Judaism
Judges: a Book of the Persian Period 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, March 15, 2001
The Setting and Nature
The 480 years from the Exodus to the building of the temple is based on 12 40 year generations from Moses to David. The period of Judges has to be long enough for this to work, but the actual period of Judges when Ezra impressed the law was only about 100 years long. If any of the names in the book represent real judges under the Persians, they must have been local magistrates not rulers over the whole country. Roman writers tell us that the ruling magistrates in Carthage in this same period were called “suffetes”. The Hebrew word for judge is “shophet”. The only difference is about 800 years of time if the biblical chronology is to be believed.
The Persian judges were probably the same as the Roman procurators—men appointed to local taxation districts to keep order by dispensing justice but also collecting tithes. It seems they failed and the idea of a central collection point for taxation in the temple state of Jerusalem was substituted. The period of the judges was then mythologized when the tales of the combating factions were substituted for the more mundane administration by the agents of the Persian king. The writers and compilers of the book were later than Ezra and intended to use the book as propaganda to get the natives to adopt the new religion of the temple.
Judges is a mixed bag of stories purporting to be about the time before Israel had a king, as the final section emphasizes repeatedly, collected together in three parts the central one of which was original and contains the stories, the beginning being a later introduction and the end a later appendix, or rather not an appendix but an artificial way of splitting the beginning of Samuel from the last of the judges. Eli and Samuel were judges themselves and so ought to be part of the book of Judges, and the enemy continues to be the Philistines from Samson into Samuel. The discourse in Samuel 12 looks to be the proper end of Judges.
Divisions and Editions
The three parts are 1:1-2:5, 2:6 to 16:31 and chapters 17 to 21. The first part gives some information about the supposed tribal areas by way of scene setting, but was probably written in the Greek period as Greek words like Talmai (Ptolemy) and Kitron suggest. Indeed, if Kitron refers to the citron (Citrus Medica), the place and the text is dated to after the fourth century when these citrus fruits were introduced from Persia (whence the qualifier “Medica” or Medea), where they had come to from India. The second is the stories of thirteen judges. The main six tell of God’s wrath at the apostasy of Israel. This is the method of the Deuteronomic writer in the Persian period. The last part is not about judges but about the religious and social conditions, and shows antipathy to Dan and the Benjaminites. The author’s interests are Levitical. He is of the Priestly school (P) and the appendix was therefore written in the Greek period.
The traditional sources seen in the Pentateuch are labelled J, E, D, and P. Often the J source (Yehouah) is seen as southern and Yehouistic while the E source is northern and prefers Elohim as the name of God. While there is some truth in this, the main point is that there were two initial factions when these legends were being considered for publication. One faction preferred El as the name of God and one preferred Yehouah. This could hardly have mattered to Canaanites for whom both were perfectly respectable gods, El the High God, and Yehouah one of his sons.
It came to matter when the Persian colonists came to impose a single high god as a god of heaven and the univesrse and whose agent was the Persian Shahanshah. El, the Canaanite High God seemed the obvious choice, but there was a faction who preferred Yehouah, perhaps the Persian administrators themselves, and eventually the Yehouah faction succeeded. Before God was named as Yehouah however, there was a period when both factions wrote their own accounts, and there was probably a period when it was expedient to use a combined name Yehouah Elohim—“Yehouah of the Gods”, the gods being sons of El. For that reason we have a J source and an E source.
Whatever was written by these original sources has been overwritten or edited by D (the Deuteronomic school of editors) and then by P the Priestly school of editors). The creator of Judaism was the editor D, who followed the strict law imposed in the Persian period by Ezra, called Deuteronomy.
The Deuteronomic editor probably compiled the assembly of stories and gave them their moralistic slant because they were meant for the native people, who worshipped their own Baalim and Ashtaroth, and this was depicted as an apostasy from their proper god who was Yehouah. The Priestly editors refined the sacerdotal cult of Jerusalem at a later date, when the innovations of the Deuteronomists had been generally accepted. The likely time of the Priestly school was in the mid-third century BC when the Egyptian Greek kings, the Ptolemies, favoured the Jerusalem cult, and published its books of laws in Greek.
Ezra and Chronology
The chronology is utterly artificial and the Deuteronomic style is continuous in the main part of the book: the people offend God by apostasy, God punishes them by the hand of an enemy, the people cry to God in distress, God sends a saviour, and the people have a period (typically 40 years) of peace before the cycle begins again. Joshua is obedient to God’s wishes and is victorious, but the people are disobedient and suffer even though God patiently sends saviour after saviour. The Deuteronomist has the idea in his mind of a saviour, and the salvation pattern is repeated. The idea of saviours was well established in Zoroastrian religion, so its origin is evident and proof that the stories are from the Persian period. If salvation was so popular 700 years beforehand, it is hard to see why it took until the Persians came for it to catch on.
A legendary saviour is recorded in the biblical books as returning with Zerubabel—he is the High Priest, Joshua (“Yehouah Saves”). This is the time when the rulers of the Canaanites in the Palestinian hills placed an emphasis on salvation. In fact, we argue elsewhere that Joshua is probably merely another title of Zerubabel who is himself the mythical Saoshyant of the Zoroastrian religion—Zoroaster reincarnated. The purpose seems to have been that the colonists who “returned” to Yehud were participating in an eschatological act by setting up a temple to Yehouah and making it work. By doing so they would make the path of the Saoshyant easier. The leading magi of Zoroastrianism, those from the holy city of Rhages itself, were entitled “Zoroaster” and it seems that a Zoroaster returned to give the native people of the land a new covenant with God and the law to accompany it that they all had to obey. The man was Ezra, the Zoroaster of Babel or Zerubabel. In Judges, we read that the natives were not impressed and resisted the imposition by banditry and sedition, though the nature of the resistance has been exaggerated too.
In the years between the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar and the imposition of the Law of Moses by Ezra, the native inhabitants of the Palestine hills had been bypassed by history. They were few and unimportant, but they were Canaanites and followed the religious customs of the Canaanites whose most famous people were the Phœnicians. Naturally, they had their own stories based on their own religious myths and doubtless some heroes, but history did not start for them until the Persians conquered the Babylonians.
The Babylonians had never bothered to rebuild Jerusalem and used Mizpah as the regional capital. According to Nehemiah, the city was still ruined in the middle of the fifth century. So, desoite the much vaunted decree of Cyrus, the Persians had done little for about a hundred years to restore Jerusalem. The natives were later to be called the Am ha Eretz, a disparaging term meaning the men of the land, and probably punning on Mother Earth, a goddess of whom they were fond. They had tales to tell about their poor treatment under various conquerors, the most immediate of whom were the Persians. The Persians sent in colonists to set up a temple and administrative district in their midst in the time of Darius II, and the locals were expressly denied any chance to participate in the project, probably unless they converted to the new cult. Most did not want to.
The two threads therefore were that of the natives who saw El as the high god, even though they also worshipped others too such as the goddesses and Yehouah, and the “returners” who preferred Yehouah, perhaps because it had echoes of Vohu and Vahu (“v” pronounced “oo”) and therefore of Darayavahu, the Persian king.
The school of the Deuteronomists no doubt worked at their didactic history for a long time, so even though Ezra returned and dedicated the new city and temple in 417 BC, much of the history will not have emerged till considerably later, towards the end of Persian rule, which ended with the victory of Alexander in 332 BC after the seige of Tyre.
In Judges we find a mish-mash of stories from the viewpoint of the native Canaanites mainly. They are stories of heroes and gods, brought down to earth by an editor who has only one god of significance, yet allowed to stand in these legends with some nobility as a foil to the apostasy of the people. The Persian aim was to keep the people peaceful, and they hoped that in a generation or two, under the new Persian admiring God, they would be. They were.
The Priestly Introduction
The introduction, Judges 1-2:5, tells that Judah was declared to have been sent to clear out the Canaanites, and it depicts the conquest as occurring through two tribal movements, that of Judah and its allies founding the temple state of Judah, and that of the tribes of Joseph settling in what was to become Samaria (Israel). It thus gives a spurious basis for the two kingdoms that contradicts the conquest of Joshua, a more elaborate attempt to justify the kingdoms. All the other tribes are in Canaan subject to the Canaanites. That is unsurprising—they all were Canaanites.
The settlers are trying to displace the locals from whole swathes of land, and the author blames their failure on a universal apostasy. The hand of two different editors seems clear by the personification of Judah and Israel, or the use of sons of Judah and sons of Israel, translated as “men of” or “people of”. The very first sentence is plainly added because the story resumes from Joshua where he is dismissing the people after his speech in Judges 2:6.
This introduction was probably written by the priests at a much later date than the main compilation, in the third or even the second century BC. Various parts of Palestine had been named, doubtless as taxation districts. The basis of the names was mythologized as the names of the original tribes. In the first five verses of chapter 2 the author establishes his theme—entrapment—God provides the old gods to tempt the people into apostasy, thereby inviting his anger!
In the historical myth of the Jews, David captures Jerusalem sometime before the millennium, but in Judges 1:8, supposedly around 100 years earlier, Jerusalem is already captured and burned by the sons of Judah, showing that the myths of David were additions. The sons of Judah will have originally been the sons of Yehouah, meaning worshippers of the new god—the colonists sent to rule Yehud, probably as a punishment for the natives rebelling (with the Egyptians in all probability, whence the depiction of the Egyptians as natural enemies of the Israelites). The city was destroyed by Nebuchadrezzar, and supposedly stayed destroyed until the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, but here might be evidence that the Am ha Eretz had begun to restore Jerusalem and the colonists destroyed it again. That would offer an explanation of why Nehemiah reacted to the destruction, apparently 150 years after Nebuchadrezzar, as if it was recent (Neh 1:3).
Judah moves into Palestine from Jericho, the city of palm trees, along with the Kenite, Moses’s father in law, Jethro, whose own ancestor was Midian (Mede). Kenite in the accepted mythology is a blacksmith, as Cain was, but what does it really mean? The root pertains to “owning” or “possession” and “begotten”, so seems related to our word “kin”. If that is the case, it is unlikely to be Semitic and probably is a Persian word. The Kenites are supposed to have settled in the Negeb—Numbers 24:21-22 might imply Petra—but evidently came from across the Euphrates, for Heber (Eber), the Kenite of Judges 4:11, lived in the far north, Hemath (Hamath) was the Kenite who founded the sect of the Rechabites, and Balaam prophesied their abduction by Assyria. The Kenites were shown mercy when the Amalekites were destroyed (1 Sam 15:6), implying that they were allies or perhaps kinsmen of the Amalekites. Thus they seem to have been colonists moved into Abarnahara by the Persians and considered kinsmen of the Jews.
In Judges 1:18, the Jews rapidly expanded to capture the main cities of the Philistines, the people who later in the book and in 1 Samuel give the sons of Israel a lot of grief. Judah never ruled over the Philistine cities until the time of the Maccabees, and in the province of Abarnahara, the Philistine coastal plain was administered from Sidon. Thus in the story of Samson, the Philistine god is Dagon, a Phœnician god, depicted as half man and half fish. Is it merely coincidence that the Babylonian god, Ea, was pictured as half man and half fish too? In Greek, Ea was given as Oannes, and in Hebrew, Yah, Yehu, and, like the Greek, Yohannah. If Dagon was Ea and so was Yah, then Yah was Dagon! The Syrians, according to authorities like Lucian, Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, would not eat fish, which they considered sacred. Totem animals, animals that stand for a people’s god, are never eaten except on ritual occasions. Poor people only had animal protein on the feast days when the animals were sacrificed and some sold off in butchers as additional income for the priesthood. The Persian law of Deuteronomy (Dt 4:18), introducing a new image for Yehouah as Ahuramazda, forbids the making of images of fish!
In Judges 1:22-29, the invasion is depicted with no mention of Joshua or a widespread planned campaign of conquest. This is the tradition before the legendary Joshua was invented probably in Ptolemaic times based on the earlier legend of the saviour priest Joshua, of Haggai and Zechariah. Yet the capture of Bethel in Judges 1:22-26, is itself late, because Bethel was not even founded until the second half of the fifth century BC. The story might be a romanticized account of how the land came into the possession of the colonists. Even Joshua has no account of the capture of Bethel, but if the colonists founded it under the name Bethel, which means the House (temple) of El, it suggests that their initial aim was to make El into the local Ahuramazda.
In Judges 2:1 the “Angel of the Lord” appears. It is a concept that could only have come in the Persian period because it is Spenta Mainyu, the Holy Spirit of Ahuramazda. The concept of angels is Persian. A move of sanctuary from Gilgal to Bochim is led (Jg 2:1-5) by the Angel of the Lord, but Bochim is Bethel in the Septuagint, so here is a peaceful move to Bethel. The stones of Gilgal were supposedly set up by the earliest Israelites crossing the Jordan, probably a folk tale to explain an ancient stone age henge.
Since the whole story is allegorized, the fortresses of the Canaanites need not have meant their military might but their adherence to their religion. The colonists had to live among people who refused to give up their veneration of Baals and Ashtoreths. The fortresses were metaphorical fortresses of the Canaanite religion. At this point in Judges, there is a lot of emphasis on sun-worship. Beth-Shamash means the temple of the sun god, Shamash (Samson), and words like “Heres” imply sun worship (from the Indo-European Hur, Surya).
The Deuteronomist’s Introduction
Judges 2:6 to 3:6 is the Deuteronomist compiler’s own introduction. The repetition in Judges 2:6-10 of Joshua 24:29-31 is the point at which Joshua is meant to join Judges, showing that what went between was an addition. Joshua will have been meant to end at Joshua 24:28.
Judges 2:11-19 express the compiler’s own imperative of divine judgement—God punishes sin and apostasy by disaster. He describes the Canaanite cults and issues dire warnings. The failure of the colonists to destroy the cults, that is persuade or coerce the Am ha Eretz to convert, meant that they remained as a temptation, deliberately left by God. The instructions given in Deuteronomy 12:2-4 are clear:
Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their Asherim with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.
In verse 2:16, we read that Yehouah raised up judges to save the people. It is beyond coincidence that the law given by Ezra, on the chronology presented here, considered to be Deuteronomy, declares with firmness:
Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates, which the Lord thy God giveth thee, throughout thy tribes: and they shall judge the people with just judgment. Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous. That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
The Persians were strict administrators of justice. These words are addressed to a person not a people because they are written singularly. They must have been meant for the ruler of the province, but though the author of Deuteronomy puts them in the mouth of Moses (Ezra) addressing a crowd, the source was plainly a document addressed to the person who would administer the law, not to a crowd. It was probably an instruction from the Persian king to his provincial ruler, the Satrap of Abaranahara.
The distinction between the native inhabitants and the colonists who are the remnant is made clear in Judges 2:20,22; 3:4, where the covenant is also mentioned—the one introduced and enforced by Ezra. Israel was tested and found to mix with the nations who were left as a test. Of course, Israel was a Canaanite nation and it was the captives who really mixed with the natives (Jg 3:6) leading to Ezra’s drastic action, but here Ezra could not be mentioned. It was supposed to be 700 years earlier! And it is even possible, depending on which editor was amending this part, that the redactor already did not understand the true nature of what he was editing.
