The Oxford History of the Biblical World (64 page)

In contrast to this picture of life as it developed among the Judeans in Babylonia is the one that can be pieced together concerning the exiled community in Egypt. Only scant information is available on the refugees who had fled southward after the murder of Gedaliah at Mizpah. The military leaders responsible for the assassination considered Egypt a safe haven from Babylonian reprisal, and towns in both Upper and Lower Egypt became home to many of them. They may have joined other Judeans already living in the Nile Valley; besides those who during hard times looked to Egypt as a natural sanctuary, one should not forget that soldiers from Judah had fought in the ranks of the Assyrian army when it invaded Egypt close to a century earlier, and some of their number may have stayed on and settled there. Jeremiah settled in Tahpanhes in the eastern delta, where he continued to provoke the anger of his fellow Judeans, on one occasion over their continued worship of the “queen of heaven” (Jer. 44).

Nothing is known of this southern Diaspora scattered about Egypt, save for the small community at Elephantine, an island in the Nile just north of the First Cataract, near modern Aswan. A collection of Aramaic ostraca and papyri dating from the end of the fifth century
BCE
discovered on the island contains the records of a military garrison of Judeans in the employ of the Persians. In addition to legal deeds concerning the private affairs of individuals (marriage and divorce, sales and purchases), a memorandum discussing the proper observance of the Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread is of particular note. Unlike their former compatriots in Babylonia, however, the Judeans at Elephantine served the God of Israel at a temple where animal sacrifices were offered, and there is also some evidence that they reverenced Aramean deities. Yet this significant difference in religious practice did not alienate them from the leaders in Judah and Samaria, to whom they appealed to intercede on their behalf before the Persian authorities concerning the reconstruction of their house of worship. Still, the ex-Judeans at Elephantine were passed over by history until their rediscovery in modern times, when their affairs were reconstructed as an exotic footnote.

For the most part, the Neo-Babylonian empire was dominated by two outstanding rulers, Nebuchadrezzar (604–562
BCE
) and Nabonidus (556–539). While the former took up the challenge of reestablishing Mesopotamian rule over the entire Near East after the demise of Assyria and left a record of conquest abroad and of building at home, the latter forsook his capital for a desert oasis, then lost it without a battle to
Cyrus the Persian. Among the Judean exiles, it was Nebuchadrezzar whose name was incised in the collective memory. Around this king who had razed Jerusalem and had deported Judah to Babylonia, a store of derisive and derogatory tales inevitably grew up, though some of them had originally been associated with Nabonidus.

The last Babylonian monarch, Nabonidus, was probably not of Chaldean ancestry. His energetic support of the moon-god Sin and his cult center in the Syrian city of Haran suggest Aramean extraction. His mother had been a lifelong devotee of Sin. That this outsider could take the throne points up the instability in post-Nebuchadrezzar Babylon. During his first years, Nabonidus fought in northern Syria and the west, after which he abruptly departed Babylon for Tema in the north Arabian Desert. There he tarried for at least ten years of self-imposed isolation. Crown Prince Bel-shar-usur (the biblical Belshazzar) administered affairs in Babylon during his father’s absence. One official duty, however, he could not fulfill. The annual New Year’s festival, during which the king “took the hand of Marduk,” Babylon’s chief deity, had to be postponed in his absence, to the displeasure of the god’s priesthood.

While the Babylonian king seems to have busied himself with protecting and even developing trade centers in the west, a new power that would eventually challenge Babylonia arose on the Iranian plateau. Under the leadership of Cyrus of Parsua, who had rebelled against his Median overlord, the combined armies of Persia and Media fought their way across the entire Anatolian peninsula to conquer the Lydian capital of Sardis, not far from the Aegean Sea. By 546
BCE
, the Babylonian empire had been surrounded, and the choice of time and place to strike belonged to Cyrus.

These geopolitical developments may have spurred Nabonidus’s return to Babylon, though no answer to Cyrus’s ascendancy was forthcoming. The rupture between the king and the city’s leaders, especially the priests of Marduk, widened when he set about completing the constructions to Sin in Haran. For the year 539
BCE
, the Babylonian Chronicle records that the Persians defeated the Babylonian army at Opis and Sippar in late summer, after which “the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle” and Cyrus declared peace to all. Biblical tradition associated Babylon’s fall with Belshazzar in particular: the inscrutable handwriting on the palace that he observed was interpreted for him by Daniel as a message from God that his kingdom would be handed over to the Persian king (Dan. 5). From the tenor of the propagandistic inscription prepared for Cyrus by the priests of Marduk who welcomed the Persian in the name of their god, one wonders whether they had not acted in the end as a fifth column: Marduk “beheld with pleasure [Cyrus’s] good deeds and his upright heart, and therefore ordered him to march against his city Babylon…. Without any battle, he made him enter his town Babylon, sparing Babylon any calamity. He delivered into his hands Nabonidus, the king who did not worship him.” Such was the eloquent apologia signaling the orderly transfer of power to the Persian conqueror.

Among the Judean exiles in Babylonia, expectations ran high for the imminent fall of Nabonidus; they, too, looked to Cyrus as their deliverer. The emotion-charged words of an anonymous visionary, who held out hope for a speedy end of the exile, are preserved in the collection of speeches now appended (from chapter 40 on) to the prophecies of the eighth-century
BCE
Isaiah of Jerusalem. This “Second Isaiah” spoke of Cyrus as God’s “anointed,” raised up to subdue the nations so that in the
end Israel might be set free and Jerusalem rebuilt. Although Jeremiah’s predicted seventy-year enslavement to Babylon had not run its full course—the number was, in any case, a typologically large one indicating completeness—Second Isaiah offered comfort and solace to his audience, that Israel “has served her term, her penalty is paid” (Isa. 40.2). God will lead his people safely home through the desert, in a stunning reenactment of the Exodus. It was not unusual for Israel’s prophets to interpret contemporary events in terms of God’s plan for Israel. Isaiah and Jeremiah in their days had referred to Assyria and Babylonia as instruments of judgment; in like manner, the exilic Isaiah greeted Cyrus as the God-sent liberator of Israel.

Along with his consoling message to the exiles, the prophet addressed a challenge to the nations: only the Lord had announced in advance what the future had in store, and its execution would be proof of his Godhead. His call to give up idolatry, the futile worship of wood and stone “that cannot save” (Isa. 45.20), held out the promise that those who would embrace Israel’s faith would be welcomed in the new Zion:

And the foreigners who join themselves to the L
ORD
,
to minister to him, to love the name of the L
ORD
,
and to be his servants,

all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it,
and hold fast my covenant—

these I will bring to my holy mountain
and make them joyful in my house of prayer…

for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples.

(Isa. 56.6–7)

Just how many foreigners, if any, actually took up the call and attached themselves to the community of exiles cannot be determined. But one pole of the ideological debate that was to divide Judeans over the next several centuries had been staked out: no longer the exclusive preserve of Israel alone, her faith now opened its doors to converts from all the nations to worship the Lord in a rebuilt and resplendent Jerusalem. Some of these grand visions draw on landscape images which suggest that Second Isaiah himself may have been one of the early returnees who responded to Cyrus’s call:

The L
ORD
, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the L
ORD
his God be with him! Let him go up. (2 Chron. 36.23)

Avigad, Nahman.
Discovering Jerusalem.
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983. A firsthand account of the excavation of the Western Hill of Jerusalem and the important discoveries of occupation levels from the First and Second Temple periods.

——.
Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals.
Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1997. The most comprehensive collection to date of Israelite seals. Analyzes over 1,100 seals, shedding light on ancient onomastics, popular beliefs, and artistic styles.

Cogan, Mordechai, and Hayim Tadmor.
II Kings.
Anchor Bible, vol. 11. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1988. A translation of the biblical text, with philological and historical commentary.

Cogan, Morton.
Imperialism and Religion: Assyria, Judah and Israel in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries
B.C.E
.
Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series, 19. Missoula, Mont.; Scholars Press, 1974. Investigation of the religious policy practiced by Assyria’s rulers in the territories annexed to empire and in autonomous vassal states.

Cross, Frank Moore. “The Themes of the Book of Kings and the Structure of the Deuteronomic History.” In
Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic,
274–89. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973. Discussion of the major Israelite historical work of the First Temple period, its composition and double edition.

Eph’al, Israel. “The Western Minorities in Babylonia in the 6th-5th Centuries
B.C
.”
Orientalia 47
(1978): 74–90. Cuneiform documents from the Neo-Babylonian age show that self-organization and national identity were features common to many ethnic minorities who resided in Babylonia, not only the Judeans.

Greenberg, Moshe. “The Design and Themes of Ezekiel’s Program of Restoration.”
Interpretation
18 (1984): 181–208. An incisive study of the concluding section of the exilic prophet’s vision of the new Israel—the future Temple, its rules and activities, the land and its people—seen as a purposeful revision of existent priestly legislation.

Malamat, Abraham. “The Twilight of Judah: In the Egyptian-Babylonian Maelstrom.”
Supplements to Vetus Testamentum
28 (1975): 123–45. The shifting loyalties exhibited by Judah’s kings during the final decades of the monarchy are studied against the background of volatile international politics.

——, ed.
The Age of the Monarchies: Culture and Society.
The World History of the Jewish People, vol. 4, part 2. Jerusalem: Massada, 1979. Summary examinations of various aspects of Israelite life: literary creativity, language, religion, society, state administration, trade, crafts, home life.

Porten, Bezalel.
Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. Reconstruction of the life of a Diaspora community in the upper Nile Valley during the Persian period.

Stern, Ephraim. “Israel at the Close of the Monarchy: An Archaeological Survey.”
Biblical Archaeologist
38 (1975): 26–54. Assemblage of the material evidence from archaeological excavations in Israel and Jordan for the considerable cultural influence exerted by Assyria, and, to a lesser degree, by Babylonia, on the area.

Tadmor, Hayim. “Propaganda, Literature, Historiography: Cracking the Code of the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions.” In
Assyria 1995,
ed. S. Parpola and R. M. Whiting, 325–38. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1997. A critical review of the methods employed by historians in studying the style and structure as well as the ideology of Assyrian texts.

Ussishkin, David.
The Conquest of Lachish by Sennacherib.
Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, 1982. Richly illustrated album containing a survey of the archaeological finds from Lachish, as well as analysis of Assyrian reliefs depicting the siege of the city.

Weinfeld, Moshe.
Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. A linguistic and theological analysis of the Israelite school of thought responsible for most of the Bible’s historical literature.

The Persian Period