Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period

Gard Granerød

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110453171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What was Judaean religion in the Persian period like? Is it necessary to use the Bible to give an answer to the question? Among other things the study argues that

• the religion practiced in the 5th c. BCE Elephantine community and which is reflected in the so-called Elephantine documents represent a well-attested manifestation of lived Persian period Yahwism,
• as religio-historical sources, the Elephantine documents reveal more about the actual religious practice of the Elephantine Judaeans than what the highly edited and canonised texts of the Bible reveal about the religious practice of the contemporary Yahwistic coreligionists in Judah, and
• the image of the Elephantine Judaism emerging from the Elephantine documents can revise the canonised image of Judaean religion in the Persian period (cf. A. Assmann).

The Elephantine Yahwism should not be interpreted within a framework dependent upon theological, conceptual and spatial concepts alien to it, such as biblical ones. The study proposes an alternative framework by approaching the Elephantine documents on the basis of N. Smart's multidimensional model of religion. Elephantine should not be exotified but brought to the very centre of any discussion of the history of Judaism.

1Introduction

1.1Problem and Hypotheses

What was Judaean religion in the Persian period like? And is it necessary to use the Bible to give an answer to this question?

Not surprisingly, generations of biblical scholars have not seldom resorted to biblical texts from or relating to the Persian period in order to answer this question and to find a historical scheme in accordance with which one could describe the religious developments. Some of these texts, like Ezra and Nehemiah, contain narratives about incidents that took place in the Persian province of Judah after the return of the Judaeans from Babylon after the exile. Others, like Haggai and Zechariah, contain prophecies addressed to the Judaeans or their leaders in Jerusalem, prophecies that explicitly are spoken in the Persian period. In addition, the question has been informed by biblical texts that biblical scholars date to the Persian period on the basis of the various methods that have developed during the last centuries of biblical criticism (for instance, Isa 56–66, 1–2Chr, and several psalms). The biblical text types in question have different tendencies. An attempt to answer the initial question on the basis of these sources will not give a coherent and univocal result. Nevertheless, I believe that I am on firm ground when stating that any reconstruction of Judaean religion in the Persian period that is made on the basis of the biblical sources alone (including both the texts’ face value and the critical research on the texts) will share certain characteristics. Some of them may be summarised thus:

–In the Persian period the worship of YHWH, and YHWH alone, became normative for the inhabitants of the province of Judah.

–In the Persian period the inhabitants of Judah considered themselves as the true religious heirs of the inhabitants of Israel and Judah of the monarchic period.

–In the Persian period the only true, legitimate cultic centre for the worship of YHWH was the temple of YHWH that had been rebuilt in the reconstructed city of Jerusalem.

–The Babylonian exile was, for better or worse, an epoch-making period in the history of Israelite and Judaean religion(s), and for that reason a number of scholars find no reason to abandon the dichotomy intrinsic in the distinction between the so-called preexilic period and the postexilic period.

–In the Persian period the Torah of YHWH revealed to Moses was about to become a religious source of utmost importance and eventually the source of religious authority par excellence.

–The Persian period was the formative period for much of the biblical literature. During this period religious texts other than the Torah (such as prophetic books) also gained an increased importance.

However, although the Hebrew Bible is an important source for the history of Judaean religion, the relationship of this collection of ideological and in part propagandistic texts to the religion that was actually lived and practiced by the Judaeans (and their predecessors) is complex. The texts of the Hebrew Bible do indeed offer templates that can be, and often actually are, used when reconstructing the history of Israelite and Judaean religion. Suffice it to mention the idea of the centralisation of the YHWH cult to Jerusalem. But, one should acknowledge that the biblical texts are ideological texts that themselves (or perhaps I should say: their authors) are in (fierce) dialogue with religious developments at the time they were written or edited. So, from a religio-historical perspective the biblical texts are part of the history of religion that they at the same time portray.

In this study I seek to approach the initial question concerning Judaean religion in the Persian period in a different way. An assumption that underlies this study is that religious diversity was characteristic of the history of Israelite and Judaean religion(s), as has been demonstrated in many recent contributions that are based on the various sources.1One particular example of lived Judaean religion in the Persian period is reflected in the many Aramaic texts that stem from or attest to the fifth-century BCE Judaean community at the Nile island of Elephantine.2This study takes as a point of departure the views

–that the religion practiced in the fifth-century BCE Elephantine community and which is reflected in, inter alia, the so-called Elephantine documents as a matter of fact represent a relatively well-attested manifestation of lived Judaean religion in the Persian period,

–that this lived religion can be characterised as a form of Yahwism, and

–that this particular form of Yahwism may even function as a window into the contemporary, lived Yahwism of the province of Judah in the Persian period.

I believe these assumptions are justified by several factors. First, the self-definition of the community in question shows that it considered itself a Judaean3 community. The Judaean [sic] community we meet in the Aramaic documents from ancient Egypt refers to itself as “the Judaean garrison” or simply “the Judaeans,” although its members also occasionally used the designation “Aramaeans.”4 This self-designation is used both by individuals in private letters and contracts and by the community as a whole in official letters. Moreover, particularly important is a letter sent by the leaders of the Elephantine community to various leading groups in the province of Judah (A4.7/A4.8 [two drafts of one and the same letter]). In the letter sent to the governor of Judah, which refers to a previous letter to “the nobles of Judah/ the Judaeans,” the leaders of the Elephantine community refer to themselves as “Judaeans,” that is, they use the same ethnicon. A student of Judaean religion in the Persian period should take this claim seriously. There is no reason to dismiss the community’s definition of itself as being Judaean, although the question of the origin of the community remains obscure.5 Quite to the contrary, an unbiased approach will have to regard the community and its members in accordance with their own self-definition: as Judaeans, who admittedly happen to be living in Upper Egypt, but who in spite of that call themselves Judaeans, and for that reason have to be treated as such.

Second, that it is appropriate to characterise the religion reflected in the Elephantine documents as Yahwism is justified in several ways. The centre of the community’s religious life was the temple of YHW in Elephantine, YHW being the god who is sometimes called“the god who dwells in Elephantine.” Etymologically, there is no doubt that YHW is identical with the biblical god YHWH, the main god of the people of Israel and Judah in the monarchic period and the god that the Judaeans (and the Samaritans) worshipped in the Persian period. This overall impression is not threatened by the fact that several documents clearly show that Judaeans in Elephantine were by no means “monotheists” or even “monolatrists,” to use modern and probably also anachronistic terms.6 Even if one may speak about a Judaean pantheon at Elephantine,7 the personal names from Elephantine also justify that the lived religion was a form of Yahwism. The divine name used in the theophoric names of the individuals associated with the Elephantine community is YHW.

Third, the Elephantine community stood in contact with Jerusalem. Although Elephantine was located on the traditional southern border of Egypt, it was not an isolated outpost on the fringe of the world. The Nile was navigable all the way from the Nile delta to Elephantine. A journey from Elephantine to Jerusalem might take approximately one month.8 In comparison, according to the Bible it took Ezra around four months to travel from Babylon to Jerusalem. In terms of travel time, the Judaeans in Elephantine were much closer to Jerusalem than was the priest-scribe who is often accorded great importance in the (re‐)formation of Judaean religion in the Persian period. Whereas this may indicate potential contact and demonstrate that the historical-geographical conditions for travelling between Elephantine and Jerusalem were more favourable than those between Babylon and Jerusalem, it is also evidenced by documents from Elephantine that there was actually a two-way contact between Jerusalem and Judah (and Samaria). Not only did the Judaeans in Elephantine know the names of the tenuring governors of Judah and Samaria (in this case, even the names of the sons of the governor) and the high priest in Jerusalem (cf. A4.7 par.), they also wrote letters to them and even got a reply (although the Judaeans in Elephantine regret that the Jerusalem high priest and his colleagues did not respond to their initial letter).

Fourth, the Elephantine documents are contemporary sources and probably even more representative of the lived and practiced Yahwism of the Persian period than are the biblical texts. Any source, whether it is a biblical or an epigraphic one, has a certain tendency to reflect the author’s biases, regardless of whether or not this was intentional. It is a crucial part of a historical hermeneutics to try to understand a given source in light of the (historical, cultural, religious etc.) context of its author. A position often found in biblical scholarship is that it was the priestly circles of Judah that provided the main environment for the literary culture of the Persian period. Against this assumption it can be claimed that we simply do not know in what niches of the Israelite-Judaean society the biblical traditions were nourished before they were eventually codified.9A prerequisite for scribal activity was an economical surplus, and as far as Jerusalem is concerned the temple itself may or may not have been the primary employer of literary scribes. Notwithstanding, even on economic grounds alone it is not likely that all segments of the population took part in the literary culture that fostered what we today know as the received biblical traditions. As far as the biblical sources for the Persian period are concerned, they all reflect a Jerusalem centrism in the sense that they all somehow relate to the temple of YHWH there. On the one hand, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah reveal an enthusiasm towards its rebuilding. On the other hand, Malachi offers terse criticism of the priesthood connected to the Jerusalem temple. In either case, the biblical sources are centred around the Jerusalem temple. They presuppose a centralisation of the cult of YHWH, or to put it differently, they seem to take a form of mono-Yahwism as the norm. This kind of mono-Yahwism centred around the temple in Jerusalem has also quite often in the scholarship been taken to be the default manifestation of Yahwism in this particular period. However, from a historical perspective the big question is to what extent the biblical sources reflect Judaean religion beyond the milieus of the authors and the milieu of those who passed on the biblical tradition.10

The biblical sources have a complicated, and often obscure, literary history. When, how and why did someone compose them? In most cases the texts do not tell and the answers have to be ferreted out. In light of this, then, it should come as no surprise that there is no scholarly consensus about the literary history of the biblical texts. Despite the fact that the Bible has been studied from a historical-critical perspective for many centuries, a number of historical questions pertaining to the Hebrew Bible remains to be solved: the extent of the redactional reworking of the texts, the guiding principles that underlie these reworkings, in what (geographical, social, religious) environments the biblical texts started being promulgated as normative texts, and so on.11

Epigraphic material like the Elephantine papyri is by no means exempt from critical-hermeneutical questions. Such texts also have to be interpreted in light of their provenance, their genre, the setting in which they assumedly functioned at the outset, and so on. Nevertheless, the provenance of the Elephantine papyri is much easier to discern than that of the biblical texts. The Elephantine papyri are in most cases either written by the members of the Judaean community at Elephantine themselves or by professional scribes hired by them. In other words, considered as historical sources for Yahwism in the Persian period, they are closer to the experiences and everyday lives of the people that they narrate of than are the biblical texts.

In sum, I will argue that the religion reflected in the Elephantine documents offers a historically well-attested manifestation of one form of lived Yahwism in the Persian period. The Elephantine documents show that poly-Yahwism did not cease in connection with, say, the religious reforms of the Judaean king Josiah in the seventh century BCE (provided that 2Kgs 22–23 render a historically accurate core). The Elephantine documents give the opportunity to focus on one particular dimension of the diverse Persian-period Yahwism practiced among Judaeans in Judah and in the diaspora, namely the one followed at Elephantine.

1.1.1Excursus: The Distance between Elephantine and Jerusalem

In the ancient world, most communication between Egypt and Palestine went thro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Social Dimension
• 3 The Material Dimension
• 4 The Ritual Dimension
• 5 The Mythic and Narrative Dimension
• 6 The Ethical Dimension
• 7 Conclusion and Outlook
• Bibliography
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Aramaic, Hebrew, Old Persian and Greek Words
• Index of Ancient Names, Deities and Epithets
• Index of Modern Authors
• Endnotes