All ancient history is speculative, and I'm paraphrasing a book whose title I forget - if I still have it I'll try and track it down.
I perhaps should have been more specific, pinning it down to the Ketuvim - the third part of the Tanakh which includes Esther, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah. Curse my use of generalised terms.
There is little doubt that there some strong political drivers to the content of these books - from Ezra and later Nehemiah's point-of-view it was to establish a claim on the lands occupied by the Samaritans who were - arguably - the true sons of Abraham and Moses. From the Persian point of view there was a need to impose stability, and to ensure that religious belief wasn't a cause for rebellion. Aligning the religions of vassal cities and states to those of the Shahr's own religion could well explain the Book of Esther, which essentially tells the Jews that the Achaemenid court is sympathetic to them. Whether true or not, there are records of many Samaritan petitions the the Persian king which tended to favour the Jews.
If the Shahr of Ezra is Xerxes, then the return of the Jews would be in 478 BC, less than two years after Battle of Salamis. This would make it a very bad time to release hostile settlers into the Levant, and a very good time to grant gifts to loyal subjects. Given the nature of Mesopotamian politics, there is no way that the worship of an independent religion would have been overlooked. So either Ezra and his successors worked to undermine the Shahr under his own nose when everything was working in their favour, or else there was some element of collusion. There are certainly traces of direct borrowing from Babylonian influences may be discerned, and things like the psalms and Hebrew apocalyptic literature display some very strong similarities.
Even the structure of worship is mirrored - the God of Jerusalem resides in a holy-of-holies at the centre of a city-state, and is seen as the creator god and a local god of local people at the same time. Mesopotamian culture strongly identified gods with cities, and their myths and legends strongly reflect the political travails experienced by the city.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-02-05 02:26 pm (UTC)I perhaps should have been more specific, pinning it down to the Ketuvim - the third part of the Tanakh which includes Esther, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah. Curse my use of generalised terms.
There is little doubt that there some strong political drivers to the content of these books - from Ezra and later Nehemiah's point-of-view it was to establish a claim on the lands occupied by the Samaritans who were - arguably - the true sons of Abraham and Moses. From the Persian point of view there was a need to impose stability, and to ensure that religious belief wasn't a cause for rebellion. Aligning the religions of vassal cities and states to those of the Shahr's own religion could well explain the Book of Esther, which essentially tells the Jews that the Achaemenid court is sympathetic to them. Whether true or not, there are records of many Samaritan petitions the the Persian king which tended to favour the Jews.
If the Shahr of Ezra is Xerxes, then the return of the Jews would be in 478 BC, less than two years after Battle of Salamis. This would make it a very bad time to release hostile settlers into the Levant, and a very good time to grant gifts to loyal subjects. Given the nature of Mesopotamian politics, there is no way that the worship of an independent religion would have been overlooked. So either Ezra and his successors worked to undermine the Shahr under his own nose when everything was working in their favour, or else there was some element of collusion. There are certainly traces of direct borrowing from Babylonian influences may be discerned, and things like the psalms and Hebrew apocalyptic literature display some very strong similarities.
Even the structure of worship is mirrored - the God of Jerusalem resides in a holy-of-holies at the centre of a city-state, and is seen as the creator god and a local god of local people at the same time. Mesopotamian culture strongly identified gods with cities, and their myths and legends strongly reflect the political travails experienced by the city.