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ZAKHORIUM
PTEN

§ Debates · Ch. 2 · Becoming the People of the Book

Did Persia shape the Torah's authority?

2 positions · no single answer

Position A · held by A hypothesis the authors find plausible

Persian government encouragement

The Torah would have taken root among the people of Judah in Persian times as a charter of religion and social life, perhaps with government encouragement; Persia may have enlisted officials such as Ezra, or the Hananiah of the letter, to instruct people in it and apply it as a regional code.

Rests on: p. 50

Reads the same page as : the same source, different readings.

Where the debate comes up

Statements tied to the debate

  1. The Persians may have encouraged this development, since they cared how the communities they ruled were run. In the Bible's account, Ezra and Nehemiah were charged by the Persian king himself with governing Judah by the law of God, and there may be some truth in that.
  2. Hananiah never names the Torah as the origin of these rules, yet several of his instructions seem to derive from it, though not every one. Elephantine's community apparently did not know Moses's laws, since its documents never quote them; the letter could be an attempt to bring them in or enforce them.
  3. Read together with Ezra, the letter hints at how the laws attributed to Moses may have gained authority in Judahite culture: honoring local custom and treating the Torah's laws as a written form of that custom among the Judahites, Persia may have enlisted officials like Ezra, or the Hananiah of the letter, to teach and enforce them as a regional code.
  4. If that testimony is taken as genuine, then by the fourth century BCE, late in Persian rule, Judah was a society run by the laws of Moses; according to Jewish sources from the first century BCE onward, foreign rulers recognized the Jews' right to follow them. The gap between the Elephantine papyri and Hecataeus cannot be filled in detail, but the Torah seems to have taken root as a religious and social charter in the Persian period, perhaps with encouragement from the Persian government.
  5. The authors caution that they are not claiming Persian rule produced the Five Books or that Persian interests drove their canonization. The books belonged to the cultural inheritance Jews received from ancient Israel, a link to their forebears, and Jews turned to them for answers about their roots and about keeping their bond with their god.