The Oxford History of the Biblical World (66 page)

Scholars dispute the history of composition of the three important historical books—Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah—for this period, although a cautious consensus exists around a date in the fourth century
BCE
for each. A final editor—perhaps the author or final editor of Chronicles—may have shaped the received texts of Ezra and Nehemiah, although originally each book probably was an independent composition. Ezra and Nehemiah include older, reworked material, such as official Persian imperial documents (originally in Aramaic), a Nehemiah memoir, perhaps an Ezra memoir, and miscellaneous archival lists. But these texts that describe the early Second Temple period are not (and were not written to be) straightforward reports of historical events. They idealize heroes, foreshorten historical events, make use of typology and recurring narrative patterns, and contain inner contradictions because the “facts” are less important as empirical data than as subtle symbolic literary elements in the service of ideology.

Nor does the Bible treat the first half of the Persian period systematically. It ignores the half century between the completion of the Temple around 515
BCE
and the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah. A still vexing question is the biblical ordering of the missions of Ezra and Nehemiah. The Bible places Ezra first, then Nehemiah. Nehemiah’s arrival in Jerusalem in 445
BCE
is likely. Ezra is the problem. The two leaders seem to have no knowledge of each other; their missions do not overlap (Neh. 8 is transposed for rhetorical reasons; Neh. 8.9 is almost unanimously considered to be a scribal harmonization); and no reflection of Ezra’s activity appears in the Jerusalem of Nehemiah. These facts have prompted the influential theory that Nehemiah preceded rather than followed Ezra, whose dates then become 428 or 398, rather than 458 as implied by the Bible. Today authoritative scholars line up on both sides of the issue, with the biblical order (putting Ezra first, in 458) enjoying a small edge; a few minimalists even doubt Ezra’s existence. This chapter diffidently retains the priority of Ezra.

After Nehemiah’s second term as governor of Yehud (Judah) (ca. 430), the Bible is silent about events through the fourth century down to 332. Except for allusive references in Daniel and the books of the Maccabees, the Bible never mentions Alexander the Great’s usurpation of the Persian satrapy of Abar Nahara. Nor does the archaeological evidence from Judah and Samaria indicate notable changes in settlement patterns or material culture immediately after 332.

Some nonbiblical texts supplement the biblical picture of Jewish history in the Persian period, although they are not without their own difficulties; most concern Jewish communities outside the territory of the Persian province of Yehud. Three groups of documents are of particular importance. First are the Elephantine papyri, written in Aramaic, which come from a Jewish military colony in Elephantine (on the Nile opposite Aswan) and cover the period from the beginning to the end of the fifth century; they include letters, lists, legal contracts, and literary-historical texts, and tell of a Yahweh temple in Egypt whose functionaries were in contact with both Yehud and Samaria. Second, from Nippur in Mesopotamia come over 650 cuneiform tablets belonging to the archives of the Murashu trading house, written between 455 and 403
BCE
. Approximately 8 percent of the names mentioned are Jewish, and the fortunes of these Diaspora Jews can be traced for several generations. Third, the foremost documentary source for fourth-century Palestine is the Samaria papyri, a group of fragmentary Aramaic legal documents from upper-class circles in Samaria, dating between 375 and approximately 335
BCE
. Their importance lies in the historical data gleaned from them and the names they contain. Most of the theophoric names are Yahwistic, indicating continued devotion to Yahweh and hence the persistence of Judaism in the territory of the former northern kingdom.

In the joyous anticipatory oracles (Isa. 44.24–45.13) of Second Isaiah (Isa. 40–55), Cyrus erupts onto the biblical stage even before his victory procession into Babylon on 29 October 539
BCE
. The anonymous prophet, perhaps an exile in Babylon, astoundingly refers to Cyrus the Persian as “messiah” (Isa. 45.1), the only instance in the Bible where a non-Jew bears this resonant title of the preexilic Davidic kings. As the instrument of Yahweh “the Redeemer” (Isa. 44.24), Cyrus will repatriate the exiles (45.13), who are called collectively Yahweh’s “servant” (44.21), and sanction the restoration of Jerusalem and worship in the Temple (44.28). Second Isaiah’s oracles, like the oracles of the preexilic prophets, are rooted in the historical circumstances of the prophet’s audience. In this case we see exiled Jews in mid-sixth-century Babylonia witnessing with satisfaction the death throes of the Babylonian empire.

For the rise of Cyrus and the Persian empire (the historians’ usual adjective is “meteoric”) and the fall of Babylon there are several important nonbiblical sources. In addition to the
Histories
of Herodotus, three contemporary documents from Babylonia are particularly valuable. The Nabonidus Chronicle describes in a relatively objective manner the deeds of Nabonidus (556–539), the last king of Babylon. The “Verse Account of Nabonidus” is a fascinating piece of pro-Cyrus propaganda composed soon after the arrival of Cyrus by elements among the Babylonian priesthood hostile to their former king. The famous “Cyrus Cylinder” is a Babylonian foundation
document of Cyrus himself describing his restoration of Mesopotamian temples supposedly neglected by Nabonidus.

The Persians were an Indo-European people who by the sixth century
BCE
had settled in Parsa (Greek
Persis
[modern Fars]), the mountainous land east of the Persian Gulf’s northern coastline. Practically undocumented in the historical record before the advent of Cyrus, by the sixth century the Persians were vassals of the Medes, another Indo-European group who occupied the Iranian plateau north of the Zagros Mountains and established their capital at Ecbatana (modern Hamadan). The Medes are comparatively better known to history, appearing in Assyrian texts as early as the ninth century. By 600 the Medes had captured the former Assyrian capital, Nineveh. There, watched uneasily by Babylon, they controlled an empire that extended from eastern Anatolia and Armenia in the west to Turkestan in the east and Parsa in the south.

Cyrus’s career began in 560/559 when, as the heir to the ruling Persian Achaemenid dynasty, he inherited the kingship of the Persians. In 550 Cyrus rebelled against his overlord, the aging Median warrior-king Astyages. His successful uprising won for Cyrus the territories of the Medes and provided him with a substantial pool of army recruits. Cyrus’s next target was the Lydian kingdom of Croesus, an ally of Babylonia. Herodotus recounts a famous story of Croesus’s visit to Delphi, where he was delighted to hear from the Delphic Oracle that if he attacked the Persians as planned, he would “destroy a great empire.” But in 546 Cyrus effectively destroyed Lydian sovereignty by a surprise winter assault on Sardis, Croesus’s supposedly impregnable capital. By a combination of hard combat, self-interested leniency, and propaganda, Cyrus brought the Greek cities on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor into his realm. Cyrus briefly turned his attention to his eastern front, but soon aimed his military might at the principal unconquered power in his path, Babylonia and its king Nabonidus.

As neighbors of the Medes and formal allies of Croesus, the Babylonians (and their Jewish populations) could hardly be unaware of Cyrus’s relentless accumulation of territory. While the Persian conquest of Babylonia in 539 was not the quick and easy victory suggested by some of the sources, the capital Babylon fell without any casualties. Cyrus’s success is credited to military acumen, to judicious bribery, and to an energetic publicity campaign waged throughout Babylonia, which portrayed him as a lenient and religiously tolerant overlord. Second Isaiah’s prophecies fit perfectly into this context and suggest that the author absorbed the essence of Cyrus’s carefully crafted image.

By 539 the Neo-Babylonian empire was experiencing severe inflation exacerbated by plague and famine. But the Cyrus Cylinder and the Verse Account of Nabonidus—both generated by the Persian propaganda machine—blamed the impious religious innovations of Babylon’s unpopular king Nabonidus for reducing the people to “corpses” until Cyrus, Marduk’s “friend and companion,” arrived to return the gods to their proper places and to restore the land. According to Cyrus’s publicists, Nabonidus had blatantly disregarded the duty of the Babylonian kings of old to honor Marduk and the other gods of Babylon, callously concentrating his religious energies on the worship of Sin, the moon-god of Haran (on the upper Euphrates), where his
formidable mother, Adad-guppi, was a priestess. And rather than foster Babylonian business and political interests—so the Persians claimed—Nabonidus chose to exile himself to faraway Tema in northwestern Arabia. There for ten years he frittered away his time and forced a cessation of the Babylonian New Year festival (Akitu). Babylon was left in the care of Nabonidus’s son, Belshazzar. Even the neutral Nabonidus Chronicle confirms that the “king did not come to Babylon in the month of Nisan…. The Akitu festival did not take place.” Nabonidus did finally celebrate the Akitu festival in 539; but by then, it would seem, Marduk had given up on him. The Cyrus Cylinder claims that Cyrus prevented his army from terrorizing the populace; his “numerous troops walked around in peace”; happy Babylonians “kissed his feet, jubilant… with shining faces.”

It is important to assess these narratives judiciously. Our sources for Nabonidus’s impious religious innovations and disregard for his empire are pro-Persian, perhaps generated by the influential priests of Marduk, with whom Cyrus consciously ingratiated himself. An equally strong claim could have been made by elements of the Babylonian populace living outside the capital for Nabonidus as a penitent, reverent ruler with respect for the past. His sojourn in Tema has been interpreted not as an unconsidered whim but as an attempt to create for Babylon a commercial empire founded on the fabulously lucrative spice trade of Arabia. Still, Nabonidus was a Babylon outsider who suffered the consequences of flouting the social and religious expectations of the empire’s capital.

No independent evidence confirms the report in Ezra 1.1–11 that in 538
BCE
the first of several waves of Judean exiles returned home. According to Ezra 1.2–4 (Hebrew; see 2 Chron. 36.23; and Aramaic, Ezra 6.2–5), Cyrus decreed that “the LORD, the God of heaven,” who had given him “all the kingdoms of the earth,” had charged him to build a temple in Jerusalem and to that end all of God’s people could return to Jerusalem. In its present wording this decree of Cyrus does not correspond to known official Persian documents or inscriptions; it has been called a free composition, possibly written to evoke the Cyrus oracles of the exilic Isaiah. Furthermore, the Aramaic reference to the decree in Ezra 6.1–5 does not mention any return from Babylon.

Still, the contents of the Cyrus Cylinder correspond closely to the spirit of the putative decree, especially in its Hebrew version (Ezra 1.2–4), which concentrates on the divinely chosen status of Cyrus. According to the cylinder, Cyrus entered Babylon at Marduk’s command, protected its temples, and allowed the (statues of the) gods, whose dwelling places had been abandoned, to return to their native centers in the company of their human associates, their priests. In both texts Cyrus credits the god of the intended audience for his success, and both texts sanction the return of displaced people to their home and native sanctuaries.

The claims of restoration of worship, piety, and religious tolerance that Cyrus makes for himself in the cylinder (seconded by the compiler of Ezra-Nehemiah, working in the shadow of the Persian authorities) must be viewed in the context both of Persian imperial policy and of Mesopotamian royal traditions. The cylinder belongs to a specific Mesopotamian literary genre, the royal building inscription; no such genre is known in Old Persian literature. By publishing such a document, Cyrus cannily manipulates local traditions to legitimate his claim to Babylon; he is doing
what a good and pious Babylonian ruler (in contrast to bad Nabonidus the blasphemer) was expected to do. Concerned with Marduk and the return of Babylon and cities in Mesopotamia to normal, the cylinder never calls for a general release of deportees or a universal restoration of centers of worship that had suffered at Babylonian hands. Furthermore, the term
restore
is ambiguous; we do not know how much religious innovating Nabonidus actually did that needed undoing, and there is no evidence for any rebuilding or repair of Mesopotamian temples during the reign of Cyrus. Life in Babylonia proceeded much as before.

The Cyrus Cylinder was meant for Babylonian consumption, to enhance Cyrus’s popularity in Babylonia. It cannot confirm the authenticity of Cyrus’s decree in Ezra. It is possible that Cyrus issued such a decree, however. The evidence of the cylinder suggests that in “restoring” the Jerusalem Temple, as in “restoring” Babylon, Cyrus was following the lead of earlier Mesopotamian rulers by strategically granting privileged status to some cities, often in sensitive areas, whose support and cooperation could benefit the empire. Cyrus might wish to cultivate loyalty in a territory close to Egypt, which he firmly intended to conquer.

Only recently have the implications of the pro-Persian bias of many Persian period sources been addressed. The near-unanimous, even automatic, characterization by historians (which goes as far back as Herodotus) of the Achaemenid Persians as enlightened and tolerant rulers should have aroused suspicion. Revisionist assessments acknowledge the pro-Persian bias of the key sources and also of the Western scholarly tradition, which can fall prey to biblio- or Eurocentrism. Have Western scholars been more willing to believe the best of Indo-European Persians and the worst of Semitic Assyrians and Babylonians? The historical record indicates that the “civilized” Persians were as capable as their supposedly barbarian predecessors of destroying sanctuaries and deporting peoples. The most judicious approach acknowledges both the tyrannical and the tolerant policies. Texts dating to the reigns of later Persian kings do confirm a pattern of Persian religious tolerance and noninterference in the cultural traditions of subject peoples. But in return—and this is essentially a Persian innovation—the temples were obliged to pay taxes to the Persians in kind. Food, livestock, wool, and laborers were regularly requisitioned by the Persians from their subordinate temple communities, which were expected to support local officials of the empire with food rations. It was not high-minded respect for individual peoples, ethnic groups, and foreign religions that motivated Persian policy. Rather, Persian policy was driven by enlightened self-interest. By reconciling the central power with local subjects, the Persians strengthened their empire.