Postexilic Judean Politics from Persian to Ptolemaic Rule

Disclaimer: This paper was written under the influence of a rather restrictive prompt and a narrow selection of sources. For this reason I attribute any weakness contained herein to that issue with which my issue is great and brimming with frustration. Also, just because I have cited books, that does not mean I have read them. The only ones I have read entirely are the biblical ones listed there. Josephus and the other two I have just read the selections handed to me. I just happen to have detailed bibliographical information for all of them. Also, indentations are bizarre in transit between Word and 'Blogger, so I will not muss with them. Also, any alliteration in the title is purely coincidental. Any alliteration in the body of the text was probably intentional. Last, please remember that this will be graded by a sincere follower of the minimalist school.

As many Judean exiles began to return to their homeland in 539 BC, a distinctly new age in their history began, and with it also came a markedly new political order at the head of their society. From the start of this postexilic age in the sixth century BC to the decline of Ptolemaic rule of Palestine in the second century BC, the Judean rulers and elites were forced to both adapt to and resist the dynamic world around them, ever struggling with the limits of autonomy and subjugation. This conflicted relationship with the outside, taken as a whole, reflects intensely on the interior affairs of the Judeans just as well, for the relations between the Judean rulers and the outside could not fail to affect those rulers’ subjects. In order to approach this matter most effectively, a periodization should serve quite well, through which both the question of external relations and the question of internal relations among the Judean rulers shall be addressed in sequence. These are the Persian era, which is divided into the sixth century return and the mid-fifth century under Ezra and Nehemiah, and the Hellenistic era, which is divided into the brief fourth century conquest of Alexander and the third century rule of Ptolemaic Egypt.

Having conquered Babylon, Cyrus the Great of Persia sought to win the favor of his new subjects by reversing the deportation policies of his Babylonian predecessors, which generally involved removing the elite population so as to decapitate the potential for resistance. In the so-called Decree of Cyrus, a Persian inscription on a clay barrel, it is stated, “I returned to (these) sacred cities on the other side of the Tigris, the sanctuaries of which have been ruins for a long time, the images which (used to live therein…I also gathered all their former inhabitants and returned to them their habitations” (Pritchard 208). Indeed, this is an excellent summary of Cyrus’ policy from its own time and supposedly from the lips of Cyrus himself. Regardless of any validity to the latter thought, this remains a valid declaration of the Persian resettlement, and it tells precisely, though not directly, of the treatment granted to the returning Judeans. In the rationale of the pagan Persians, the gods were tied to the land, so it was only natural to return both the people and their gods whence they came. Of course, in this sweeping policy, the Judeans necessarily fell within the pagan conception, regardless of the very distinct theological differences in the Judean concept of the Deity.

The Judean God retained throughout the exile a close association with Jerusalem, but his tie remained with the people rather than the land. This is plainly observed in an episode in the book of Daniel, wherein Darius is said to have decreed that no one shall pray to anyone but himself, the king, for thirty days: “Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before” (Daniel 6:10). Thus Daniel associates God with Jerusalem but does not confine him there, as Daniel himself was living in Babylon. For this reason the Persian policy incorporated the Judeans without issue, Ezra presenting a text comparable to the Decree of Cyrus:

This is what Cyrus king of Persia says:

'The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you—may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the LORD, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem. And the people of any place where survivors may now be living are to provide him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, and with freewill offerings for the temple of God in Jerusalem' (Ezra 1:2-4)

The Judeans were allowed to return to their homeland, and they were to restore their ancestral temple where it had stood before. As far as the Persians were concerned, this was another people restoring their god to its home. As far as the Judeans were concerned, Cyrus was practically a messianic figure for ending the exile at last.

Immediately following the exile, then, the Judeans were on excellent terms with their Persian overlords, but interior and local strife was far from nonexistent. The Persian administration may have commanded the Judeans’ fellow subjects west of the river to be altogether helpful (Ezra 1:4), this does not mean they were. Ezra records that the enemies of Judah, surrounding peoples, “…hired counselors to work against them and frustrate their plans during the entire reign of Cyrus king of Persia and down to the reign of Darius king of Persia” (Ezra 4:5). In reference to the temple construction, he details how regional officials sent a letter to King Darius I, causing him to order the construction to a stop (Ezra 5:3-9). At the last, though, Ezra records that Cyrus’ declaration was found, and that the Persian crown was once again showering great favor on the Judeans, including royal funding for the restoration, according to Cyrus’ declaration (Ezra 6:1-12). Here, then, is visible the consistent loyalty to the Persian king demonstrated by the Judeans as an amicable and unobtrusive force and an authority over that of hostile fellows also under the crown. Indeed, the very officials responsible for the letter were brought to aid in the restoration effort under the orders of Darius I.

In the face of the troubles just mentioned, however, there did indeed exist considerable internal trouble over the restoration of the temple. When the external pressures against the temple construction compelled the task’s cessation, it was at first an internal issue before the external support of the Persian king was returned. The forces behind the continuation of the temple’s construction were the prophets Haggai and Zechariah (Ezra 5:1). Of course, not they alone drove the construction effort but their success in convincing Zerubbabel the royal governor and Joshua the high priest to resume it, even in defiance of royal orders: “So the LORD stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and the spirit of Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and the spirit of the whole remnant of the people. They came and began to work on the house of the LORD Almighty, their God, on the twenty-fourth day of the sixth month in the second year of King Darius” (Haggai 1:14-15). In this case, the internal order of Judea is at strife with its Persian master, and indeed it is from strife with the Persians that the internal troubles that brought Haggai and Zechariah into action arose. The internal and external are inseparable, a point taken much further under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah.

Nehemiah was unquestionably a man of power, as it is noted in the book bearing his name, “…I was cupbearer to the king” (Nehemiah 1:11), unquestionably an authority close to the Persian sovereign. His association with Judea is perhaps the most direct linking of Judean internal affairs with the policies of the Persian crown. He would become, after all, the governor of Judea in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes (Nehemiah 5:14), a direct regional authority of the Persian Empire, and furthermore, Judea was separated from Samaria and made its own province at this time, giving it far greater independence and autonomy, the governor being one of its own. Furthermore, Persian allowance and even encouragement of Judean practices, wisely granted and in line with the usual procedure of Persian law, comes forth in Ezra himself. In the book of Ezra, it is recorded that Ezra was sent with any exiles desiring to accompany with orders to establish a legal system in Judea under the Law of Moses. In the letter with which Ezra was sent, King Artaxerxes wrote:

And you, Ezra, in accordance with the wisdom of your God, which you possess, appoint magistrates and judges to administer justice to all the people of Trans-Euphrates—all who know the laws of your God. And you are to teach any who do not know them. Whoever does not obey the law of your God and the law of the king must surely be punished by death, banishment, confiscation of property, or imprisonment. (Ezra 7:25-26)

True, this was all part of the Persian policy enunciated in the time of Cyrus, but for the Judeans, recently granted an independent province, it was surely striking to then be allowed to enforce their own law, rooted in their own tradition. As with any social change, though, the enforcement and interpretation of the Law of Moses under Ezra and Nehemiah’s reestablishment of Judean society had its difficulties, as it shall be seen.

As expectation would have it, the policies of Ezra and Nehemiah, though sanctioned rulers at the highest levels of their society, were not without opposition from Judea’s adversaries without as well as from within. These local and internal struggles go hand in hand, as the bulk of the troubles tended by Nehemiah consisted of local, outside influences seeping into internal affairs, challenging the renewing Judean autonomy. There is scarcely a better example of this than Nehemiah’s first major pursuit in Judea, the reconstruction of the walls. Surrounding authorities, named as Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arab (Nehemiah 2:19), are noted to have troubled the effort at every turn, and they continued to harass the Judeans even unto the wall’s completion. The book of Nehemiah impresses upon the reader that they were a constant source of threats and treachery, telling tale of all manner of deceit and underhanded practices in attempting to discredit Nehemiah and undermine his leadership (Nehemiah 6:1-14). It does indeed make sense that surrounding officials would desire regional superiority, and it is the reflection of this struggle to subjugate any rise in Judean power seen here from the Judean perspective. It also effectively vilifies the foreigners as pernicious not only to the underlying aims for autonomy, but also as morally subverted and thereby contrary to all things righteous and Judean.

Also prominently featured is the issue of intermarriage with foreigners, the dangers of which threatened to pollute the purity of the Jewish bloodline and integrate the Jews and to integrate them out of any independent existence. This was not without precedent. After the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BC and deported its elite population (II Kings 17), the land was resettled, and both the people there and their beliefs became integrated (Antiquities, IX. 288-291), this being the core of the tensions between Judea and Samaria in postexilic times, as the first century AD Jewish, Roman historian Josephus notes in his Antiquities. The focus of Ezra and Nehemiah, of course, was within Judea, which the Babylonians did not resettle following the deportation of the Judean elites. Though this kept Judea from Samaria’s fate during the exile, the returning, elite exiles had spent all their lives in the lands of outsiders and around non-Jews. Certainly, also, it is the practice of elite populations to mingle with and marry their children into other powerful families. This appears to have been the case in fifth century Judea when, in asserting Judean isolation, “…Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, ‘You have been unfaithful; you have married foreign women, adding to Israel's guilt. Now make confession to the LORD, the God of your fathers, and do his will. Separate yourselves from the peoples around you and from your foreign wives’” (Ezra 10:10-11). Indeed, this problem is noted among the returned exiles, not among the throngs that the Babylonians had left in Judea all along, implying quite distinctly the class from which the offenders came, or at least the offenders that raised the ire of Ezra and Nehemiah. Thus it was their aim in enforcing these marital restrictions to keep the rulers of the Judean society, especially the priests, independent within themselves, both for the communal survival of the society and certainly with potential problems with future inheritances in mind, as well.

This disciplining of Judean high society was by no means limited to the marriage issue, though. The decrees against usury also played very prominently in the ruling classes, as Nehemiah decried the apparently significant trouble wrought upon Judean society by its widespread practice. First describing the dire straits of poverty, the book of Nehemiah recalls, “I pondered them in my mind and then accused the nobles and officials. I told them, ‘You are exacting usury from your own countrymen!’ So I called together a large meeting to deal with them” (Nehemiah 5:7). Further complicating the matter was that the indebted had begun to sell their children into slavery in foreign lands, which was obviously entirely unacceptable to the likes of Nehemiah. Indeed, in an isolationist society struggling to cast out foreign influence, the loss of population to foreigners would prove to be terribly injurious, and the fact that it was imposed by completely internal forces seems the ultimate insult to top it all off. Once again, the enforcement of the Law of Moses and its interpretive application to the situation at hand served the unifying and segregating ends of Ezra and Nehemiah, those representatives of both Persian authority and of Judean independence.

When the Persian Empire fell before Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, the Judeans found themselves under a new, Hellenistic master. Josephus gives a romanticized account of Alexander’s encounter with Jerusalem in his Antiquities with a simultaneous praise of Judean virtue and strike against Samaritan duplicity. He first describes how a dream of Alexander’s compelled him to bow before the Judean God at the sight of the high priest in his vestments, who had been commanded in a dream of his own to go out of the city therein with a great multitude to meet Alexander (Antiquities, XI. 331-335). Afterward, Alexander showed great favor to the Judeans, granting them all manner of freedoms to maintain the traditional customs allowed under the Persians, even allowing some to join his army with the same promise (Antiquities, XI. 338). Now, in this situation, Josephus says that the Samaritans broke their oath of loyalty to the Persians as soon as Alexander’s approaching victory became evident, whereas the Judeans would not break their own oath even in the face of Alexander’s army (Antiquities, XI. 315-321), highlighting the continued hostilities between Judea and Samaria, regardless of the ruler to which they might be subject. Whatever the details, the Judeans received favorable treatment from Alexander’s administration, this much is granted. Indeed, there was scarcely any immediate change in the Judean way of life between Persian and Greek rule, excepting the destination of their tribute. Thus the next notable progression would be the continued development of the Hellenistic world under Ptolemaic Egypt, the Diadochic kingdom that gained control of Judea following Alexander’s death.

Under Ptolemaic rule, new issues did indeed come into being among the Judeans as the Judean elites assumed positions of power in the new order, one known for the prevalence of bribery and for its system of tax-farming. In addition, the period was defined by consistent conflict between Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid Empire, a conflict which extended into the world of the Judean elites, dividing many between factions of Ptolemy supporters and Seleucid supporters. The latter point is visible in the life of Hyrcanus, as recorded in Josephus’ Antiquities. Hyrcanus became a favorite of Ptolemy essentially by bribery with his father’s money (Antiquities, XII. 216-221), and Josephus writes that this greatly incensed his brothers, to the point that they met him in battle, causing him to flee across the Jordan (Antiquities, XII. 222-223). There he constructed a fortress, where he lived out the remainder of his life until committing suicide in the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanies around the year 168 BC. Josephus informs his readers that Hyrcanus’ reasoning behind killing himself was his “seeing how great was the power which Antiocus had, and fearing he might be captured by him and punished for what he had done to the Arabs…” (Antiquities, XII. 235-236). Just as all hope was lost for Ptolemaic Egypt to regain control of Judea and its surroundings; all hope for Hyrcanus was also lost. This rather direct tie between Hyrcanus’ conflict and the conflict between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids is strongly indicative of a mirrored factional struggle on the same grounds among the Judean elites. Again it is outside meddling bringing strife among the Judeans, but internal struggle fuels its own flame.

Before this abrupt conclusion with the coming of Seleucid rule, though, there are indeed interactions between the Judeans and the Ptolemaic rulers to be considered, particularly in relation to the common elitist practices of bribery and tax-farming, the two of which often go hand in hand. Among the Zenon papyri, for instance, there are featured the details of gifts for both Apollonios in one letter and to King Ptolemy in another. These letters came from a certain Toubias, a Judean of notable importance to be able to address a letter directly to Ptolemy himself (Tcherikover 126-129). It is worth asking, for what other purpose would he send these luxurious gifts but to keep the favor of his superiors? Furthermore, Hyrcanus’ father, Joseph, made his fortune as a tax-farmer, according to Josephus’ less than historical, but not entirely unhistorical narrative. Joseph began to win over Ptolemy when “he himself…hospitably received the envoy sent by Ptolemy; and after presenting him with valuable gifts and entertaining lavishly for many days, he sent him on ahead to the king…” (Antiquities, XII. 165). Invariably, this prompted the envoy to speak very highly of Joseph with the king, a fact of which Joseph took full advantage when he charmed the king into granting him tax-farming rights later on. Of course, also, Hyrcanus later mirrored his father’s actions on a far more grandiose scale, as noted. The heroic romanticizing of these characters by Josephus goes very far in showing the general acceptance of the aforementioned system, not at all unlike that of the Romans of Josephus’ day, among the Judean elites. It was not a matter of opposing its unsavory aspects; it was a matter of maintaining the Law of Moses as far as the political order would reasonably allow.

Indeed, by no means does Josephus concede such a thought as that the Judean nobles might be falling heavily under foreign influences. On the contrary, he provides the episode between Joseph and his brother, Solymius’ daughter. Joseph, greatly desiring a dancing-girl he saw while dining with Ptolemy in Alexandria, requested that his brother, whose daughter they had taken to Alexandria to find a suitable, Jewish husband from the large Jewish population in that city as part of the dispersion, help him cover this unlawful amorous pursuit. Instead, Joseph’s brother sought to protect Joseph from scandal, and instead provided his own daughter to the drunken Joseph (Antiquities, XII. 186-188). Eventually, she became his second wife and the mother of Hyrcanus. This surviving preoccupation against foreigners but not against a lesser sin which could go unnoticed demonstrates most of all the importance of appearance among these elites. Whereas nothing lawful could come of Joseph’s relationship with the dancing-girl, a legitimate marriage was produced from the brother’s trick, and this is all that would be seen. In general terms, this meant that they could be functionally a part of the foreign, in this case Ptolemaic, society, while retaining the tie to Judea and its customs, remaining distinctly Jewish. This is the strange synthesis of the internal morality dictated by the Law with the external politics of the foreign rulers.

Even upon the return from Babylon, the Judeans were faced with a conflict between external politics and their internal affairs, and this played significantly upon the Judean ruling class, which was necessarily part of both systems, even in contradiction. At that time, a hostile world lay all around, and the Persian Empire’s policy was the province’s protection. Thanks to its overlord was it able to build itself up as a distinct entity, not in spite of it. Rather, in spite of its neighbors did Judea resurrect itself independently. As time drew on, Persian policy continued to align with Judean aims, as the Persian Empire made Judea its own province, appointed Nehemiah to be its governor, and sent Ezra to establish its legal system, which he did according to the Law of Moses, of which he was called a scribe. The work of Ezra and Nehemiah at last ensured the continued existence of a place called Judea, inhabited by its own Judeans, and thisplace and its people continued to change beyond them, especially with the inundation of Hellenistic influences in volumes far greater than ever before after Alexander’s conquest. The Judean elites were then forced to adapt to or reject a new sort of society and a new set of rulers under the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty. As always, the question of foreign influence was essential to the Judeans’ approach to the situation, and the gamut of responses was concocted. None of this, however, on any account broke Judean society down. Not even the exile achieved such a feat as that. Instead, the Judean rulers were able to maintain throughout this period basically good relations with their superiors while simultaneously maintaining internal independence, even in the face of often incessant regional struggles or, later, factional strife. Though conflict was a constant, it seems that the advancement of this history depended upon it.

Bibliography

The Bible: II Kings, Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, Haggai. New International Version. Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan: 1984.

Josephus, Ralph Marcus tr. Jewish Antiquities. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1987.

Pritchard, James ed. The Ancient Near East. Volume 1, An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Princeton University Press, Princeton: 1958.

Tcherikover, Victor and Alexander Fuks, eds. Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1957.