Persian Policy and the Yehud Community During Nehemiah

Varia Historia, Belo Horizonte, vol. 38, n. 78, p. 825-859, set/dez, 2022

This article aims at providing a brief overview of the historiographic writings on Achaemenid taxation, showing how the thesis of overtaxation influenced our understanding of Neh. 5 and Persian Yehud in the 5th century BCE. It describes how it was once widely accepted that overtaxation led to social and economic instability in many peripheral areas of the Achaemenid Empire, including Yehud. According to traditional scholarship, the narrative of Neh. 5 described how the local governor acted to mitigate this crisis by granting temporary tax and debt relief to small farmers. The author then moves to discuss how recent scholars questioned that long-established view, highlighting the biblical source’s rhetorical nature and the logical inconsistencies of the economic explanations used to describe this putative crisis. Finally, this article faces the question of a supposed economic calamity arising in Yehud under Persian hegemony and provides some clues to reevaluate the biblical narrative, particularly in light of recent studies concerning the Persian Empire’s economy and taxation. It supports to some extent the reading of Neh. 5 in an Achaemenid historical context.

Studia Orientalia Electronica 9/2 - Special Issue: Identity and Empire in the Ancient Near East Guest editor: Gina Konstantopoulos, 2021

The goal of this article is to draw attention to a seemingly strange, generative pattern that, at times and under certain conditions, has shaped socially shared worlds of imagination among subordinate groups within imperial or hierarchically asymmetric structures of power, especially among "retainer" groups who saw themselves as a "cultural elite" of the subordinate group. I am referring to a generative pattern that in a significant number of such groups, across time and space, has led to constructions of worlds of imagination, and vicarious participation in them through readings or other social acts of imagination that involved "bracketing the empire out." The article focuses on the world of the literati of late Persian Yehud/Judah, and especially the bracketing out of Ramat Rahel, the most obvious and monumental, explicit, imperial site in the province, but a number of various examples from diverse historical and geographical contexts are also brought to bear to make a point that this is a well-instantiated pattern. The article then concludes with a discussion of what was often gained by acts of imagination and memory involved in bracketing out "empire" and under which circumstances such acts tended to be historically likely.

in Johannes Unsok Ro (ed.), From Judah to Judaea: Socio-economic Structures and Processes in the Persian Period, Sheffield, Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012, 4-53., 2012

This paper traces the development of three neighboring geo-ethnic units that existed in the southern Levant during and after the Persian Period: Judea, Samaria and Idumea. All three groups are the successors of Iron-Age states that were conquered and destroyed by the great Mesopotamian empires. All three groups underwent some form and measure of exile/displacement of population, of importation of foreign inhabitants, of destruction of urban centers and of rural settlements, of extreme social and economic changes, and of the disbandment of their former political structures. All three groups were reconstituted and re-formed during the Persian Period, and at least by the early Hellenistic Period were recognized as three specific ethne, each with its own autonomous self-governance within the Ptolemaic and then the Seleucid realms. There were, however, also significant differences between the three. Their specific histories, the time and manner in which the original Iron-Age states were terminated, imperial policy at the time, the fate of their inhabitants and of their land and many additional factors, all contributed to the formation of three very different groups, that emerged from the Persian Period into the Hellenistic world in different ways, and ultimately set out for very different destinies.

Palamedes. A Journal of Anciet History, 2020

The article juxtaposes the process of law codification that took place in Rome in the mid-5th century BCE under the so-called Law of the Twelve Tables and the codification of law that took place around the same time in Palestine, known as Deuteronomy. According to the reconstruction of events in Rome, the codification of laws involved an attempt to limit the judicial omnipotence of the elite, due to pressure from a new elite that sought to diminish the power of the old elite. The text asks whether analogous political mechanisms could have led to the codification of law in the form of Deuteronomy, and if so, how to define the group whose judicial omnipotence would be curtailed.

The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible Edited by Brad E. Kelle and Brent A. Strawn, 2020

Biblical scholars today recognize the long Persian period (550-332 BCE) as the time when an early form of the biblical text approached canonical status. Yhwh religion-at least in its elite form-evolved from a tradition largely based on temple and kingship into one framed by control of a sacred text. While the title of this essay could imply that only Yehud (Judea) is of relevance to Yhwh religion and the historical books of the Bible, this period should be understood in international terms. New textual evidence for previously unknown Yahwist communities in Babylonia and Idumea are a case in point. Elites in Yh wh-worshiping communities situated across the Persian Empire from Egypt to Persia, and not just in Yehud or Shomron (Samaria), communicated with each other. The biblical books written or set in the Persian period developed within this international context, one that included debate over claims to be the true "Israel."

Hermathena, 2018

It is an axiom of the ancient world that politics and religion were inseparable; the example of the urban elite of Babylon and their response to the rise of the Persian Empire in the sixth century BCE is a case in point. The defection of King Nabonidus from the patronage of the chief god, Marduk, to that of the moon god, Sîn, and his mismanagement of domestic religious policy pre-empted a religious schism in the Babylonian ruling class that resulted in the complicity of some elite groups in the transition of sovereignty to the Persian invader Cyrus the Great. This article treats the unravelling of Nabonidus' relationship with the Marduk cult in the decade prior to the Persian assault and then turns to the religious motivations of responses by Nabonidus' most powerful subjects at the time of the fall of Babylonia.