cult being brought in by the upstarts? Later, though, the benefits would have been clearer and the propaganda of the prophets must have taken its toll. The Jewish caste system plainly reflects the situation—Priests, Levites, Israelites and Proselytes. Priests and Levites were “the captivity”, the colonists sent in by the Persians to rule the temple state. The Israelites were converts from among the Am ha Eretz and ordinary proselytes were converts from among other people.
What then was the problem over exogamous marriages? It was obviously that the marriage partner would not give up their affection for the older religion. Ezra-Nehemiah suggests a long period of investigation—too long to have been necessary. Everyone must have known who the culprits were. Women were allowed into the assemblies to which Ezra read the law (Neh 8:2-3), which took an oath of allegiance to it (Neh 10:28-29) and that demanded the cases of expulsion (Ezra 10:1). They could also own property. What took the time was the effort trying to persuade some of the marriage partners to convert to the new cult. In the end only about 100 refused! They might have had other reasons for being happy to allow the marriage to be annulled, especially if there was any settlement with the divorcement.
All great empires seek homogeneity of race and religion—except perhaps among an exclusive ruling class—to reduce tensions and the potential for rebellion. The Persians were no different. The Persian kings knew of the importance of religion and, arguably, the later kings deliberately yielded the strictest Zoroastrianism to the expediency of having the friendly, honest accessibility of a Mithras and the womanly understanding of a goddess Anahita because they were popular. Catholic Christianity was expedient in the same way. The Persians themselves seemed like the Normans in England or the pioneers in the USA—they were not keen to mix with the native stock and tended to keep themselves aloof in their own estates guarded by armed attendants who would rally to the call of their neighbours if they were attacked by local mobs. In Yehud, the colonists despised the Israelites, considering themselves superior and entitled to carve out their own estates from the land held by the Am ha Eretz. They themselves were certainly mixed, with little in common except their joint religion imposed by the Persians and their duty as colonists to obey Persian orders or have their protection withdrawn.
Culture
The destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 BC was widespread if not complete.Charles E Carter
Jerusalem was not the administrative centre of the Babylonian district or province. It was Mizpah. The temple and perhaps the city, if the bible is right about when the first temple was destroyed, were in ruins for 168 years from 586 BC to 418 BC, and after the initial work nothing was done for 110 years. When Jerusalem was repopulated, Kenyon’s excavations showed it to have been smaller than the Iron II city, its walls being within the earlier ones, but good signs of Persian period occupation were found outside those walls. Nevertheless, the city was small, confined to the south eastern spur and temple mount with little occupation of the western hill. Since Nehemiah 6:10-11 suggests that a temple did already exist, it might not have been a built temple but an open space on a high place.
Thomas Willi of Greifswald University in Germany notices a cultural change from the mid-fifth century. En Gedi reached its peak of prosperity late in the fifth century. Excavations there are unusual in showing a full range of Persian pottery together with some Greek pots (Attic ware), Yehud Persian seal impressions, substantial building remains and even signs of industrial activity. From then to the end of the Persian period, the site seemed to decline. Through the fifth century, the use of seals increased as did the use of coins, though they were not common until the beginning of the fourth century. Beth Zur, one of the few Persian sites excavated, has yielded a quantity of coins all dating from the early fourth century. Carter coyly notes that “more than a few” sites were settled only in the late fifth and early fourth centuries! Bethel was only resettled late in the Persian period. Most biblical “scholars” think the post-Exilic settlement of the country was a century earlier.
These sites show a mixture of Persian and Hellenistic pottery that Carter describes as “problematic”, though the “problem” would presumably be immediately solved if Greeks, or peoples from countries occupied or colonized by Greeks, were among the people being settled in Yehud. The Hellenistic period begins mysteriously early in Palestine, so that the Persian occupation seems hardly testified to in the ground, or is invisible. What better explanation could there be than that many colonists were Greeks brought from Ionia, Caria or even Egypt?
The incident of the Greeks ordered by the Persian queen to be killed, though Megabyxos had promised them lenience for their surrender, might suggest that Greek footsoldiers who surrendered with them were placed as colonists in Yehud to guard against their former allies. Spartan volunteers might have been among them. The Spartans, who were often allied with the Persians against Athens, about this time were fighting the Athenians in the Peloponnesian war funded by Persian gold. The Spartans intrigued with the Satraps of the West against Athens. The attachment of Ionia to Persia was the price. This was achieved a few decades later under the treaty called the King’s Peace of 386 BC. Perhaps loyal Spartans were rewarded with estates and privileged duties in the temple colony of Yehud with captured Ionian nobles as slaves. According to the Anabasis, Xenophon’s Ten Thousand seemed to escape around 400 BC, but perhaps not all did. Alexander later settled Macedonian veterans near here in Samaria. Was it because the Hellenistic milieu made them feel at home? Later, in Maccabaean times, the Jews peculiarly claimed kinship with the Lacedaemonians—the Spartans! This has always seemed bizarre, but the explanation could be as simple as this given here, once it is accepted that the “returners” were not Israelites but colonists, the leaders of whom were Greeks. Was the Hebrew bible originally Greek?
Commentators speak about a Jewish aristocracy among the people who had just returned from a minimum of three generations of slavery in exile (presumably a great leveller), were all aristocrats before they were exiled, and could hardly have established a new aristocracy among themselves in the short time they had been back. Nehemiah 6:17 uses the word “horim”, translated as nobles, but it looks to be nothing less than an Hebraized plural of the Iranian word “ahura”. Literally, then it meant “lords”, and suggests that some of the “returners” were “lords” by virtue of their authority through the Persian administration.
Ezra repeatedly calls the colonists “captives”, yet they were supposedly now free, and indeed they were free to be so extremely successful in Babylonia that many did not want to return, or so we are told. It does not seem to stir the minds of commentators convinced they are reading the “word of the Lord” that the “returners” were indeed “captives”. In fact, most were not free! They were captives and had been sent as captives by the Persians specifically to colonize this poor country—a hard task, but one which offered riches once they accomplished the task successfully of setting up a temple and a treasury for their masters. They were exiles not because their ancestors had once been exiled from their home in the Palestinian hills but because they themselves were exiled to the Palestinian hills from their original homes elsewhere!
