Another approach to assessing Ezra’s actions against mixed marriage is to consider the marriages as other than a purely religious crime that causes the community’s “great guilt” (Ezra 9.13). The penalties for staying away from the great assembly (Ezra 10.7), where the guilty will be dealt with, are not religious but economic and social: loss of both property and membership in the assembly of “the exiles,” the dominant group of the restoration community.
Ezra, we must always remember, was a representative of the Babylonian Diaspora and the bearer of an official Persian mandate. While the Bible suggests that Ezra came to Judah to root out corrupting influences on the purity of ancient Jewish law, as a Persian agent, Ezra might well have channeled the interpretation of that law into new areas. Political theorists note that law in imperial systems is used to maintain the relationships between groups in a subject territory and the imperial center. Broadly based reforms of the legal system occur when the relationship between subject and imperial center changes enough to require new legal structures. In the mid-fifth century Persia’s fear of Greek expansionism enhanced Judah’s strategic value. Ezra’s mission may have resulted in the creation of a legal apparatus for defining an ethnically circumscribed community, the Bible’s “community of exiles,” or “Israel.” Such a community could gain privileges from the Persian authority; according to the imperial view, all conquered land was the great king’s to distribute. Returning exiles or local loyalists could hope to benefit from such tangible expressions of royal patronage. At the same time, however, they would constitute a loyal elite, socially and economically bound to the empire.
Beginning with Cyrus, the Persians carefully coordinated imperial policy with local religious laws to foster political stability. Persian officials, for example, intervened several times in the religious lives of the Elephantine Jews; the Elephantine papyri include a letter dated 419 BCE to the Egyptian satrap concerning regulations for the Jewish Festival of Unleavened Bread in the Elephantine community. Like Udjahorresnet, Darius I’s Egyptian legal and ritual reformer, Ezra was probably the agent not of imperial condescension but of strengthened imperial control mechanisms.
In the short term, Ezra’s actual success appears limited. The Bible’s Ezra, however, colored by hindsight (even if the composition date of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah remains elusive), shapes both the future and the sacredness of God’s holy people by bringing them (back) to the Torah of Moses. Like important postexilic Jewish leaders before him, he then recedes into the historical obscurity from which he emerged. Josephus’s report that Ezra died at an old age and was buried in Jerusalem is formulaic, a detail appropriate to a biblical figure. But Josephus’s need to account for Ezra’s death also demonstrates the honor accorded him at the end of the Second Temple period.
Despite Ezra’s centrality to the biblical account of the Persian period, Nehemiah’s is the dominant personality. Nehemiah, the king’s cupbearer (not a eunuch), left the Persian court and Susa to begin his mission to Judah in “the twentieth year of Artaxerxes” (Neh. 2.1). He served for at least twelve years, returned to Persia, and was back in Judah again around 430 BCE. References to “Sanballat the governor of Samaria” in a letter of 408 from the Jewish community of Elephantine to Bagoas, the then-governor of Yehud, have led to a consensus that Nehemiah served under Artaxerxes I, beginning in 445. Scholars identify the Sanballat of the Elephantine letter with Nehemiah’s archenemy (Neh. 2, 10, 19).
Nehemiah is one of the most colorful figures in the Bible, thanks to the lively first-person voice of the “Nehemiah memoir.” This memoir does include Nehemiah’s own words, but it is more rhetorical than factual. Nehemiah could not have been privy to many of the events and the motivations he describes. Not an autobiography, the “memoir” has affinities with royal inscriptions and votive texts (it is addressed to God), prayers of the falsely accused, a self-justification addressed to an angry monarch, and biographical tomb inscriptions such as that of Udjahorresnet. Whatever its original form, it was revised and reworked in the light of later events.
Nehemiah’s emotional, strong-willed—some have said vain—character emerges vividly from the pages of his story. It opens with the hero weeping at the news of Jerusalem’s fallen walls and then artfully inducing his royal master to send him to the rescue of his ancestral city. Once in Jerusalem, he physically separates the holy city from the profane peoples around it by rebuilding the walls under difficult circumstances. A wall identified as Nehemiah’s lies higher up the slope from the preexilic fortifications, circumscribing a relatively small area and possibly explaining the brief period of fifty-two days for the work. Religiously, too, he walls off the holy community by sternly enforcing regulations derived from Deuteronomic law concerning the Sabbath and intermarriage.
From an imperial perspective, Nehemiah’s job was to build a city wall and an imperial fortress (the citadel of the Temple, Neh. 2.8) just outside the city. The fortress and the fortifications of Jerusalem may have been part of the general Persian deployment of garrisons suggested in the archaeological record. The Persians did not encourage the building of walls in Levantine cities, probably considering them symbolic of civil independence; Samaria, for example, never had an urban wall system in the Persian period. The unusual nature of Nehemiah’s wall-building with the blessing of the great king is highlighted in the biblical narrative.
Explanations for the fortification of Jerusalem include the suggestions that the Persians were hoping to foster or to reward Judean loyalty. Alternatively, in a region where Persian control was threatened by international military adventurism, Jerusalem became an inland defensive city and possibly a new center for the collection and storage of imperial revenues (delivered in kind and not in coin before the late fifth century). The latter is suggested by the account of the people’s economic distress in Nehemiah 5. When Nehemiah lightened the tax burden, rather than aiming at some sort of rapprochement between peasant and aristocracy he may have been trying to minimize an increased tax burden caused by the need to maintain the new garrisons. The implied criticisms of Persian rule by the later author/editor of Ezra-Nehemiah (Ezra 9.8–9; Neh. 5.1–19; 9.37) may reflect Persia’s tightened grip on Judah and the economic consequence of Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s work. The Samarian governor Sanballat’s obstructionist behavior suggests that he understood that Jerusalem’s walls announced for that city a status higher than Samaria’s, ensuring greater royal favor. Judean national revival would not have appealed to a citizen of the former northern kingdom, aware of Judah’s ancient claims on his territory. Sanballat must have sensed that Nehemiah’s official privileges could only be diminished by addressing directly to the king himself insinuations about Nehemiah’s disloyalty (Neh. 2.19).
Always Nehemiah struggled against opposition. This opposition is difficult to characterize and is multifaceted, but its sources are political and economic, not religious. He helped Judean peasants by suppressing excesses of usury and remitting the taxes paid for his own maintenance, but he was also willing, as an upper-class member of the influential eastern Diaspora, to exclude them from his definition of Israel. He may have pleased the Levitical families by giving them an enhanced role in the Temple while alienating some priestly officials. Whereas biblical tradition depicts Sanballat, the Ammonite Tobiah, and the Arab king Geshem as mean-spirited pagans, it is more likely that their disagreements with Nehemiah were political. Sanballat and Tobiah were probably Yahweh worshipers, and before the new governor arrived all three men had enjoyed friendly relations with Jerusalem. After Nehemiah’s return to Persia we find Tobiah, a relative of Eliashib the high priest and other Judean nobles, in possession of an office in the Temple (Neh. 6.18; 13.4–9). A number of Jerusalemites also disagreed with Nehemiah’s activities. These included the Jerusalem district administrator Shallum (Neh. 3.12), Shemaiah (Neh. 6.10–13), and the influential female prophet Noadiah and her fellow prophets (Neh. 6.14). Nehemiah all but accuses Noadiah of waging psychological warfare (Neh. 6.14).
The restricted definition of Israel in Ezra and Nehemiah and the xenophobia of postexilic oracles against the nations (Isa. 46–47) hang in dynamic tension with the trend toward greater universalism in prophetic writings of the Persian period, most notably in Third Isaiah (Isa. 56.3–8) and Zechariah (Zech. 8.20–23). Malachi gives Gentiles credit for sincere worship (Mai. 1.11–14), and by acknowledging that even foreigners (Ninevites) can receive God’s favor, the book of Jonah rejects the exclusion of other nations from membership in the people of God.
With the arrival on the scene of Ezra and Nehemiah in the mid- to late fifth century, the boundaries between Jew and non-Jew began to be defined more narrowly. The reforms were controversial, but the Persian empire stood on the side of Ezra and Nehemiah, and resistance could have been risky. Even so, in view of the continued relations between Jerusalem and Jews of Samaria, Ammon, and Egypt in the decades after Ezra and Nehemiah, the new restrictions were not immediately enforceable.
The prevailing heterodoxy of Persian-period Judaism with which Ezra, Nehemiah, and their followers struggled is illustrated by two controversial items, a coin of Judah engraved with an image that must have been someone’s idea of Yahweh, and the subversive book of Job. The coin, a unique silver quarter-shekel now in the British Museum, is inscribed yhd, Yehud, in Aramaic lapidary script and assigned to the early fourth century. On the reverse a bearded deity carrying a falcon or eagle on his outstretched left hand sits on a winged wheel. If not for the inscription, the iconography would suggest a Greek deity such as Zeus or an eastern Mediterranean god identified with him. The inscription, however, demands a Jewish context for the image, and the winged wheel naturally evokes Ezekiel’s vision of Yahweh’s “glory” (Ezek. 1.4–28). Attempts to relegate the drachma to the hand of some ignorant Persian official in Judah disregard the reality of Persian religious policy toward its subject peoples. If Judah issued the coin, the Jerusalem priesthood would have had veto power over the imagery.
The author of the biblical book of Job deliberately created a character who is not Israelite, does not live in Israel, seldom refers to God as Yahweh, and makes no allusions to Israel’s history or its covenant with God. Job is Everyman, his innocent suffering a challenge to retributive ideas of God’s justice especially favored in exilic and postexilic meditations on the catastrophe of 586 BCE. In particular, this book engages in an eloquent and disturbingly open-ended dialogue with the Deuteronomic, prophetic, and wisdom traditions that dominate the Bible. Even if the book was composed before the exile, as some propose, its presence in the canon testifies to its continued life into the Persian period and beyond.
In the end, Nehemiah’s exclusivistic vision may have resulted in a Judah that looked inward and viewed the outside world with suspicion, but that same vision helped a tiny, impoverished community preserve itself in the coming centuries of tumultuous change.
Diaspora Judaism
Jews in the eastern Diaspora had opportunities for advancement under the Persians, as one sees in such romantic, didactic tales of Jewish life in the Diaspora as Daniel 1–6, Esther, Tobit, and 1 Esdras 3–4. The Murashu tablets contain the names of Jews acting as agents for the Persian government or for Persian nobles. Ezra and Nehemiah came from the Babylonian and Persian Diaspora, respectively, and Nehemiah’s position of trust at the Persian court illustrates how proximity to the centers of Achaemenid power enhanced the religious authority of these Jewish communities of upper-class ancestry at the expense of Jewish leaders in Palestine. While many in the Diaspora did not enjoy great wealth—some Jews in Nippur were slaves—economic conditions in Judah were far worse; the Bible mentions Diaspora Jews sending money to underwrite Temple expenses (Ezra 7.16; 8.25; Zech. 6.10).
The religious life of Babylonian Jews is illuminated by a trend in the nomenclature of the Murashu tablets. A century after the exile (ca. 480) a large number of fathers with Babylonian names began to give their sons names with Yahweh as the theophoric element. The suggestion has been made that this phenomenon reflects the gradual dominance of a “Yahweh alone” party in the Diaspora, to which Ezra and Nehemiah belonged. Daniel’s categorical resistance to any form of assimilation contrary to Jewish practice (Dan. 1–6) reflects eastern Diaspora concern for maintaining Jewish identity in a later period.
Egyptians are among the peoples Jews are forbidden to marry according to the marriage legislation of Ezra (Ezra 9.1). The Elephantine papyri give a fascinating picture of life during the fifth century in a Jewish military colony on Egypt’s southern frontier. When this community of mercenaries in the service of Persia first came to Egypt is unclear, perhaps as early as the seventh century. Their local temple, whose construction antedated the Temple of Zerubbabel, was dedicated to Yahweh, but they also worshiped a god Bethel and the Canaanite goddess Anat. Despite their apparently syncretistic worship, these Egyptian Jews were not isolated. They corresponded with Jerusalem and Samaria on religious matters, appealing to both cities for assistance in rebuilding their temple when it was burned in local riots and promising as a condition of aid not to sacrifice animals in it. The monotheism that characterizes rabbinic Judaism evolved slowly. Rather than being Judaism of a sadly degenerated form, the Yahwism of Elephantine may preserve ancient elements of Israelite Yahwism, frozen in time. Elephantine Judaism no less than Samarian Judaism must be viewed within the broad parameters of early Second Temple Judaism.
By the late Second Temple period the synagogue had become a common element in Jewish life, both in the Diaspora and in the Jewish homeland. On the basis of logic and the indirect testimony of Ezekiel 11.16, it has been assumed that such an essential Jewish institution must have arisen among the exiles in Babylon. Unfortunately, neither archaeological nor epigraphic evidence supports this theory. The term synagogue, meaning “house of assembly,” is Greek, and it did not become current until the turn of the era. The earliest undisputed reference to a synagogue comes from Egypt in the third century BCE, where it is called a “prayer house.” Synagogues do not seem to have been part of Palestinian Judaism until the Roman period.
Rather than assume a single line of development, one should conceive of the gradual convergence of several Jewish institutions: a prayer hall, an assembly hall or community center (see Jer. 39.8), a Torah study hall and school, and perhaps also the preexilic city gate where elders gathered to render judgment. Synagogues were a product of the Hellenistic Diaspora, but they were not Temple substitutes. They were not built on sacred ground; they were a lay, not a priestly, institution; and they were not the sites of animal sacrifice. Furthermore, while the Jerusalem Temple remained central in the religious consciousness of Diaspora Jews, this did not prevent some Jewish communities from erecting their own local temples in fifth-century Elephantine (Egypt), on Mount Gerizim in the fourth century, at Leontopolis (Egypt) in the Hellenistic period, and elsewhere. Thus, synagogues, whenever they originated and in whatever form(s), belong to a wide spectrum of possible venues and contexts for communal worship in Second Temple Judaism.
Events to 332
/> After Ezra and Nehemiah, the historical record again becomes obscure. Both Judah and Samaria maintained their autonomous status within the empire; no evidence for a parallel Persian administrator over the subprovinces beyond the satrap has come to light. The Bible provides the names of high priests (Neh. 12.10–11, 22) and Davidides (living in Judah? 1 Chron. 3.17–24) down to the end of the fifth century. (See table on p. 296.) With additional data gleaned from Josephus, the Elephantine and Wadi ed-Daliyeh (Samaria) papyri, and inscriptions on seals, sealings, and coins, attempts have been made to fill out the list of Judean high priests and the governors of both Judah and Samaria down to 332 (see table 8.2). If these reconstructions are accurate, the firm dynastic grip on the Judean high priesthood and governorship of Samaria indicates a level of stability in the two regions. But dynastic tenacity cannot prevent family quarrels or the backing of different political factions (pro- or anti-Persian, for example). Josephus mentions the murder by the high priest Johanan of his brother in the Temple, bringing down on Judah a punishment of seven years of extra tribute (Antiquities 11.7.1), probably during the reign of Darius II.
Table 8.2 Governors of Samaria; Governors and High Priests of Judah (445–335 BCE)
Let us end by returning to the larger stage of history. Artaxerxes I died peacefully in 424 BCE. After a period of violent intrigue, Artaxerxes’ son Ochos emerged the winner and took the throne name Darius II (424–404). The Elephantine papyri concerning the Festival of Unleavened Bread (419) and the ruined temple (410) come from his reign. Aided by the capable diplomats and satraps Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, Darius II intrigued to foster Greek disunity, even intervening in the Peloponnesian War. Then Darius II was succeeded by his son Artaxerxes II (Memnon; 404–359), a long-lived monarch whose reign was marked by continuous revolts, particularly by Greek city-states. A potentially dangerous attempt to unseat Artaxerxes by his brother Cyrus was thwarted in 401 at Cunaxa (Babylonia), despite the formidable Greek mercenary army assembled by Cyrus and immortalized by Xenophon. By the terms of the King’s Peace (386–376), the Ionian Greek cities for a time acknowledged Persian control.
The Oxford History of the Biblical World Page 53