I have been sitting in the San Diego airport for four hours so far and I still have four hours before the plane takes off. I have used the time to read the first essay in Persia and Torah: The Theory of Imperial Authorization of the Pentateuch. This is a translation of Peter Frei’s article, “Die persische Reichsautorisation: Ein Uberblick.”1 Frei was the first to propose the idea that the Torah was the officially authorized law of Yehud in the Persian period, and James Watts has done American scholars a great service by translating it for this volume.
The article consists of a catalogue of instances in the Persian period where the Persian authorities authorized local laws. Frei cites examples from Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor, including examples from Nehemiah, Daniel, Esther, and the letters from Elephantine.
The evidence falls in two different groups. First is the command under Darius to codify all the laws in Egypt. This is the example that seems to me to be parallel with Ezra’s work with the Torah. Yet even here it is not clear that Darius is authorizing the laws. He is the one who has them collected, but they are already the law of the land. He may be responsible for the laws as a collection, but I don’t know if I would say he authorized these laws to be the law of the land, unless we mean that in the sense of him reaffirming them.
The second group - that is, the rest of the examples - consists of the king authorizing individual laws or giving his approval to judicial decisions. These seem to me to bear little resemblance to what Ezra was doing.
That means we are looking at Darius’s codification of the laws in Egypt as the main parallel to Ezra’s work. It seems to me, however, that these two “law codes” are very different in nature. For one thing, the Torah is hardly a law code. Large sections contain laws, but there are also huge swaths, such as the entirety of Genesis, that are narrative. And taken as a whole, the laws in the Pentateuch would hardly constitute a complete law code. There are many areas of life that are simply not covered. It doesn’t really compare to the law collection of Darius or to other law codes such as that of Hammurabi.
In addition, I don’t think Ezra 7:12-26 presents a picture of the Persian king calling for the codification of Jewish law. What we see is Ezra deciding to return to Yehud and Artaxerxes giving him permission. Undoubtedly, Ezra could not have returned to Yehud and carried out his program without the permission of the Persian king, but passive permission seems different than the active authorization that Frei envisions.
Obviously, this post is not doing justice to the full range of evidence that Frei presents. But after an initial reading of his article, I have to say I am not even slightly convinced.
- Originally published in Zeitschrift fur altorientalische und biblische Rechtgeschichte 1 (1995): 1-35. [back]