When the Persians patched together old myths to make a "holy book"

The more things change the more they stay the same.

When the Persians patched together old myths to make a "holy book" and
installed a priests to keep the people quiet and obedient, they were
thinking that they are really smart and their empire will last forever.

The more things change the more they stay the same.



http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/1828_934.pdf


Watts, James W., ed.

Persia and Torah: The Theory of Imperial
Authorization of the Pentateuch

Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 17
Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001.
Pp. xi + 228. Paper. $39.95. ISBN 1589830156.
R. Christopher Heard

Milligan College
Milligan College, TN 37682


Peter Frei's theory of Persian imperial authorization of local
legislation opened up to biblical scholars a fascinating line of
inquiry with regard to the origins of the Pentateuch. Frei sought to
demonstrate that the phenomenon of .imperial authorization,. whereby
legislation proposed by a local authority within the Persian Empire was
endorsed by the central government to the point of being taken up as
imperial law, was attested more or less strongly in a wide variety of
ancient texts. These texts included the biblical books of Ezra,
Nehemiah, and Esther. Frei's contention that the mission of Ezra
related to an imperial authorization of the laws Ezra was commissioned
to enforce spurred scholars such as Erhard Blum, Frank Crüsemann,
Joseph Blenkinsopp, and others to link the composition of the
Pentateuch to Persian legal initiatives in Yehud. The essays in this
volume assess, in various ways, Frei's thesis itself, its applicability
(if any) to Ezra's mission, and the relationship of these to the
origins of the Pentateuch.

The volume opens with a new English translation of Peter Frei's 1995
essay, .Persian Imperial Authorization: A Summary.. Here is a
straightforward presentation of the evidence that Frei believes
supports his thesis. This summary is a helpful introduction to those
unfamiliar with the theory, a helpful review for those already familiar
with the theory, and an indispensable summary for those whose access to
Frei's original presentation of his thesis is limited. This essay
consists mostly of a survey of documents that seem to Frei serviceable
as potential examples of or witnesses to instances of such
authorization. It should be noted that Frei's thesis is not itself an
attempt to explain the origins of the Pentateuch; rather, Frei takes
the Ezra traditions as evidence of the process of imperial
authorization.

Joseph Blenkinsopp answers his title question, .Was the Pentateuch the
Constitution of the Jewish Ethnos?. with a resounding .maybe..
Blenkinsopp argues that the legal terminology used in the biblical
books of Daniel, Esther, and Ezra.regardless of the historicity of the
events narrated in those books.is consistent with Persian usage
attested elsewhere. On Blenkinsopp's analysis, any legal enactments
anywhere within the Persian Empire could be appropriately labeled .the
law of the king,. as in the Ezra tradition. Among the evidence adduced
by Frei for imperial authorization, Blenkinsopp focuses most of his
attention on the Demotic Chronicle and its account of the activities of
Udjahorresne. Certain analogies can be drawn between those activities
and the activities of Ezra and Nehemiah as pictured in Ezra-Nehemiah,
suggesting that the Persian authorities might have undertaken a program
in Yehud similar to that undertaken in Egypt under Darius I.
Ultimately, Blenkinsopp does conclude that Ezra's mission was to
enforce Jewish law with the force of Persian law among the Jews in
Trans-Euphrates. Blenkinsopp further shows that Ezra-Nehemiah show
familiarity with both Deuteronomic and Priestly laws, though from what
sources and in precisely what forms cannot be known. Moreover, some of
Ezra's and Nehemiah's impositions correspond to no known pentateuchal
regulations or even contradict pentateuchal legislation. Thus the legal
contents of the Pentateuch might have been, but cannot be conclusively
shown to have been, bound by Persian authority on the Jews of Trans-
Euphratene. In any event, Blenkinsopp suggests, this would not
precisely be a case of Frei's imperial authorization, for Frei's model
requires an appeal for authorization by local authorities, which the
biblical materials (and, for that matter, the Demotic Chronicle) do not
attest.

In . .You Shall Appoint Judges.: Ezra's Mission and the Rescript of
Artaxerxes,. Lisbeth Fried accepts Ezra 7:21.26 as an authentic decree
by Artaxerxes II. From this starting point, and staying scrupulously
close to the wording of the decree, she describes Ezra's charge as the
appointment of Persians as judicial officials in Trans-Euphrates. Much
of the essay is devoted to an extremely helpful examination of Persian-
era jurisprudence, particularly the roles of judges, lawmakers, and law
compilations. Fried demonstrates that the concept of a .law code. to
which judges might appeal when making decisions is alien to the Persian
Empire. Persian-era judges enforced specific royal, satrapal, and
gubernatorial edicts (.the law of the king.) and decided cases
according to socially constructed concepts of right, fairness, and
justice (.the law of the god.). They did not, on Fried's evidence,
enforce local law codes or indeed law codes of any kind. Fried
demonstrates that the depiction of Nehemiah's jurisprudential
activities in Yehud closely conforms to this pattern of imperial
judicial hierarchies. His prohibition of business activities on the
Sabbath and of Judean marriages to non-Judeans were enabled by the
power of his office of governor of the province of Yehud, not by
application of any local law code.

Lester Grabbe's essay, .The Law of Moses in the Ezra Tradition: More
Virtual Than Real?. expresses skepticism about the historicity of Ezra
and his alleged commission from the Persian government. Grabbe argues
for the inauthenticity of the Artaxerxes firman in Ezra 7:12.26 on
linguistic and content grounds.
Sometimes Grabbe's claims seem overly impressionistic; for example, his
judgment about the implausibility of Ezra being given authority to
appoint judges should be weighed against Fried's arguments in this
volume. Nonetheless, Grabbe helpfully demonstrates that the books of
Ezra and Nehemiah preserve at least two different traditions about the
promulgation of the Mosaic law in Yehud, and only one of these involves
Ezra. After surveying a variety of legal texts from the Persian Empire,
Grabbe concludes that the picture in the Ezra tradition of the empire
imposing the Mosaic torah on Jews in Trans-Euphrates is at best an
exaggeration of a permissive Persian attitude toward local laws and
customs.

Gary Knoppers also answers his own title question, .An Achaemenid
Imperial Authorization of Torah in Yehud?. more in terms of a
permissive imperial stance toward local governance than as a Persian
initiative. Knoppers particularly examines Frei's suggestion that in
Ezra-Nehemiah the phrases .the law of your God. and .the law of the
king. refer to the same body of law. By comparing the use of these and
related terms in the Chronicler's presentations of David and
Jehoshaphat, Knoppers shows that these terms are unlikely to be used
synonymously in Ezra-Nehemiah. Beyond this, Knoppers offers a detailed
defense of imperial permissiveness over against imperial authorization.

Since the ascription of lawgiving, or at least law-authorizing,
activity in Egypt by Darius I is often cited as an analogy to the
biblical depictions of Ezra's activity, Donald Redford's essay, .The So-
Called .Codification. of Egyptian Law under Darius I,. provides
important cautions for the use of that analogy. Redford argues that the
category .lawgiver. is not native to Egyptian culture. Rather, the
category was imposed by Diodorus Siculus to .Hellenize. Egypt for a
Hellenic audience. Redford does not doubt that some sort of writing of
laws occurred in Egypt during the reign of Darius I, but he does
interrogate the sources to determine what sort of activity this might
have been. Redford shows that in Egypt, legal materials of various
kinds were written down with great frequency, published, read aloud,
and even classified according to genre. Yet evidence for
any .codification. or systematic ordering of principles to be used by
Egyptian judicial officials is lacking. Nevertheless, Redford judges
Egypt's legal system to have been perhaps the most sophisticated in the
Mediterranean world when it came under Darius's control. Egypt thus had
no need of any Persian-imposed law code, and Redford is skeptical that
Darius could have withheld .authorization. of Egypt's existing laws had
he wished to do so. Rather than an imperial authorization of Egyptian
law, Redford perceives in Darius's activity as described in the Demotic
Chronicle a translation of Egyptian law, especially those laws related
to the production of wealth, into Aramaic. The goal of this translation
was not to impose new laws on Egypt but to instruct the imperial
government in controlling Egyptian wealth.

Jean-Louis Ska rounds out the volume with . .Persian Imperial
Authorization.: Some Question Marks,. which summarizes a number of
problems with Frei's construct of imperial authorization. Ska points to
the wide disparity in the documents adduced by Frei and the lack of any
explicit mention of imperial authorization in any document as problems
with the idea of imperial authorization in general. Moreover, Ska notes
that the Jerusalem authorities. interventions on behalf of the
Elephantine cult and the sanctions defined in Ezra for breaking .the
law of God and the law of the king. both contradict pentateuchal
legislation, making it hard to believe that the torah was considered
legally binding on Jews in Trans-Euphratene generally or even in Yehud
more specifically. Indeed, the Pentateuch in its canonical form could
not have functioned very well as a real-life law code, because of its
own internal variety, and its extensive narratives deprive the
Pentateuch as a whole of the .look and feel. of a law code. Also, Ska
presents comparative evidence (some of it the same evidence offered by
Frei) that any official law codes would have been translated into
Aramaic, but no Aramaic Pentateuch is known. Ska thus rejects Frei's
thesis of imperial authorization and regards the Pentateuch instead as
the national archives of the temple community in Jerusalem. Appended to
Ska's article is a brief excursus very helpfully locating Frei's theory
of imperial authorization within the trend in central European exegesis
to try to link literary products with social or religious institutions.

Simply put, this volume is a .must read. for anyone interested in
Frei's theory of imperial authorization, the character and historicity
of Ezra's mission, or the origins of the Pentateuch. All of the essays
engage important document sources with rigor and care. The range of
possible approaches to these questions is well represented in the
volume, and readers will be rewarded many times over.







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