While the Babylonian king seems to have busied himself with protecting and even developing trade centers in the west, a new power that would eventually challenge Babylonia arose on the Iranian plateau. Under the leadership of Cyrus of Parsua, who had rebelled against his Median overlord, the combined armies of Persia and Media fought their way across the entire Anatolian peninsula to conquer the Lydian capital of Sardis, not far from the Aegean Sea. By 546 BCE, the Babylonian empire had been surrounded, and the choice of time and place to strike belonged to Cyrus.
These geopolitical developments may have spurred Nabonidus’s return to Babylon, though no answer to Cyrus’s ascendancy was forthcoming. The rupture between the king and the city’s leaders, especially the priests of Marduk, widened when he set about completing the constructions to Sin in Haran. For the year 539 BCE, the Babylonian Chronicle records that the Persians defeated the Babylonian army at Opis and Sippar in late summer, after which “the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle” and Cyrus declared peace to all. Biblical tradition associated Babylon’s fall with Belshazzar in particular: the inscrutable handwriting on the palace that he observed was interpreted for him by Daniel as a message from God that his kingdom would be handed over to the Persian king (Dan. 5). From the tenor of the propagandistic inscription prepared for Cyrus by the priests of Marduk who welcomed the Persian in the name of their god, one wonders whether they had not acted in the end as a fifth column: Marduk “beheld with pleasure [Cyrus’s] good deeds and his upright heart, and therefore ordered him to march against his city Babylon…. Without any battle, he made him enter his town Babylon, sparing Babylon any calamity. He delivered into his hands Nabonidus, the king who did not worship him.” Such was the eloquent apologia signaling the orderly transfer of power to the Persian conqueror.
Among the Judean exiles in Babylonia, expectations ran high for the imminent fall of Nabonidus; they, too, looked to Cyrus as their deliverer. The emotion-charged words of an anonymous visionary, who held out hope for a speedy end of the exile, are preserved in the collection of speeches now appended (from chapter 40 on) to the prophecies of the eighth-century BCE Isaiah of Jerusalem. This “Second Isaiah” spoke of Cyrus as God’s “anointed,” raised up to subdue the nations so that in the end Israel might be set free and Jerusalem rebuilt. Although Jeremiah’s predicted seventy-year enslavement to Babylon had not run its full course—the number was, in any case, a typologically large one indicating completeness—Second Isaiah offered comfort and solace to his audience, that Israel “has served her term, her penalty is paid” (Isa. 40.2). God will lead his people safely home through the desert, in a stunning reenactment of the Exodus. It was not unusual for Israel’s prophets to interpret contemporary events in terms of God’s plan for Israel. Isaiah and Jeremiah in their days had referred to Assyria and Babylonia as instruments of judgment; in like manner, the exilic Isaiah greeted Cyrus as the God-sent liberator of Israel.
Along with his consoling message to the exiles, the prophet addressed a challenge to the nations: only the Lord had announced in advance what the future had in store, and its execution would be proof of his Godhead. His call to give up idolatry, the futile worship of wood and stone “that cannot save” (Isa. 45.20), held out the promise that those who would embrace Israel’s faith would be welcomed in the new Zion:
And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,
to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it,
and hold fast my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain
and make them joyful in my house of prayer…
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples.
(Isa. 56.6–7)
Just how many foreigners, if any, actually took up the call and attached themselves to the community of exiles cannot be determined. But one pole of the ideological debate that was to divide Judeans over the next several centuries had been staked out: no longer the exclusive preserve of Israel alone, her faith now opened its doors to converts from all the nations to worship the Lord in a rebuilt and resplendent Jerusalem. Some of these grand visions draw on landscape images which suggest that Second Isaiah himself may have been one of the early returnees who responded to Cyrus’s call:
The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him! Let him go up. (2 Chron. 36.23)
Select Bibliography
Avigad, Nahman. Discovering Jerusalem. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983. A firsthand account of the excavation of the Western Hill of Jerusalem and the important discoveries of occupation levels from the First and Second Temple periods.
——. Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1997. The most comprehensive collection to date of Israelite seals. Analyzes over 1,100 seals, shedding light on ancient onomastics, popular beliefs, and artistic styles.
Cogan, Mordechai, and Hayim Tadmor. II Kings. Anchor Bible, vol. 11. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1988. A translation of the biblical text, with philological and historical commentary.
Cogan, Morton. Imperialism and Religion: Assyria, Judah and Israel in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries B.C.E. Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series, 19. Missoula, Mont.; Scholars Press, 1974. Investigation of the religious policy practiced by Assyria’s rulers in the territories annexed to empire and in autonomous vassal states.
Cross, Frank Moore. “The Themes of the Book of Kings and the Structure of the Deuteronomic History.” In Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 274–89. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973. Discussion of the major Israelite historical work of the First Temple period, its composition and double edition.
Eph’al, Israel. “The Western Minorities in Babylonia in the 6th-5th Centuries B.C.” Orientalia 47 (1978): 74–90. Cuneiform documents from the Neo-Babylonian age show that self-organization and national identity were features common to many ethnic minorities who resided in Babylonia, not only the Judeans.
Greenberg, Moshe. “The Design and Themes of Ezekiel’s Program of Restoration.” Interpretation 18 (1984): 181–208. An incisive study of the concluding section of the exilic prophet’s vision of the new Israel—the future Temple, its rules and activities, the land and its people—seen as a purposeful revision of existent priestly legislation.
Malamat, Abraham. “The Twilight of Judah: In the Egyptian-Babylonian Maelstrom.” Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 28 (1975): 123–45. The shifting loyalties exhibited by Judah’s kings during the final decades of the monarchy are studied against the background of volatile international politics.
——, ed. The Age of the Monarchies: Culture and Society. The World History of the Jewish People, vol. 4, part 2. Jerusalem: Massada, 1979. Summary examinations of various aspects of Israelite life: literary creativity, language, religion, society, state administration, trade, crafts, home life.
Porten, Bezalel. Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. Reconstruction of the life of a Diaspora community in the upper Nile Valley during the Persian period.
Stern, Ephraim. “Israel at the Close of the Monarchy: An Archaeological Survey.” Biblical Archaeologist 38 (1975): 26–54. Assemblage of the material evidence from archaeological excavations in Israel and Jordan for the considerable cultural influence exerted by Assyria, and, to a lesser degree, by Babylonia, on the area.
Tadmor, Hayim. “Propaganda, Literature, Historiography: Cracking the Code of the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions.” In Assyria 1995, ed. S. Parpola and R. M. Whiting, 325–38. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1997. A critical review of the methods employed by historians in studying the style and structure as well as the ideology of Assyrian texts.
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Ussishkin, David. The Conquest of Lachish by Sennacherib. Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, 1982. Richly illustrated album containing a survey of the archaeological finds from Lachish, as well as analysis of Assyrian reliefs depicting the siege of the city.
Weinfeld, Moshe. Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. A linguistic and theological analysis of the Israelite school of thought responsible for most of the Bible’s historical literature.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Israel among the Nations
The Persian Period
MARY JOAN WINN LEITH
In the Persian period the concept of “Israel” changed. Before the Babylonian exile, Israel was defined not by worship but by its independent geopolitical existence, by occupying its own land. Exile and Diaspora forced a new, evolving sense of identity. The Persian period (539–332 BCE) constitutes an era of both restoration and innovation. The religious attitudes and practices characteristic of postexilic Judaism did not originate in the Persian period. The centrality of the Jerusalem Temple and of public worship at its sacrificial altar are only the most obvious in a list of continuities from preexilic Israel; others include the priestly families, the practice of circumcision, Sabbath and Passover observance, and prohibitions against mixed marriage. At the same time, however, with the figures of Ezra and Nehemiah we reach the end of biblical Israel.
In leading Jewish circles during this period, written words perceived as having originated in Israel’s distant past came to assume a primacy previously uncontemplated—if not unanticipated (see 2 Kings 22–23)—in legitimating the practice of worship and for determining social and ethnic identity. The movement toward compiling a biblical canon accelerated. The Psalms, the editions of the prophetic books, and, most important, the Torah or Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) approached their final shape during the Persian period. The period is also rich in literature by Yahwistic prophets, poets, priests, and philosophers whose names often elude us; they wrote pseudonymously, claiming the names of ancient Israelite heroes or sages, covering their creations with a validating veneer of antiquity. Late biblical works frequently quote from older Israelite writings (now become scripture) and contain early examples of traditional Jewish biblical exegesis. One of the era’s most arresting images is that of Ezra the scribe, a contemporary of Socrates, reading aloud the “book of the law of Moses” (Neh. 8.1) to women and men assembled at the gates of rebuilt Jerusalem. Ezra’s reading, however, is supplemented by interpreters (Neh. 8.7–8)—or possibly translators—whose task is to ensure that all the listeners correctly understand the meaning of the Torah.
Formerly a nation with fixed borders, postexilic Israel became a multicentric people identified not geographically or politically but by ethnicity—an amorphous cluster of religious, social, historical, and cultural markers perceived differently depending on whether the eye of the beholder looks from inside or from without. The identity of this Israel could not be threatened by the Persian hegemony over the homeland or by military aggression. Rather, the danger to this new Israel lay in a different sort of boundary transgression: ethnic pollution, an offense variously defined.
The pronounced Jewish sectarianism of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, embodied in such groups as the Samaritans, the Qumran community, the Pharisees, and the earliest Christians, has its roots in the Persian period. Typically for this period, while Ezra and Nehemiah attempted to restrict membership in the privileged group they considered to be “Israel” (Ezra 10.2, 7, 10), the Bible itself preserves traces of rival Jewish groups engaged in an ideological struggle against the vision of Ezra and Nehemiah. During the Persian period Jewish communities—Yahweh worshipers—flourished not only in Judea, but also in Babylonia, Persia, and Egypt, in neighboring Samaria to the north, and in Ammon to the east.
The term Jew originates as an ethnic label for a person whose ancestry lay in the land of Judah (see 2 Kings 16.6); the earliest occurrence of the term to designate a religious community is in Esther 2.5, a Hellenistic novel set in the Persian court. The word is used in a broad sense in this chapter to designate Yahweh worshipers—be they exclusive or syncretistic—in the Persian period.
Cultural Influences
To what extent were Jews, whether in the Diaspora or the Levantine homeland, influenced by Persian or Greek culture? The Persian period encompasses, after all, the Greek Classical Age. (Conventionally spanning the years 479–323 BCE, this age is the time of Periclean Athens: the Parthenon, Phidias and Praxiteles; Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides; Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander before he became “the Great”; the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon.) In the eastern Mediterranean world, including the western territories of the Persian empire, the era sees the increasing presence of Greek artists, writers, doctors, adventurers, and especially mercenary soldiers, frequently in the pay of non-Greeks (including Persians).
What did cultural assimilation entail, specifically in the case of the Jewish encounter with Hellenism? The assumption that a Jew’s adoption of Greek culture meant a renunciation of Judaism is refuted by the example of Philo, the great Jewish philosopher of the first century CE. Judaism in the later Second Temple period became deeply hellenized without any loss of communal historical consciousness or national culture.
How deeply Greek culture might have penetrated Judah and Samaria—or the Diaspora, for that matter—in the Persian period is difficult to determine. Students of fourth-century BCE cultural history have increasingly recognized a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic oikumene of sorts in the western Persian empire. During this period the Phoenicians were the primary conduit of Hellenism to the Levant, although less in terms of political and religious thought than of material culture and artistic taste. Evidence of extensive trade with Greece and the west in the form of imported high-prestige-value eastern Greek and Attic pottery appears in the Phoenician cities of the coast and in the Shephelah, but far less of such pottery is found at poor inland sites in Judah and Samaria. Eastern influences (Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian) still dominated the material culture of inland Palestine.
Any exposure to Greek culture in Judah and Samaria must have been indirect. There are no references, biblical or otherwise, to Greek natives in Judah or Samaria before the arrival of Alexander, although Greek mercenaries might have served in Persian garrisons in Palestine, including Nehemiah’s fortress in Jerusalem. The coinage of Judah and Samaria in the fourth century includes devices in imitation of Greek coins. But the adoption of Greek images such as the Attic owl or the head of the goddess Athena need not be interpreted religiously. Provincial mints copied foreign issues, particularly the ubiquitous and trustworthy Athenian tetradrachm.
In small ways, such as their predilection for seals with Greek subjects (probably from Phoenician workshops), Samarians (if not the Judeans) seem to have been attracted to Greek culture, even if they had no firsthand experience of it. Nevertheless, there can be no cultural receptivity unless the receiving culture has receptors attuned to new influences. Without a degree of hellenizing groundwork already having been accomplished by cultural interactions, the world conquered by Alexander, including Syria-Palestine, would have been far more resistant to the Greek ways that took root with such ease.
The paucity of Persian artifacts in the archaeological record of western lands subject to the great king led earlier scholars to deny significant Persian artistic, religious, or cultural influence. They assumed that the Persians were interested only in maintaining the flow of tribute into the national treasuries but otherwise allowed their subjects to go their separate religious and economic ways. More recently scholars have interpreted the Persian art that has been found in the western satrapies as evidence of a conscious imperial propaganda program. We now consider the Persian impact on the western reaches of the empire to have been subtle but assertive, with more cultural interaction than had been previously supposed.
Beginning
with Darius I (522–486 BCE), Zoroastrianism was the national religion of the Achaemenids, the official name for the Persian royal family. This religious tradition included purity laws (to prevent pollution by corpses and bodily emissions) and the belief in a cosmic struggle between Justice, upheld by the great god Ahura-mazda (“Lord of Wisdom”), and the “Lie.” The struggle would climax in a final, apocalyptic battle. Zoroastrian priests, called magi, officiated at all sacrifices, usually on mountaintops. There is no evidence for any imperial proselytizing, nor was the adoption of Zoroastrianism a necessary condition of advancement for a nonnative official in Persian service. There is little if any effect of Zoroastrian elements on Judaism in the Persian period. Most discussions of Persian influence on Judaism now look to the Hellenistic and Roman periods as the era of significant cross-fertilization.
One effect of Persian domination was the spread of the Aramaic language throughout the empire. Originally the native tongue of small Syrian and Mesopotamian states, Aramaic became the international commercial, administrative, and diplomatic language of the Assyrian empire in the eighth century. Aramaic’s alphabetic script was more flexible than Akkadian cuneiform. Second Kings 18.26 (= Isa. 36.11) shows Aramaic in diplomatic use, as well as the general Palestinian populace’s ignorance of it in the eighth century. During the Neo-Babylonian period, however, Aramaic became the main spoken language of the Neo-Babylonian empire, and subsequently the Indo-European Persians adopted this Semitic cousin of the Hebrew language for all aspects of their written communications and records. Eloquent testimony to this fact appears in the book of Ezra, which employs Aramaic for official Persian documents (Ezra 4.8–6.18; 7.12–26) and some narrative.
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