The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (47 page)

The mighty Neo-Babylonian empire crumbled and was conquered by the Persians in 539
BCE
. In the first year of his reign, Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, issued a royal decree for the restoration of Judah and the Temple:

Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: 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 at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the L
ORD
, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem. (E
ZRA
1
:2–3)

A leader of the exiles named Sheshbazzar, described in Ezra 1:8 as “the prince of Judah” (probably indicating that he was a son of the exiled Davidic king Jehoiachin), led the first group of returnees to Zion. They reportedly carried with them the Temple treasures that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from Jerusalem half a century earlier. A list of returnees by town of origin, family, and number follows, about fifty thousand altogether. They settled in their old homeland and laid the foundations for a new Temple. A few years later another wave of returnees gathered in Jerusalem. Led by Jeshua the son of Jozadak and an apparent grandson of Jehoiachin named Zerubbabel, they built an altar and celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles. In a moving scene they began to rebuild the Temple:

And all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the L
ORD
, because the foundation of the house of the L
ORD
was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy; so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard afar. (E
ZRA
3
:11–13)

The people of Samaria—the ex-citizens of the northern kingdom and the deportees who were brought there by the Assyrians—heard about the beginning of the construction of the second Temple, came to Zerubbabel, and asked to join the work. But Jeshua the priest and Zerubbabel sent the northerners away, bluntly saying that “you have nothing to do with us in building a house to our God” (Ezra 4:3). The faction that had preserved itself in exile now believed that it had the divine right to determine the character of Judahite orthodoxy.

In resentment, “the people of the land” hindered the work, and even wrote to the Persian king, accusing the Jews of “rebuilding that rebellious and wicked city” and predicting that “if this city is rebuilt and the walls finished, they will not pay tribute, custom, or toll, and the royal revenue will be impaired . . . .you will then have no possession in the province Beyond the River.” (Ezra 4:12–16). Receiving this letter, the Persian king ordered a halt to the construction work in Jerusalem.

But Zerubbabel and Jeshua nevertheless continued the work. And when the Persian governor of the province learned about it and came to inspect
the site, he demanded to know who gave the permission to start rebuilding. He was referred to the original decree of Cyrus. According to the book of Ezra, the governor then wrote to the new king, Darius, for a royal decision. Darius instructed him not only to let the work continue, but also to defray all expenses from the revenue of the state, to supply the Temple with animals for sacrifice, and to punish whoever tries to prevent the implementation of the royal edict. The construction of the Temple was then finished in the year 516
BCE
. Thus began the era of Second Temple Judaism.

Another dark period of over half a century passed until Ezra the scribe, from the family of the chief priest Aaron, came to Jerusalem from Babylonia (probably in 458
BCE
). “He was a scribe skilled in the law of Moses which the L
ORD
the God of Israel had given . . . For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord” (Ezra 7:6,10). Ezra was sent to make inquiries “about Judah and Jerusalem” by Artaxerxes king of Persia, who authorized him to take with him an additional group of Jewish exiles from Babylon who wanted to go there. The Persian king provided Ezra with funds and judicial authority. Arriving in Jerusalem with the latest wave of returnees, Ezra was shocked to find out that the people of Israel, including priests and Levites, did not separate themselves from the abominations of their neighbors. They intermarried and freely mixed with the people of the land.

Ezra immediately ordered all the returnees to gather in Jerusalem:

Then all the men of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem. . . . And all the people sat in the open square before the house of God. . . . And Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, “You have trespassed and married foreign women, and so increased the guilt of Israel. Now then make confession to the L
ORD
the God of your fathers, and do his will; separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives.” Then all the assembly answered with a loud voice, ‘It is so; we must do as you have said. . . . “Then the returned exiles did so” (E
ZRA
10
:9–16).

Ezra—one of the most influential figures of biblical times—then disappeared from the scene.

The other hero of that time was Nehemiah, the cupbearer, or high court official, of the Persian king. Nehemiah heard about the poor state of the inhabitants of Judah and about Jerusalem’s terrible condition of disrepair. Deeply affected at this news, he asked the Persian king Artaxerxes to go to
Jerusalem to rebuilt the city of his fathers. The king granted Nehemiah permission and appointed him to the post of governor. Soon after arriving in Jerusalem (around 445
BCE
), Nehemiah set out on a nighttime inspection tour of the city and then summoned the people to join in a great, communal effort to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, so that “we may no longer suffer disgrace.” But when the neighbors of Judah—the leaders of Samaria and Ammon, and the Arabs of the south—heard about Nehemiah’s plans to fortify Jerusalem, they accused the Jews of planning an uprising against the Persian authorities and plotted to attack the city. Work on the wall continued to completion nonetheless. Nehemiah was also active in implementing social legislation, condemning those who extracted interest, and urging restitution of land to the poor. At the same time, he too prohibited Jewish intermarriage with foreign wives.

These rulings by Ezra and Nehemiah in Jerusalem in the fifth century
BCE
laid the foundations for Second Temple Judaism in the establishment of clear boundaries between the Jewish people and their neighbors and in the strict enforcement of the Deuteronomic Law. Their efforts—and the efforts of other Judean priests and scribes which took place over the one hundred and fifty years of exile, suffering, soul-searching, and political rehabilitation—led to the birth of the Hebrew Bible in its substantially final form.

The great scriptural saga woven together during the reign of Josiah, which told the story of Israel from God’s promise to the patriarchs, through Exodus, conquest, united monarchy, the divided states—ultimately to the discovery of the book of the Law in the Jerusalem Temple—was a brilliant and passionate composition. It aimed at explaining why past events suggested future triumphs, at justifying the need for the religious reforms of Deuteronomy, and most practically, at backing the territorial ambitions of the Davidic dynasty. But at the very moment when Josiah was about to redeem Judah, he was struck down by the pharaoh. His successors backslid into idolatry and small-minded scheming. Egypt reclaimed possession of the coast, and the Babylonians soon arrived to put an end to the national existence of Judah. Where was the God who promised redemption? While
most other nations of the ancient Near East would have been content to accept the verdict of history, shrug their collective shoulders, and transfer their reverence to the god of the victor, the later editors of the Deuteronomistic History went back to the drawing board.

Jehoiachin, the king exiled from Jerusalem in 597
BCE
and the leader of the Judahite community in Babylon, could have represented the last best hope for the eventual restoration of the Davidic dynasty. But the previously unchallenged belief that a Davidic heir would fulfill the divine promises could no longer be taken for granted in light of the catastrophe that had just occurred. Indeed, the desperate need to reinterpret the historical events of the preceding decades led to a reworking of the original Deuteronomistic History—in order to explain how the long-awaited moment of redemption, so perfectly keyed to the reign of Jehoiachin’s grandfather Josiah, had failed to materialize.

The American biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross long ago identified what he believed to be two distinct redactions, or editions, of the Deuteronomistic History, reflecting the difference in historical awareness before and after the exile. The earlier version, which is known in biblical scholarship as Dtr
1
, was presumably written during the reign of Josiah and was, as we have argued, entirely devoted to furthering that monarch’s religious and political aims. According to Cross and the many scholars who have followed him, the first Deuteronomistic History, Dtr
1
, ended with the passages describing the great destruction of idolatrous high places throughout the country and the celebration of the first national Passover in Jerusalem. That celebration was a symbolic replay of the great Passover of Moses, a feast commemorating deliverance from slavery to freedom under YHWH and anticipating Judah’s liberation from the new yoke of Egypt under Pharaoh Necho. Indeed, the original Deuteronomistic History recounts the story of Israel from the last speech of Moses to the conquest of Canaan led by Joshua to the giving of a new Law and a renewed conquest of the Promised Land by Josiah. It was a story with an ending of divine redemption and eternal bliss.

But catastrophe struck. Centuries of efforts and hopes proved to be in vain. Judah was again enslaved by Egypt—the same Egypt from which the Israelites had been liberated. Then came the destruction of Jerusalem, and with it a terrible theological blow: the unconditional promise of
YHWH to David of the eternal rule of his dynasty in Jerusalem—the basis for the Deuteronomistic faith—was broken. The death of Josiah and the destruction of Jerusalem must have thrown the authors of the Deuteronomistic History into despair. How could the sacred history be maintained in this time of darkness? What could its meaning possibly be?

With time, new explanations emerged. The aristocracy of Judah—including perhaps the very people who had composed the original Deuteronomistic History—were resettled in far-off Babylon. As the shock of displacement began to wear off, there was still a need for a history; in fact, the urgency for a history of Israel was even greater. The Judahites in exile lost everything, including everything that was dear to the Deuteronomistic ideas. They had lost their homes, their villages, their land, their ancestral tombs, their capital, their Temple, and even the political independence of their four-centuries old Davidic dynasty. A rewritten history of Israel was the best way for the exiles to reassert their identity. It could provide them with a link to the land of their forefathers, to their ruined capital, to their burned Temple, to the great history of their dynasty.

So the Deuteronomistic History had to be updated. This second version was based substantially on the first, but with two new goals in mind. First, it had briefly to tell the end of the story, from the death of Josiah to destruction and exile. Second, it had to make
sense
of the whole story, to explain how it was possible to reconcile God’s unconditional, eternal promise to David with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and the ouster of the Davidic kings. And there was an even more specific theological question: how was it possible that the great righteousness and piety of Josiah had been powerless to avert Jerusalem’s violent and bloody conquest?

Thus arose the distinctive edition known to scholars as Dtr
2
, whose closing verses (2 Kings 25:27–30) report the release of Jehoiachin from prison in Babylon in 560
BCE
(that means, of course that 560
BCE
is the earliest possible date for the composition of Dtr
2
). Its treatment of the death of Josiah, the reigns of the four last Davidic kings, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the exile displays almost telegraphic brevity (2 Kings 23:26–25:21). The most conspicuous changes are those that explain why Jerusalem’s destruction was inevitable, despite the great hopes invested in King Josiah. In insertions into Dtr
1
, a second Deuteronomistic historian added a condition to the previously unconditional promise to David
(1 Kings 2:4, 8:25, 9:4–9) and inserted ominous references to the inevitability of destruction and the exile throughout the earlier text (for example, 2 Kings 20:17–18). More important, he placed the blame on Manasseh, the archenemy of the Deuteronomistic movement, who ruled between the righteous kings Hezekiah and Josiah and who came to be portrayed as the wickedest of all Judahite kings:

And the L
ORD
said by his servants the prophets, “Because Manasseh king of Judah has committed these abominations, and has done things more wicked than all that the Amorites did, who were before him, and has made Judah also to sin with his idols; therefore thus says the L
ORD
, the God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such evil that the ears of every one who hears of it will tingle. And I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria, and the plummet of the house of Ahab; and I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. And I will cast off the remnant of my heritage, and give them into the hand of their enemies, and they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies, because they have done what is evil in my sight and have provoked me to anger, since the day their fathers came out of Egypt, even to this day.” (
2
K
INGS
21
:10–15)