Blue Cord

The Jerusalem Post reported last Wednesday that Eilat Mazar has found a new seal in Jerusalem. She dates the seal to 538–445. Although the Post does not explain her reasons for this date, it is presumably based on the stratum in which the seal was found.

Mazar reads the name on the inscription as Temech and connects it with a family mentioned in Nehemiah 7:55. But as several others have pointed out, she is reading the inscription backwards. Seal engravers normally wrote in mirror image, because they wanted the seal to leave a positive image when pressed into clay. A more likely reading is Shelomith, a name found in Ezra 8:10. Of course, the fact that both names appear in the Bible tell us nothing about the seal except that it contains a known name. There is no reason that the person on the seal has to be someone mentioned in the Bible.

Even if it is someone named in the Bible, Mazar overstates the importance of this find. She says,

The seal of the Temech family gives us a direct connection between archaeology and the biblical sources and serves as actual evidence of a family mentioned in the Bible. . . . One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find.

This seal does nothing to establish the credibility of the Bible. Even if it shows that the Shelomith in Ezra 8:10 (or the Temech in Nehemiah 7:55) were actual people, this is not exactly something that anyone has doubted. But just because the Bible is accurate with regards to post–exilic names does not mean that it is accurate in other respects. One would have thought that by now we would have moved away from trying to “prove” the Bible through archaeology. After all, the biblical archaoelogy movement ended a couple of decades ago.

For fuller discussions of the seal, please see Chris Heard’s post at Higgaion and Jim West’s discussion on his eponymous blog.

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.

1. Originally published in Zeitschrift fur altorientalische und biblische Rechtgeschichte 1 (1995): 1-35. [back]

A few days ago, Steve Cook posted a piece on the social location of Ezra. Steve suggests that there were three groups of priests in postexilic Yehud: Zadokites, Aaronides, and Levites. I asked Steve a brief question about Ezra and the Holiness School, to which he kindly responded. I wanted to push the conversation a bit farther, though in a slightly different direction.

I am wondering (actually wondering, having not made up my mind) whether these three groups can be isolated and whether all of them actuall existed. Certainly the Levites did, as they are scattered all over 1 and 2 Chronicles. Where the uncertainty creeps in for me is with the Aaronides and Zadokites. That a group that identified itself as the “sons of Zadok” is clear from Ezekiel 40-48. The question is whether they can be separated from the Aaronides.

According to the Pentateuch, Aaron had four sons: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar. Nadab and Abihu are killed in Leviticus 10, so there is no priestly line descended from them. Eleazar is presented in Numbers as succeeding Aaron as the high priest, so the main priestly line descended from him. But what of Ithamar? It is interesting to note that there is no line given for Ithamar anywhere in the OT. The closest we come is 1 Chronicles 24, which calls Ahimelech the son of Ithamar. This would mean that the Ithamar line was banished to Anathoth by Solomon and therefore ceased to function as priests. This suggests that while in theory there were non-Zadokite priests by the late preexilic period, the reality was that only Zadokites were functioning as priests.

This is further strengthened by the fact that every preist mentioned in Chronicles is listed as coming from Aaron through Zadok. We have no priestly lineage that is not descended from Zadok. In her book Missing Priests: The Zadokites in Tradition and History, Alice Hunt argues that Chronicles does not make a big deal of Zadok. This is true. In each case, Zadok is simply mentioned without any focus placed on him.

But while this suggests to Hunt that the Zadokites were not important or even existant at the time, to me it suggests that the Zadokites did not need to press their lineage in Chronicles because by that time their position was secure. If it wasn’t, we would expect to see Chronicles at least giving us the lines of other priestly houses, if only to discredit them. The only challengers to the Zadokites in the exilic period were the Levites, and Ezekiel 40-48 and later Numbers 16-18 (Steve would reverse this order) had already taken care of them.

In other words, it seems that there are Zadokites and Aaronides in the postexilic period, but they are the same group.

I am sure Steve has evidence for these groups being separate, and I look forward to hearing it. If anyone else has some ideas one this subject, I encourage them to jump in as well.

Next post in this series: An Ithamarite Priesthood?