The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  Notes

  Chapter 1

  1 Bezalel Porten, with J. J. Farber, C. J. Martin, G. Vittmann et al., The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change (Leiden, New York and Cologne 1996), B8, 107–9. Porten’s scholarship is the most comprehensive and rigorous work on the Elephantine archives and my account is entirely indebted to it. See also his Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony (Berkeley, 1996).

  2 All this can be inferred from the detailed description given in a letter to Jerusalem of what had been destroyed in the rampage of 407 BCE. Porten, B19, 241.

  3 This is a point made (over-literally in my view) by Herbert Niehr, ‘In Search of YHWH’s Cult Statue in the First Temple’, in Karel van der Toorn (ed.), The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Leuven, 1997), 81. Niehr is committed to the view that there may have been some sort of cult statue in the First Temple (though not the Second), hence offerings of bread and animals were for the people of YHWH not unlike those rendered to anthropomorphic gods elsewhere in the western Semitic Near East.

  4 Stephen G. Rosenberg, ‘The Jewish Temple at Elephantine’, Journal of the American Schools of Oriental Research, vol. 67 (March 2004).

  5 Evidence of Egyptian circumcision can readily be found on tombs and other sculpture from the period of the Old Kingdom (2500 BCE) onwards.

  6 Porten, B13, 125–6.

  7 For the chronology of the Tamet–Ananiah marriage I follow Porten, 208–51. Boulos Ayad Ayad, ‘From the Archive of Ananiah Son of Azariah: a Jew from Elephantine’, JNES, 56, 1 (1997) gives an entirely conflicting reading, involving the separation of Tamet and Ananiah, their reunion in a remarriage, and the same pattern of separation and reunion followed by their daughter Jehoishima and her husband, another Ananiah. In a communication to me Professor Porten attributed the discrepancy to a mistake made by Ayad in reading the Aramaic dating of the documents. See also Emil G. Kraeling, The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri (New Haven, 1953); and Edward Bleiberg, Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive from the Nile Valley (Brooklyn, 2002). I am grateful to Edward Bleiberg for allowing me to explore the Brooklyn papyri at an early stage in this project; an enthralling experience.

  8 Porten, Elephantine Papyri, 242.

  9 On the ‘Mibtahiah’ archive, Porten, 152–201.

  Chapter 2

  1 I am assuming, along with the most authoritative scholars, like Lester Grabbe, the historicity of Nehemiah and Ezra, and the approximate contemporaneity of the books written in their names with the events they relate. This is, however, by no means an unchallenged assumption, although the major challenges have been made by scholars arguing that none of the Hebrew Bible was written before the Persian and Hellenistic periods, notwithstanding the glaring difference between the ‘late Hebrew’ of this period, a minority language even among Jews, and the ‘classical Hebrew’ of the late Judaean monarchy. For more on this argument, see William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge, 2004). On authenticity and authorship issues in Ezra, see Arvid S. Kapelrud, The Question of Authorship in the Ezra-Narrative: A Lexical Investigation (Oslo, 1944); and much more recently, Juha Pakkala, Ezra the Scribe: The Development of Ezra 7–10 and Nehemiah 8 (Berlin and New York, 2004); and most critically the work of Sara Japhet, especially From the Rivers of Babylon to the Highlands of Judah: Collected Studies on the Restoration Period (Winona Lake, Indiana, 2006), esp. 1–38 and 367–98.

  2 Bizarrely, those who argue for a post-exilic date for the beginnings of Bible writing situate it precisely in the period archaeology has conclusively shown to be most severely depopulated and impoverished, some claiming a shrinkage from the late-Judaean monarchy of as much as 85 per cent . . .

  3 The sixth-century BCE cuneiform ‘Cyrus Cylinder’ in the British Museum confirms the Persian policy of restoring local cults and populations, though it does not specify the Temple or indeed the Judaeans of Yahud.

  4 Ezra 3:11.

  5 Ezra 6:1–12.

  6 John Curtis, review of Amelie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period, 2 vols (London and New York, 2007), in Palestine Exploration Quarterly, vol. 144, 1 March 2012, 68–9.

  7 Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablets from the early sixth century BCE discovered in the 1930s record the oil portions doled out to Jehoiachin, and ‘princes’ expressly called ‘King of Judah’. W. F. Albright, ‘King Jehoiachin in exile’, BA (1942), 49–55. See also O. Pedersen, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500–300 BCE (Bethesda, 1998), 183–4.

  8 Kyung-jin Min, The Levitical Authorship of Ezra–Nehemiah (London and New York, 2004), rehearses the debate over single or collective authorship. See also James C. Van der Kam, ‘Ezra–Nehemiah or Ezra and Nehemiah?’ in E. Ulrich (ed.), Priests, Prophets and Scribes: Essays on the Formation and Heritage of Second Temple Judaism in Honour of Joseph Blenkinsop (Sheffield, 1992), 55–76.

  9 On the relationship between vocalisation and writing, and the presumption of gathered audience, see Daniel Boyarin, ‘Placing Reading: Ancient Israel and Medieval Europe’, in Jonathan Boyarin (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1993), esp. 11ff.

  10 Deuteronomy 31:11.

  11 Midrash, Rabbah Genesis, 1/1.

  12 Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologicus-Philosophicus (Amsterdam, 1670). See Richard Popkin, ‘Spinoza and Bible Scholarship’, in The Cambridge Guide to Spinoza (Cambridge, 1996), 383–407; Nancy Levene, Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy and Reason (Cambridge, 2004), 77–9.

  13 See Karel van der Toorn (ed.), The Image and the Book, op. cit.

  14 It is ironic that the writing form taken by Hebrew over the two millennia since the biblical canon was closed and the rabbinic codification of oral tradition in the Mishnah was inaugurated in the third century ce, and still supposed, in every synagogue, yeshiva and cheder, to be an authentic Hebrew continuous with the script in which the Bible is written, is actually square-form Aramaic.

  15 These texts can be found in James M. Lindenberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters (Atlanta, 2003), 125–30.

  16 Frank Moore Cross Jr, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 123.

  17 Frank Moore Cross Jr and David Noel Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1975), passim.

  18 Seth L. Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew (Urbana, Illinois, 2009), 113. Inland Hebrew inscriptions, Sanders writes, were the product of a home-grown craft rather than Solomonic enlightenment, and on 113 writes, ‘Hebrew was engineered and spread but not monopolised by a geographically wide-ranging group of skilled artisans.’ Sanders stresses the uniqueness of this diffusion in the ancient Near East. A more conservative view is taken by Christopher A. Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel: Epigraphic Evidence from the Iron Age (Atlanta, 2010). See also the deeply engaging discussion of the relationship between orality and written chronicle in Robert S. Kawashima, Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode (Bloomington, Indiana, 2004). Kawashima’s work is a response in particular to Baruch Halpern’s classic work, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (University Park, PA, 1996).

  19 Lindenberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters, 62, 125–6.

  20 Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter Jr, Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context (Winona Lake, Indiana, 2008).

  21 Lindenberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters, 55–60, 121–4.

  22 Ibid., 50, 109–10.

  Chapter 3

  1 Bertha Spafford Vester, Our Jerusalem: An American Family in the Holy City 1881–1949 (New York, 1950), 92–3. The account was given directly to the author by her adopted half-brother, Jacob, after he became a Spafford and lived in the American colony of evangelical ‘Overcomers’ in 1883.

  2 Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in the Holy Land in the years
1838 and 1852 (Boston, 1852), 340–1.

  3 Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839–1899 (Philadelphia, 1985); Nissan Perez, Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (New York, 1988); Kathleen Stuart Howe, Nitza Rosovsky et al., Revealing the Holy Land: The Photographic Exploration of Palestine (Santa Barbara, 1997).

  4 Journal of Sacred Literature and Biblical Record, April–July 1864, 133–57. Anyone who wants to understand the peculiar marriage of Christian enthusiasm reconceived as scientific inquiry must read the Journal. This particular issue included articles on Eusebius of Caesarea as well as sceptical comments on the ‘statistics of Exodus’ – meaning the two million said to have left Egypt with Moses!

  5 That of course turned out to be the case and in 1868 Walter Besant, a mathematician, returned from Mauritius for his health, and the aspiring novelist and historian became active secretary, keeping the job until 1885.

  6 John James Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (Leicester, 2000), 63–149. A typically engaging account of the survey is Claude Reignier Conder, Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure. (London, 1887).

  7 Preface to Edward Henry Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus: Journeys on Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years Wandering (London, 1872).

  8 Arthur Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History (London, 1857), 66, and also xix, ‘It is impossible not to be struck by the constant agreement between the recorded history and the natural geography both of the Old and New Testament.’

  9 Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus, 54.

  10 The history of this archaeological revision is rehearsed in Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar (ed. Brian B. Schmidt), The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel (Atlanta, 2007). Finkelstein has been a major figure in revising assumptions about sites such as Megiddo Yadin believed to be Solomonic and reassigning them to the Omridic period of the Kingdom of Israel. See Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman: David and Solomon (New York, 2006) and The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and its Sacred Texts (New York, 2000). William G. Dever, the other dominant figure in the debate, has moved further away from a sceptical stance; see, for example, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, MI 2006). The ultra-minimalist position has been most assertively argued by P. R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ (Sheffield, 1992) and T. L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and Archaeological Sources (Leiden, 1992). See the response by Baruch Halpern, ‘Erasing History: The Minimalist Assault on Ancient Israel’, Bible Review, 1995, 26–35.

  11 See Morton Smith (ed. Shaye Cohen), The Cult of Yahweh, vol. 1, especially the careful and subtle reading in ‘On the Common Theology of the Ancient Near East’, 15–27. See also John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield, 2000 and 2002); Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002); Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses and Images of God in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis, 1998). One of the best surveys of recent scholarly debate on the gradual rise of ‘aniconism’ in Judahite religion is Karel van der Toorn (ed.), The Image and the Book, op. cit., especially: Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, ‘Israelite Aniconism: Developments and Origins’, 173–204; Ronald S. Hendel, ‘Aniconism and Anthropomorphism in Ancient Israel’, 205–28; and most suggestively Karel van der Toorn, ‘The Iconic Book: Analogies between the Babylonian Cult of Images and the Veneration of the Torah’, 229–48.

  12 Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, vol. 1, 10,000–586 BCE (New Haven and London, 1990), 501–2.

  13 R. Kletter, The Judaean Pillar Figurines and the Archaeology of Asherah (Oxford, 1996).

  14 William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI, 2005).

  15 Ibid., 497–8.

  16 Nili Sacher Fox, In the Service of the King: Officialdom in Ancient Israel and Judah (New York, 2000), passim; Robert Deutsch, Masrim min Ha’Avar (Messages from the Past, Hebrew bullae from the time of Isaiah to the end of the First Temple) (Jaffa, Tel-Aviv, 1997); Biblical Period Hebrew Bullae: The Joseph Chaim Kaufman Collection.

  17 The most recent excavations and the history of the work is in Yosef Garfinkel, Saar Ganor and Michael Hasel, In the Footsteps of King David (Tel Aviv, 2012). See also Y. Garfinkel and S. Ganor, Khirbet Qeiyafa Excavation Report, Vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 2008).

  18 G. Bearman and W. A. Christens-Barry, ‘Imaging the Ostracon’, in Garfinkel and Ganor, Excavation Report, 261–70.

  Chapter 4

  1 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1869), Chapter IV, passim. Arnold conceded at the outset that both ‘Hebraism’ and ‘Hellenism’ were ‘august and admirable’ and cited Heine as an instance of reversing expectations – but the two poles of cultural expression remained for him ultimately not just distinctive but irreconcilable.

  2 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 11, 5, 256.

  3 J. M. Cowey and K. Maresch (eds), Urkunden des Politeuma der Juden von Herakleopolis (Wiesbaden, 2001); see also A. Kasher, The Jews in Hellenistic Egypt (Brill, 1985); see also Robert Kugler, ‘Uncovering a New Dimension of Early Judaean Interpretations and the Greek Torah: Ptolemaic Law Interpreted by its own rhetoric’, in Hanna von Weissenber, Juha Pakkala and Marko Mattilla (eds), Rewriting and Interpreting Authoritative Traditions in the Second Temple Period (Berlin and New York, 2011), 165ff. For the status and governance of politeuma, see G. Ludertz, ‘What is the politeuma?’, in J. W. Henten and P. W. van der Horst, Studies in Early Jewish Epigraphy (Leiden, 1994), 204–8.

  4 Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, 2005), 81ff.

  5 Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenism (Cambridge, 1971); the classic Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Grand Rapids, MI, 1959); Erich Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA, 2002); John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (New York, 1983); Lester L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, Vol. 2: The Coming of the Greeks (London, 2008); Joseph Meleze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt from Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian (trans. Robert Cornman), (Princeton, 1995), 49.

  6 On this and the other ‘romances’, see Sara Raup Johnson, Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in its Cultural Context (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004), 113–120.

  7 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 11, 8, 329–40.

  8 Letter, 158–9.

  9 But not according to the more stringent Deuteronomy which classified locusts as swarming creeping things and thus an abomination.

  10 Letter, 152.

  11 See Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore and London, 1997); also (and for Roman Egypt), John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora from Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE), (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996).

  12 Rob Kugler, ‘Dorotheus petitions for the return of Philippa: A Case Study in Jewish Law in Ptolemaic Egypt’, in Proceedings of the 25th Meeting of the Institute of Papyrology (Ann Arbor, MI, 2007), 387–96.

  13 On the rules and customs of sacrifice see (although dealing mostly with the Persian period) Melody D. Knowles, Centrality Practiced: Jerusalem in the Religious Practice of Yehud and the Diaspora in the Persian Period (Leiden, 2006), esp. 19–23 and 77–103. Some reformed versions of Jewish prayers (such as the conservative synagogues in the United States) remove from the daily order of prayer, and presumably out of squeamishness, any references to the constant sacrifices offered in the Temple.

  14 I follow the arguments here of David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007), especially 26–7 whe
re he discusses the possibility that sacrificial rituals that emphasised the careful sprinkling of blood and the priestly concern with purity might actually have been motivated by wanting to differentiate Jewish practices from the animal sacrifices (goats in particular) of the Greeks.

  15 For more, much more, on this subject, see Leonard B. Glick, Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judaea to Modern America (Oxford, 2005), and, authoritatively, Frederick M. Hodges, ‘The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics and their relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision Foreskin Restoration and the Kynodesme’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 75, 375–405.

  16 Baba Batra, 60B; Yebamot, 45A–B.

  17 Lee I. Levine, Jerusalem: Portrait of the City in the Second Temple Period 586–70 ce (Philadelphia, 2002), 72ff stresses the paucity of archaeological evidence about the precise location of the Akra but it is clear that its construction would have involved disruption of old-established and densely populated districts.

  18 Anathea E. Portier-Young, in her excellent Apocalypse against Empire: Theories of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2011) persuasively argues that the subsequent ferocity of Antiochus IV’s massacres and persecutions in Jerusalem were not motivated by his humiliation in Egypt, but rather by Jason’s disloyalty, armed rebellion and capture of Jerusalem, and his own resulting determination to tear up the ‘contract’ Antiochus III had made and impose instead a regime of ‘captive by the sword’ on Judaea in which the lives and bodies of the inhabitants were plainly seen to be at the absolute disposal of the reconquering king.