Ezra and Nehemiah: Bringing Judaism from Persia

Ezra and Nehemiah: Bringing Judaism from Persia

Judaism
Ezra and Nehemiah: Bringing
Judaism from Persia
Abstract
Persian emperors are mentioned in Ezra-Nehemiah in close to the right order, though the three Dariuses
and two Artaxerxes are not distinguished. Taking the order and chronology to be true, the return of Ezra
and Nehemiah is in the reign of Artaxerxes II. The problem is that Nehemiah could hardly have been as
late as the twentieth year of Artaxerxes II and fit in with Elephantine papyri about thirty years earlier that
already look to an established temple in Jerusalem. The king was Darius II. Persians gave the Jews the
concept that this tiny country could become a great nation if its people were obedient and righteous. The
Jewish David is a mythologized Darius II. The Maccabees, once they had set up the Jewish free state,
embellished the myth of Darius II as the founder of the Jewish state, into the myth of David, the founder of
a Jewish empire!
Ezra, called both priest and scribe, obviously working in a senior capacity, leads Levites in teaching the
law. He reads to the colonists and the Am ha Eretz a covenant, an enforceable treaty. The law read out
was a law that had to be kept. Ezra imposed it firmly under threat, and the people wept! Some say they
wept in joy, but the response was grief—they were commanded not to mourn! It was the law of Mazas,
Ahuramazda, called Mazas by the Assyrians and Moses by the Jews. Or perhaps Misa (Mica), the name
of Mithras in the Persian dialect. Jewish sages think of Ezra as the second Moses. He was the first

Moses, unless Ahuramazda or Mithras is considered the first. It looks more than a coincidence that his
brother is Aaron, in Hebrew letter equivalents, Ahrwn. Besides the final “nun” the word looks to be a
mishearing of Ahura (Aura, Oura), and the “nun” is from its assimilation into Hebrew as meaning “his
brother”.
Ezra the scribe attended the ceremony of dedicating the walls, together with Nehemiah. If this happened
in a second period of office of Nehemiah beginning about 430 BC, it could have been in the reign of
Darius II. The compiler, unable to distinguish between the Persian kings thought “year seven of Darius”
meant Darius I. It was impossible, so he rejected it in favour of Artaxerxes, who had already been
mentioned in the context of Nehemiah, because the two men were together at the dedication. Ezra really
came in year seven of Darius II specially to dedicate the walls and to introduce the new law. Ezra was
never a “returner” and could not appear in lists of them, and was never a High Priest of the Jerusalem
temple. He was the senior priest in the Persian empire.

If Moses had not preceded him, Ezra would have been worthy to bring Torah into the
world.
b Sanh 21b

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Ezra and Nehemiah: Bringing Judaism from Persia

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, February 26, 2001
Ezra and Nehemiah
Esdras
The Book Restored
Initial Considerations
Am ha Eretz
The Temple Treasure
A Letter to Darius
Ezra
The Law of God or the Law of the King
The Artaxerxes Letter
Financial Matters!
Reading the Law
The Festival of Booths
Separating Husband from Wife
The Law is Deuteronomy
A Letter to Artaxerxes
Megabyxos Rebels

Who Were the Prophets?
When was the Dedication of the Walls?
Darius I or Darius II?
Population
Who were Jews?
Ethnicity
Culture
The Founder of Judaism
Was Ezra a Fiction?
The Root ZR (SR)
ZR as a Priestly Title
Moses as the Mythologized Ezra

Ezra and Nehemiah
In the modern bible, Ezra and Nehemiah are presented as two separate books. Quite
why is anybody’s guess because they are only a single book as everyone interested
knows. Doubtless clerics will tell us it is tradition, but it is more likely to be
dishonesty intended to fool religious innocents, because this is the key to the
foundation of Judaism, and the clerics prefer it to be confused to keep their flocks
confused. To make sure it is thoroughly confused and that no one can understand

what is happening, even if they can be bothered to read it, the book has also been
mixed up!
These two books together with the two books of Chronicles—also just one book
really—are an attempt at a complete history of the Jews from Adam to the time it was
written, seemingly the fifth century BC. The original material comprising it was
written in the Persian period, but it was edited after the end of the 200 years of
Persian rule rather than near its beginning as it pretends. 2 Chronicles ends with the
same verses as the beginning of Ezra seemingly showing that they were part of the
same work. Yet Ezra and Nehemiah was admitted into the Jewish canon before
Chronicles, which is the last book in it, having been accepted last. They certainly
seem to have been redacted by people with a similar outlook, but the connexion by
repeating verses seems an obvious trick, so there might be no link other than through

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a school of editors.
John C H How, who was a scholar of Trinity College Cambridge, tells us that
Ezra-Nehemiah is of great importance because it covers the years 537 BC to almost

300 BC, when “the real foundation of Judaism with its rigid exclusivism and its
intense devotion to the Law of Moses were laid”. The genealogies at the end take us to
Jaddua who was a High Priest only a few decades before Alexander conquered Persia.
In fact, the events in Ezra-Nehemiah mainly take place in a 30 year period in the
reigns of Artaxerxes I and Darius II, but How is right that this is the foundation of
Judaism.
L E Browne, in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, has no doubt that the work of the
priestly school called “The Chronicler” that wrote these books displays the same
outlook as that of the authors of the Priestly Code (P) of Genesis. Elements of P are
found in Ezra-Nehemiah but they are interpolations. The law that the book is
concerned with is Deuteronomy. The emphasis of the Priestly Code on the
priesthood, temple worship and on the paraphernalia of it, that plainly took a good
length of time to evolve after Ezra and Nehemiah founded Judaism, puts P late, in
Ptolemaic or Maccabaean times. 2 Maccabees 2:17 says what the Maccabees were up
to:
God… delivered all his people and gave them all an heritage, and the kingdom, and
the priesthood and the sanctuary…

Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah are full of genealogies and this fondness for them,
and more particularly the inclination to compile them and invent what was not

known, was a habit of men of leisure—the temple priesthood of a much later time,
again the time of the Ptolemies or the Maccabees—intent on giving an antiquity to
their own profession and to the Jewish nation as a whole that had in reality just been
founded. M E Meeker, studying Semitic tribes in Arabia, has shown that tribal
genealogies reflected ideological beliefs not actual historical lines.
The early part of Chronicles is written as a genealogy to get the reader quickly to the
time of David when the author wants to begin the tale proper. That is because the
Hasmonaean scribes were intent on legitimizing the reign of the Hasmonaeans by
showing that they were simply re-establishing the kingdom of David of old. There had
been no kingdom of David, of course—they made it up as an ancient reflexion of the
Hasmonaean kingdom!
Ezra-Nehemiah consists of three main parts based on content and style:
1. Ezra 1-6, a history from the first year of Cyrus to the sixth year of Darius.
2. Ezra 7-10, the story of Ezra told in a different style.
3. Nehemiah, the story of Nehemiah.

1 Esdras
Unlike the Pentateuch that has to be analysed purely from its internal clues,
Ezra-Nehemiah has an extra external source to help—1 Esdras, a book included in
the Apocrypha. This Greek version of the combined Ezra-Nehemiah shows some of

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the redactional activity that has led to the two separate versions we now have. These
revisions are from the mid-second century BC when the Jewish scriptures were
compiled from what remained after the civil war, as 2 Maccabees 2:13-14 declares. It
offers an acceptable explanation for the chronological mix up of the books, though it
is hard to understand why those who were supposedly so familiar with them did not
notice the blunders.
So, what we seem to have are two different attempts to put together the fragments of
the works that remained or could be remembered. Neither is correct. The authors had
forgotten the order of the Persian kings, just as the author of Daniel, writing at about
the same time had. It shows that what we have today is not genuinely from the
Persian period.
Curiously 1 Esdras does not mention Nehemiah. It might be a deliberate intention to
ignore the Persian administrator in favour of the supposed Jewish priest, Ezra, but
since 1 Esdras ends with the same Greek words as Nehemiah 8:13, words absent in
the Hebrew texts, Nehemiah might have been meant to follow 1 Esdras, which is

therefore itself incomplete. Whole sections of 1 Esdras can be seen in different parts
of Ezra and Nehemiah.
The leader of the first “returners”, Zerubabel, was considered the messiah by Haggai
and Zechariah who made him the grandson of Jehoiachin (Jeconiah) a man who
went into captivity in 597 BC. Joshua, Zerubabel’s companion, is the son of
Jehozadak, the High Priest in 587 BC who is also the son of Seraiah, the father of
Ezra (Ezra 7:1-5, 1 Chr 6:14-15). Ezra then is the brother of the High Priest of 587 BC
and the uncle of Joshua who returned about 520 BC, while he himself returned in
458 BC at the earliest. Doubtless Jews and Christians will see the hand of God in
these miraculous relationships, but it really shows that whoever made up the
chronologies had no clear idea of the times involved.
They had the idea that most of the people “returned” together just a few years after
Cyrus issued his decree. The lists of “returners” in Ezra 2:1-67 and in Nehemiah
7:6-69 are essentially the same, but they purport to be the first “returners” under
Sheshbazzar in Ezra and the contemporary “returners” in Nehemiah. They thought
Seraiah and Jehozadak could have had children in captivity who returned about
536 BC, and had no idea that Ezra was returning much later still.
Bits of Ezra are in Aramaic (Ezra 5:1-6:18; Ezra 4:5; Ezra 4:6-23; Ezra 7:12-26)
suggesting that an Aramaic book was a source of the original, or an attempt to imply
that it was. All four bits of Aramaic refer to the actions of Persian kings in respect of

the Jews, so seem to be a hint of genuine chancellery archive. Perhaps they were, but
were destroyed when Nehemiah’s library was scattered, and all we have are later
imperfect reconstructions. Or, perhaps, they were composed deliberately to give a
false impression. Whether fraudulent or a sincere attempt at restoration of something
lost, they are not genuine now.
Some scholars question the truth of these bits of Jewish history, and indeed, it is
questionable whether the policy was implemented by Cyrus or by Darius. In the
interest of creating a history for his colony, Darius might have applied the decree of
Cyrus to the colonists who had no idea originally that it applied to them because, in
truth, they were being deported. Evidence of this is that 1 Esdras has Darius where

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Ezra has Cyrus.
M Dandamaev and A Lukanin (The Culture and Social Institutions of Ancient Iran)
state that there are “no grounds for speaking of a special benevolence toward
Judaism on the part of the Persian king”. The supposed benevolence of the Persian
kings to Judaism depends purely on the bible itself. The Persians have been

considered as benevolent to the cults within the empire, the Cyrus Cylinder being an
oft-cited example of this generosity. Yet what seems to be benevolence in these
propagandist works actually was carefully calculated to give political advantage, as
Amelie Kuhrt has shown for the Cyrus Cylinder itself.
Cyrus drew upon the form of Mesopotamian building texts to show himself as a pious
monarch dedicated to restoring cults neglected and damaged by Nabonidus. He
authorized the restoration of privileges to temples in Babylonia and Assyria. Kuhrt
says he did it to restore the religious status quo ante to gain support from these areas
and their priesthoods. The kings sought the favour of populations to give no basis for
revolution, and they wanted a reliable and trusted organization for the collection of
taxes. So whatever altruism the kings seemed to offer would be multiply repaid by a
grateful people.
But the Persians destroyed the temples of people who resisted their power. Darius I
destroyed the temple at Didyma involved in the Ionian revolt (Herodotus 6.18-20).
The leaders of the temple in Elephantine claimed that by the power of Cambyses, “all
the temples of the gods of Egypt were overthrown”.
Some say the story of the generosity of Cyrus was based on the stories of Hezekiah
and Josiah. Yet no one knows anything about the domestic acts of these kings except
what the bible tells us. The Deuteronomic history was written after Ezra and so the
acts of the older kings were probably based on the acts of Artaxerxes, rather than the

reverse. The objective of the history was to depict the Jews in the past as having been
an apostate and ungrateful people who deserved God’s punishment because of their
wickedness. This sort of propaganda suited the rulers, the Persians, rather than the
Jews themselves, so their source ought to be evident.

The Book Restored
C C Torrey has, in careful research, that few would question, convincingly restored
the correct order of the original work as:
Ezra 1. Edict of Cyrus; Sheshbazzar brings the temple treasure.
1 Esdras 4:47-56; 62-5:6. Darius approves Zerubabel to return.
Ezra 2:1-4:5. Zerubabel returns and begins the work opposed by adversaries.
Ezra 5-6. A letter is sent to Darius and the decree of Cyrus found; the temple is
built and dedicated on the 3rd of the twelfth month in the sixth year of Darius.
Ezra 4:6. An objection is raised in the time of Xerxes.
Ezra 7-8. In the 7th year of Artaxerxes, Ezra comes to Jerusalem with a letter of
authority from the king and men gathered on route.
Nehemiah 7:70-8. In the seventh month Ezra read the law and introduced the
festival of booths.
Ezra 9-10. Ezra stops mixed marriages.

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Nehemiah 9-10. Mixing ceases on the 24th; the author gives Ezra a long composed
speech; a covenant is sealed by Nehemiah and others; separation is again
confirmed and a pledge to give a third of a shekel followed by an added
justification of it.
Ezra 4:6-23. Adversaries demand a letter to Artaxerxes and he stops any further
work on the walls until the time of Darius.
Nehemiah 1-7:69. In the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, Nehemiah comes as
governor and repairs the walls of Jerusalem against opposition; he implements
social and economic reform.
Nehemiah 11-13. Lists of people are followed by a retrospective look by Nehemiah
at his second tour of duty during which the walls were dedicated, apparently in the
reign of Darius II.
The reordering assumes that the correct sequence of Persian kings was known in the
original, but had been forgotten by the time attempts were made to reconstruct it by
the Jewish priests after the war, but the logic of the unfolding story also confirms this
order. A confusion is apparent immediately and that is that there seem to be two
Dariuses in the unfolding tale. Usually the references to Darius II are assumed to be
anachronistic references to Darius I. In fact the Darius referred to could be Darius II
Nothus. Sir H Howorth, a century ago vigorously argued this was the case, but
needless to say believers were no more interested then in scholarship than they are
now, but only apologetics.
Sara Japhet of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, notes in Second Temple Studies II
that the Persian emperors are mentioned in Ezra-Nehemiah, as it stands, in close to
the right order, allowing for three Dariuses and two Artaxerxes who are not
distinguished. The Darius of Ezra 4:5 is Darius I, that of Ezra 4:24 is Darius II while
that of Nehemiah 12:22 is Darius III. The Artaxerxes of Ezra 4:7ff is Artaxerxes I
while that of Ezra 7:1 is Artaxerxes II. In Ezra 1-6, the order of kings is Cyrus, Darius,
Ahasuerus (Xerxes), Artaxerxes, Darius, the latter being Darius II, and the story looks
straightforward. This passage almost says it all:
And they built, and finished, according to the commandment of the God of Israel and
according to the command of Cyrus, and Darius, and Artaxerxes the king of Persia.
And this house was finished on the third day of the month Adar, which was in the
sixth year of the reign of Darius the king.
Ezra 6:14-15 Lit

Cyrus allows the temple to be rebuilt, some people return and begin (538 BC) but
there is opposition and the work is interrupted for the reigns of Cyrus, Darius,
Xerxes, and Artaxerxes, until it is resumed in the second year of Darius II and
completed in his sixth year (418 BC). It suggests that the chronology and therefore
the order of the books is correct.
Taking the order and chronology to continue true, the return of Ezra and Nehemiah
is in the reign of Artaxerxes II, and the last king of Persia, Darius III is mentioned in
Nehemiah 12:22. The greatest problem with such a simple and uncluttered scheme is
that Nehemiah could hardly have been as late as the twentieth year of Artaxerxes II
(384 BC) and fit in with the Elephantine papyri which are about thirty years earlier
and already look to an established temple in Jerusalem.
The conventional idea that Nehemiah returned in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes I
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looks hard to refute but, to minimize arbitrary changes in order, would mean that
Ezra returned in year seven of the same king. The whole reconstructed composition is
curious in the way that it puts Ezra ahead of Nehemiah when the internal clues are
that Ezra’s reforms presuppose Nehemiah’s:
In Ezra 9:9, the walls of Jerusalem were already built, so Nehemiah went before
Ezra to build them (or they must, as his story perhaps implies, have been knocked
over again in the meantime).
Jerusalem is derelict in Nehemiah (Neh 7:4; 11:1-2) but is healthily populated in
Ezra (Ezra 10:1,13). (Had it been sacked again by Megabyxos or the Egyptians, or
were the two restorers in the wrong order?)
We take the two men to be discussed in the wrong order, the Chronicler not knowing
what the order was and choosing to put Ezra, the most important, because the most
senior, first. The two facts noted that might explain the biblical order does not stop
the reverse. Jerusalem might have been restored to some degree and populated in the
time of Darius the Great, but was later sacked in the troubled time at the start of the
reign of Artaxerxes. Other evidence for the reversal of the biblical order is given in the
section on Ezra.
By taking Ezra to return in the seventh year of Darius specifically to inaugurate the
city walls and the temple, and to deliver the law, the problems of chronology are
minimized with only the assumption that an editor tried to correct what he thought
was an error—that year seven of Darius (I) was impossible and it must have meant
year seven of Artaxerxes, because Nehemiah and Ezra were contemporaries.

Initial Considerations
Jeremiah 25:12; 29:10 says the exile would last seventy years—a lifetime—meaning
that no one who returned would remember the country and its temple as it was. The
exile would be longer than anyone could remember. No one could remember either,
but that was because they had never been exiled in the first place—they were being
deported to Yehud but the propaganda was they had no memory of being exiled
initially because it was over a lifetime ago.
Cyrus had issued a general decree that people could return to their homes, but it was
a cover for deporting colonists, just as the Assyrians and Babylonians had done.
Cyrus was simply cleverer about it. There are few historians today, as opposed to
theologians, who cannot see the declarations of Cyrus as propaganda. On the
Babylonian cylinder seals Cyrus was the chosen king of Marduk, the Babylonian god.
On the clay tablets of Nippur, Cyrus was the chosen king of the local god Sin. In the
Jewish scriptures, Cyrus was the chosen king of the local god Yehouah. Cyrus
proclaimed himself as the king chosen by the god of each nation. Curiously, ANET
records that Cyrus ordered “as far as Ashur and Susa, Agade, Eshunna, the towns
Zamban, Me-Turnu, Der as well as the regions of the Gutians, I… established for me
permanent sanctuaries”. Nothing is mentioned of a permanent sanctuary at
Jerusalem.
The bible is clear that, despite any decree, no Jews did “return”. Haggai and
Zechariah highlight the failure of Jews to return, but their purpose will have been to

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justify the forcible colonization that was to follow. W K Lowther Clarke, in the
Concise Bible Commentary, admits that few took advantage of Cyrus’s edict, but the
ones who did enforced their “policy on the apathetic ’people of the land.’” Racist?
Since the “returners” were so few, these “apathetic” people must ultimately have
provided the main body of the ancestry of modern Jews. As thick as two short planks,
Lowther Clarke tells us:
There was no deliberate settlement of foreigners, as in North Israel after 721.

He has to say this because the integrity of the bible depends upon the ethnic group
called in it the Israelites being continuous from Abraham to the time of Jesus. To
admit that the people who “returned” were not the people who went rather spoils the
picture.
In Ezra 8:36,
And they delivered the king’s commissions unto the king’s lieutenants, and to the
governors on this side the river, and they furthered the people, and the house of
God”,

Ezra’s orders are delivered to the “satraps and governors of Abaranahara”, the correct
translation. How many satraps were there in Yehud? The whole of Abarnahara was
one satrapy. Perhaps this is a simple infelicity or an exaggeration to magnify Judah,
but it gels better with Ezra being sent to inaugurate a temple for the whole of
Abarnahara, not just to Judah itself.
The insertion from 1 Esdras makes it clear that the Jerusalem temple was meant to
be the temple of the whole of Abarnahara not just a small part of it—it really was the
temple of the Hebrews, the population of Abarnahara, not merely the Jews. Syrians,
Phœnicians and Canaanites had to help financially in building and maintaining the
temple in its period of inception. The sums required were substantial—20 talents a
year for building, 10 talents a year for sacrifices and unspecified support for the
colonists is commanded, proving that they were privileged. The privileged class of
people called Jews were divided into several castes whose duty was to mind the
temple, and who had been given a small state of their own, rather akin to the Vatican.
This province, Yehud, was obviously carved out of the Arab state of Idumaea (Edom)
leading to a long lasting hatred between Jews and Idumaeans.
The myth is that they went up on the first day of the year in the second year of Darius
(or Cyrus), presumably meaning that the new state was declared on that day, making
the Persian New Year a famous day to remember in Jewish history.
Ezra 2:1-67 gives the list of 42,000 returned exiles, pretending that they all returned
at once.
From the first day of the seventh month, the altar was consecrated, but nothing else
seems to have been done and the foundation, supposedly laid by Sheshbazzar, had to
be laid again. Sheshbazzar is unlikely to be Zerubabel unless it is a title or nickname,
but both names are not Jewish but Persian. 1 Esdras says the foundation was laid at
the new moon of the second month of the second year of the new colony. This

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concern with lunar associations suggests that the colonists considered Yehouah as the
god Sin. Some people were weeping. It was not from joy but because they realized
they were being enslaved (the Jews called themselves “the Captivity”) by a new ruling
class with a different god from their own, even if it had the same name. Not
surprisingly we hear immediately (Ezra 4:1-5) that hatred between the Jews and the
Samarians had begun.

Am ha Eretz
Ezra 3:3 already spoke of fear of the “People of the Land”, the Am ha Eretz or Dallal
ha Eretz (Poor of the Land), the people already living in the Palestinian hills when the
colonists moved in under Persian protection to settle. At the inception of the temple,
while some were rejoicing and some were weeping, we hear that there were
“adversaries”.
Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the children of the
captivity builded the temple unto the Lord God of Israel; Then they came to
Zerubbabel, and to the chief of the fathers, and said unto them, Let us build with you:
for we seek your God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of
Esarhaddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither.

These were the natives who, according to the supporting mythology, had been left
behind when their rulers were taken captive. If so, the rulers no longer wanted
anything to do with them. Though they had lamented in the ruined temple for
seventy years, and now were supposed to have been weeping with joy, the returners
ignored them because they were “adversaries”. These people were themselves
deportees from the Assyrian period and knew it. The ruling Samarians were deported
from Bit Adini, the area around Harran in Syria, the Aramaean homeland, and,
oddly, next to a small state called Yauda whose capital city seems to have been called
Samal. Esarhaddon, the Syrian king had sent them to Israel from these small
Aramaean states to worship the same god, Yehouah, as the colonists. They were
utterly rejected:
Zerubbabel, and Jeshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers of Israel, said unto
them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we
ourselves together will build unto the Lord God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of
Persia hath commanded us.

Only the Yehudim, the people sent by the Persian kings as colonists had the right to
build a temple and restore a religion, and it must have been to a particular and
different specification from that already in situ. Had the “returners” been simply
restoring the old temple, what possible objection could they have had against
accepting the assistance offered by the native Yehouah worshippers? They could have
had none. It is plain that the colonists were doing something that they knew would
not be acceptable to the natives in any case, and so they refused assistance from the
outset. Judaism was to be a new religion based on an ethical Yehouah of the
Ahuramazda mould, not a fertility religion based on the mould of the Baalim of the
natives.
The hostility between the Samarians and the Jews began and never ceased. The story
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has it that the Samarians were able to hold up the work for twenty years, but it seems
most likely that Sheshbazzar could only make a formal beginning in the reign of
Cyrus, and not enough colonists were sent until Zerubabel and Joshua came in the
reign of Darius. The hostility of the natives obviously emerged when they were
refused leave to help in the reconstruction, and that was when enough colonists had
returned. Once there were enough colonists, protected by the Persian satrap, the
locals would have been unable to stop the work. Sabotage, however, was possible and
the account suggests that measures had to be taken to prevent it.

The Temple Treasure
The vast treasure returned also must be queried. It all supposedly happened as soon
as Cyrus captured Babylonia. The problem is that unless the kings of Babylon
meticulously kept captured treasure in depositories, how could it have been gathered
together so easily to return it? Captured treasure, like that captured by the
conquistadores in America, was put to use, to pay soldiers and to build new buildings.
It was not just stored, it was melted down, spent and otherwise dispersed. How then
was it still hanging about fifty or seventy years after Jerusalem had been razed by
Nebuchadrezzar?
The Book of Ezra tries to explain that it was kept in a temple called “The Temple of
Babylon!” Yet Babylon had many temples and, if one was called the Temple of
Babylon, it must have been to Marduk, the Babylonian god. Why should priests of
Marduk want ritual objects that were meaningless to them? They would have had
them recast as objects suitable for their own religion. Furthermore, the Palestine hill
country was never so wealthy that any pre-Babylonian temple in Jerusalem would
have had a vast treasure, whatever the bible might say about the mythical Solomon.
These hills were impoverished.
The only answer, if Ezra is correct, is that Nebuchadrezzer set up a temple to
Yehouah somewhere in Babylon. It must have been a Canaanite temple like the one in
Elephantine in Egypt, but might have been a centre for worship of the Baal Yehouah
of the deported Canaanites. Commonly conquerors would carry off idols, images of
gods, and set them up elsewhere for superstitious reasons—they hoped to have the
favour of the god. If Canaanite Yehouah had an image—a bull, one would guess—then
that might have been carried off and used to set up a Yehouah cult elsewhere.
Had Yehouah already been a Babylonian cult, even if not a major one, then it would
explain the Jewish names in the accounts of the Babylonian bank of Murushu in the
fifth century. It is falsely assumed that the Jews were taken into captivity to the city of
Babylon. There they flourished and that explains the presence of Jewish names on
Babylonian tablets. A few thousand deportees, or myriads, could hardly have had
much impact from a condition of slavery in about three generations.
The deduction is based on Semitic names incorporating “Yahu” or “Iah”, and “El”,
considered to have been Israelite names for God. And so they were—but not only
Israelites worshipped them. People other than those in the geographic place
worshipped these gods, and, if it is maintained that any worshipper of El is an
Israelite and any worshipper of Yehouah is a Jew, then it has to be recognized that
Israelites and Jews always lived in places other than in Israel and Judah, and the

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manner in which they worshipped must have been different in these different places.
Yehouah and El were Canaanite gods not just Jewish and Israelite ones. Indeed, El
was also worshipped for centuries in Mesopotamia. Added to that was the
deportation of the Israelites by the Assyrians, and they must have had names in “Iah”
and “El”. If they were allowed to keep their names then they would have been passed
on, at least grandfather to grandson, a common preference in those times,
presumably so that fathers and sons could not be confused. It seems the Persians
decided to rationalize religions in an acceptable way, by unifying divers gods under a
Mazda-like cloak as the God of Heaven. Iranians called those who followed these
non-Zoroastrian religions Juddin.
When the Persians had decided to set up a Jewish colony in Jerusalem supported
financially by the Hebrews of Abarnahara, they might indeed have taken some cult
objects from a temple of Yehouah in Babylon to Jerusalem, but the image of a bull
would not have been one of them, even though Persians revered bulls. They used no
images themselves for their High God, Ahuramazda, other than a winged disc, and
this is the most likely image used in the temple of Yehouah. The rest of the ritual
paraphernalia mentioned, where it is not exaggerated for propaganda purposes, was
donated out of the Persian treasury. The king aimed to get the money back with
interest once the colony and its temple had been established.

A Letter to Darius
The report continues at Ezra 5:1, the Aramaic section having been wrongly inserted.
The official mentioned is Tatnai (Tattenai, Tatannu), satrap of Abarnahara, a man
with an Assyrian name, and his sub-official has a Persian name. A T Olmstead
reports, “Ta-at-t[an-ni] (Tattenai) governor (pahat) of Ebirnari (Abarnahara, in
Persian times)” appears in a Babylonian document of 502 BC. Abarnahara was what
was essentially to become the empire of David in mythology. It covered Cyprus,
Phœnicia, Syria, Palestine and West Arabia, the places whose treasurers had to
support the new temple.
The Samarians evidently complained to the governor and the satrap about what was
going on. The start of the reign of Darius was troubled and possibly the satrap
thought they had a point. Cyrus had issued his policy on thousands of cylinder seals
and it is inconceivable that Tatnai did not know imperial policy, so that was not the
issue. But he might have thought it a good idea to humour the Samarians for awhile,
pretending to be sympathetic then coming back with the message that it was out of
his hands. Persians were generally rather subtle rulers, a fact that is usually ignored.
The search for the decree by Darius I looks unlikely and might have been the satrap’s
propaganda to allow the Samarians to save face.
Some complaint of the Canaanites presumably against the colonists was made in the
time of Xerxes (Ahasuerus) but only a fragment remained for the editor and he could
add nothing, so it appears alone in Ezra 4:6 testifying only to the fragmentary nature
of much of the bible, and showing that it is a valient attempt at reconstruction. It also
suggests that when long, more or less complete, stories appear like the sagas of
Joseph, the Exodus, David and Solomon, they are late romances added to the
fragments salvaged from the destruction of the civil war, and therefore inventions so

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late that they precede the time of Jesus by only about a century, not the millennium
or two that biblicists think.

Ezra
Now Ezra appears on the scene—or did he? The seventh year of Artaxerxes I would
have been 458 BC whereas the seventh year of Artaxerxes II was 397 BC. The editor
does not know the sequence of Persian kings and makes no effort to distinguish one
Artaxerxes from another, but seems to think Artaxerxes preceded Xerxes, who has
little role in this story. Ezra was a contemporary of Johanan (Ezra 10:6) and
Nehemiah was a contemporary of Eliashub (Neh 3:1) but Johanan was the son of
Eliashub, so Ezra seems to have been a much younger man than Nehemiah and might
have appeared a generation later in the reign of Artaxerxes II. What is more, the list
of High Priests (Neh 11 and 22) shows that Johanan or Jonathan was actually a
grandson of Eliashub, and the Elephantine papyri show he was High Priest in
408 BC. Ezra seems to have “returned” much later than Nehemiah. Note that he is
not listed as a leader of the “returners” in Ezra 2:2 or Nehemiah 7:7.
Ezra is always considered to be a Jewish High Priest and concerned only with Jewish
matters (though he is never called a High Priest or listed among them in the
genealogies). David Janzen, in JBL (2000), goes all around the mountains to return
to the point of departure. Ezra was a priest and scribe who served as administrative
head of the temple community. The letter of Artaxerxes is spurious, merely a midrash
which it is unhelpful to bother trying to understand, and Ezra’s work is simply as
administrator, priest, and scribe working within the framework of the temple
assembly in Yehud. Ezra functions simply as a temple official, albeit on a number of
levels, and had no mission. The Ezra narrative admittedly seems to contradict itself:
while Ezra is not a high priest, he appears to act like one,
while he is not a satrap, he appears to wield satrap-like powers,
while he is sent to enforce the law in Yehud, it is the community that actually
appears to exercise legal authority,
while he comes to restore the cult, supposedly it has long been functioning
His position was a peculiar one. But it will not do that Ezra was just a temple official!
Artaxerxes informs Ezra that the royal treasuries are obligated to provide resources
to the temple in Jerusalem and that they are not to tax the temple clergy (Ezra
7:20-24). He also authorizes Ezra to appoint judicial officials throughout Abarnahara,
the satrapy of which the province of Yehud was a part, and to teach the law of God
there (Ezra 7:25-26).
Joseph Blenkinsopp in his 1987 JBL paper argued that the biblical descriptions of the
missions of Ezra and Nehemiah made sense because the actions that they took were
not dissimilar from those of the Egyptian, Udjahorresnet. The characteristics of
Udjahorresnet acting on behalf of the temple of Neith are the same in kind as
Nehemiah acting for the Jerusalem cult. The inscription on his funerary statue says
Udjahorresnet defected to the Persians when they invaded Egypt in 525 BC, became a
local advisor to Cambyses, informing him of Egyptian customs and religion, and
thereby won the king’s approval to restore the cult at Sais.

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He presents it as an act of restoration of normal religious practice on behalf of the
local worshippers and approved by the kindly shah, here Cambyses. The shah
commanded the expulsion of foreigners from the temple, the removal of ritual
impurity, the appointment of legitimate cult personnel, the restoration of traditional
worship and the Houses of Life. And what were the Houses of Life? They were
training schools concerned with the recording of religious law and its interpretation.
Another Egyptian example comes from Elephantine, where a letter has been found
from the satrap of Egypt, Pherendates, wriiten in 491 BC, in the reign of Darius I, to
the priests of the temple of Khnum in which he told them of a decree of the
shahanshah for the selection of chief priests. It looks like a direct interference, unlike
the usual more subtle approach, unless subtler approaches had failed. Darius had
spent some time codifying Egyptian temple practices. The priests of Khnum perhaps
were defiant, and the apparently direct Persian intervention was a response to the
“abnormal practices” they persisted in following. The Persians will still have claimed
to have been restoring proper practice, and their first step was to appoint compliant
people, not dissenters, as priests.
Herodotus describes a case of the same ploy being used in a different context. After
the Ionian rebellion, Artaphernes, satrap of Sardis held a council of the cities’
representatives to agree on how conflicts should be handled, before they were
assessed for taxation. Evidently the Persian satrap met the Greeks to “facilitate” a
local agreement. Naturally, it would be one agreeable to the suzerain, but would
emerge from a local council. It could therefore be presented as the Persians merely
responding to the wishes of the locals.
Another case is the inscription found at Sardis in 1974, being a Greek copy of an
original monument set up in year 39 of Artaxerxes (426 BC or 365 BC). The hyparch
of Lydia set up statue of Zeus and founded rules for his proper worship. No one who
worshipped other gods such as Sabazius, were to worship this one, called Zeus of
Baradates, a mixed Greek and Persian title. Idiosyncrasies of the style suggest the
Greek was a translation out of Aramaic, so here seems to be another local cult set up
with its own laws, but approved by the Persians. Pierre Briant declared that none of
this illustrates…
…how the Persian community at Sardis fell back upon its own religious traditions.
Quite the contrary, it indicates the intense intercultural exchanges between Persians
of the imperial diaspora the local elites.

The Persian ploy was to present changes in religious practice and law as restoring
some religious norm on behalf of the local people. The shah simply approved the
desired changes, thus giving them the force of imperial law, and so Frei calls the ploy
“imperial authorization”. Of course, even though the changes are dressed as having
been a local initiative, as Erhart Blum showed, they rarely were, the king, or rather
his chancellery, being the true author of the changes.
The Persians succeeded so well in spreading the propaganda that they would respond
favourably to local requests that it is still believed, doubtless helped by the bible
which spreads the same propaganda. It has become so strong a tradition in Daniel
that Darius is bound by it and has to do what the satraps and councillors request,

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landing the hero in the lion’s den! Joseph Blenkinsopp, a scholar in a catholic college,
notes the shahs’ willingness—to judge by widespread evidence from across the
empire—“to regulate, one might almost say, micromanage, local cult practice”. And,
“interest in the operation of local cults seems to be the one exception to the
noninterventionist policy” imagined of the shahs generally. Catholics can hardly be
keen to admit the Jewish religion was created as a matter of imperial policy by the
Persian Zoroastrian shahanshahs, but that inference draws closer once the shahs are
seen to be interested in regulating local cults. Darius was furious that Gadatas, one of
his officials in Ionia, had taxed the sacred gardeners of Apollo of Magnesia, despite
his “policy about deities”. Persian policy was to keep the priests of local cults on side
by allowing them taxation privileges (“ateleia”) in return for keeping order—helping
to collect taxes and enforcing the law through their cults.
Many scholars have found it significant that in the letter and elsewhere in the Ezra
narrative, Ezra is called a “scribe” as well as a “priest”. The word scribe was used in
two basic senses in the Persian period:
1. someone who has the ability to read and write and who is called upon to transcribe
legal documents;
2. officials within the administration.
We use the word “secretary” in equivalent ways, as someone who transcribes letters
and as a senior government official like a Secretary of State. Legal documents or
letters from Persian officials mention the name of the scribe who wrote out the letter.
An order from Arsames to his officials in Egypt states that “Nabuaqab wrote”, and
that “Nabuaqab is the scribe”. In the same letter, Arsames writes that “Anani the
scribe is chancellor” and since Anani is not the scribe who committed Arsames’ words
to paper, here “scribe” means “chancellor”, the “overseer of the order”. Anani will see
that the order is carried out.
This double description of someone as “scribe” and “chancellor” is known elsewhere
from the Persian period. A cuneiform document from 486 BC. concerns an order
given by a satrap to two men regarding a certain amount of barley, and both men are
referred to as “sepiru” (“scribe”) and as “bel temi” (“chancellor”). These titles appear
in the introduction to the letter of Ezra 4:11-16, part of the correspondence between
“Rehum the chancellor and Shimshai the scribe” (Ezra 4:8) and Artaxerxes.
Artaxerxes orders that the building of Jerusalem come to a halt, and that Rehum and
Shimshai enact the royal decree in Yehud. A cuneiform text also refers to “a scribe of
the satrap of Egypt”, who worked at the royal court and who kept the satrap informed
of what was going on there.
So, a scribe was an official position within the Persian administration, and the “Scribe
of the God of Heaven” was an office of the Persian government. Scholars who accept
the validity of Ezra’s mission look to the title of scribe to explain his position vis-à-vis
the royal administration. Did scribes do the types of things Ezra was commissioned to
do according to the letter—teach the people about the law and appoint legal officials?
If scribes represented higher ranks in their absence, then Ezra could have received a
commission from the shah to introduce Jewish law to Abarnahara and to appoint
judicial officials who would act in accordance with it.
H H Schaeder has concluded that Ezra was a High Commissioner for Jewish Affairs

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but it is difficult to understand why an officer responsible for Jewish affairs should
have been needed at the Persian court. To suggest that a tiny colony should require
its own minister of religion in the chancellery is absurd. However, if Jewish here
pertains not to Yehudim but to to “Juddin”, the Persian description of
non-Zoroastrian religions, the title and position would make complete sense.
It seems Ezra was a senior minister responsible for religious affairs in the empire,
and this can only add to the suspicion that Ezra is an abbreviation of Zoroaster.
Zoroaster was a title of officials of the Zoroastrian religion at Rhages under the Medes
and doubtless remained the same under the Persians, though officiating at the new
capital. What could have brought such a senior religious authority, a man senior to
the satrap, to Yehud?
Josephus tells us that it was that Johanan had murdered his own brother in the
temple! If the colonists had been given the task of setting up an official religion—a
religion of the Good Creation—then this was a serious matter. More so in reality
because it will surely have been a symbol of the dissension between the Samarians
and the Jews. The governor of Yehud, Bagoas (Persian Bagavahya, Bagoses, in the
Elephantine papyri) had reported the murder to the satrap of Abarnahara, and
thence it reached the office of the minister of religious affairs at the king’s court. Ezra
sought the permission of the king to go and sort it out in person:
Forasmuch as thou art sent of the king, and of his seven counsellors, to inquire
concerning Judah and Jerusalem, according to the law of thy God which is in thine
hand.
Ezra 7:14

Artaxerxes II came to the throne in 404 BC. From the dated letters of Elephantine,
Bagoas was governor of Yehud in 410 and 407 BC. Egypt declared itself autonomous
about this time, and remained semi-independent for sixty years, so suddenly Yehud
became an important place as an outpost once more. In these conditions of
uncertainty and change, Johanan seems to have decided to get rid of his troublesome
brother. The fact that the satrap did not punish the High Priest suggests that Joshua
was considered a trouble by the Persians. Instead sacrifices were taxed implying a
more widespread dissension in the worshipping population and Ezra, the senior
minister for religious affairs, was sent to sort it all out.

The Law of God or the Law of the King
Eduard Meyer in 1886 pointed out the implication of Ezra 7:26 for Judaism. The
shah ordered them to obey the Jewish law on pain of death. “The law of your god and
the law of the king”, in Ezra 7:26, implies the identity of two laws but could imply two
separate laws. The conjunction translated as “and” is better translated as “namely”,
yielding “the law of your God, namely, the law of the king”. A Babylonian document
recording the sale of a slave mentions “datu sari”, the king’s law, but it does not imply
a legal code, for any law given the imprimatur of the king was the king’s law. The
authoritative Cambridge Ancient History denies any unequivocal evidence of the
implementation of an imperial legal code in the time of the Achaemenids.
The nature of law, passed down from the Akkadian culture into the Elamite and
Babylonian ones, and held by Cyrus and Darius, was that of the king’s commands
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expressed as decrees to promote God’s will, or “arta”, the fundamental orderliness
that even God was subject to.
In the ancient Near East, any law was based on divine legitimation and so involved
P Frei, Persia and Torah (Ed J W Watts)
religion.

Kings ruled in the name of a god, and, if the law of a god could possibly clash with the
law of a king, the people would consider the god to have it right and not the king.
Plenty of religious people today still, Christians as well as Moslems, put their
conception of the law of God before the law of the land. Eastern potentates could not
have endured two separate and possibly conflicting laws operating simultaneously.
The Persian shahs were not at all tolerant of the daeva religions, the religions of the
evil gods, manifested by opposition to the agent of the God of Heaven, the Persian
king. If any such group of people had defied the king, they would have been punished
as being influenced by evil daevas. [†A MODERN EXAMPLE. The very same argument
was used by our Christian leaders Bush and Blair against the Moslems who defied
their exploitative policy in the middle east. Dare one say, “Plus ça change”?] It follows
that the laws of any local God were necessarily the laws of the king so long as the king
saw nothing in their application that contradicted his will. Once they did, they were
illegal and were punished.
The Persian authorities needed a legal document containing the basic customs and
laws of the community living in Judea to grant religious and political autonomy on a
clear juridical basis to this province.
J L Ska

M A Dandamaev and V G Lukonin thought the Persians accepted localities into the
empire as pseudo-autonomous regions subject to the overriding royal judicial system.
The regions were bound to fidelity by political, economic, and religious laws obliging
them to do certain t