JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

period (c. 1850 B.C.E.) the *Amorites (mar-tu, “people of the
west”) ruled over northern Babylonia. The city gained greater
strength during the time of *Hammurabi (1792–1750 B.C.E.)
when it extended its influence over most of southern Mesopotamia,
as well as over parts of northern Mesopotamia. Later
rulers of the area were the *Hittites, Kassites and the Assyrians.
The Assyrian kingdom was overthrown in 612 B.C.E.
and succeeded by the neo-Chaldean kingdom of which the
outstanding figure was *Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562 B.C.E.).
However, 25 years after his death, the country was captured
by *Cyrus, king of Persia, and ceased to exist as an independent
kingdom.
For a full description of this period up to Cyrus see
*Mesopotamia.
Achaemenid Period
A turning point in Near Eastern history was heralded by the
Medes’ conquest of the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, in 612 B.C.E.,
and arrived when Babylon fell to the Achaemenid Persians in
539. After two millennia of Semitic rule in the ancient Near
East, an age was beginning in which Iranians and then others
would dominate; but the new masters of the area would continue
to draw heavily on the older cultural heritage.
The first important Achaemenid, Cyrus, conquered Media
in 549, Lydia in 546, and Babylon in 539; next, Cambyses
took Egypt in 525; then *Darius extended the empire into
northern India by some time before 513. This conquest ranks
in its speed and its scale with the later exploits of Alexander
(for whom it may have served as a model) and with the initial
spread of Islam. While Persepolis, in an upland valley of
what is today southwestern Iran, remained the Achaemenids’
ceremonial capital, much of the business of the extended empire
was handled from Susa, at the edge of the Mesopotamian
plain. Babylon, further to the west, became a more local administrative
center.
Organized into a score of satrapies or provinces and held
together by an effective system of roads, communications, and
standardized coinage, the empire introduced a largely new
conception of legitimacy or imperial ideology to the area.
The ancient Near Eastern empires had often ruled by the forcible
displacement of local institutions or had placed them in
subservient vassal relationships by treaty. The Achaemenids,
though still relying on the universal language of force, sought
to exercise it by posing as heirs of local dynastic traditions
and by following wherever expedient the local idiom. Thus in
Egypt the Persian kings ruled as pharaohs, and in Babylon as
kings of Babylon; and Isaiah 45 provides evidence that Jews in
Babylonia on the eve of the Persian conquest expected Cyrus
to be the anointed of the Lord. On taking Babylon, Cyrus did
not in fact promulgate the Judean cult but restored a variety
of local cults. He relates in a cylinder inscription (Pritchard,
Texts, 315) that he restored to their localities the divine images
which Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, had carried
off to Babylon. Later, Darius reprimanded his satrap Gadatas
in Asia Minor for abuse of local shrine property (text in A.T.
babylonia
Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, 156). The policy seems
to have been one of religious tolerance provided that subject
populations were politically docile (Ezra 1 and 4–7); Xerxes’
inscription in which he tells of suppressing the worship of
daevas, gods false by Zoroastrian standards (text ibid., 232)
could be interpreted either as a case of political rebellion or of
heresy in the Iranian heartland, to which the lenient policy of
more westerly regions was inapplicable. In any event, diversity
of religion under imperial patronage appears to have replaced
the Near East’s earlier close association of palace and temple
wherever Jews were concerned.
Exiled from Judea by the Babylonians in 597 and
586 B.C.E., a small community of leading Judeans whose experience
was to be adopted as the spiritual heritage of all Israel
had been settled along the canals of Babylon (Ps. 137:1), such
as the Chebar (Ezek. 1:1) and in ruined sites, such as Tel-Abib
(Ezek. 3:15), Tel-Melah, and Tel-Harsha (Ezra 2:59; Neh. 7:61),
which they were apparently expected to rebuild and cultivate
(cf. Jer. 29:4–5). The initial feeling in this “foreign land”
was one of intense yearning for Jerusalem (Ps. 137). Some not
clearly datable biblical materials may describe this experience,
such as the Tower of Babel account (Gen. 11, commonly
regarded as much earlier), which associates the problem of
linguistic diversity with the locality of Babylon; but Ezekiel
provides the clearest contemporary evidence for conditions
at the start of the Exile.
Following the Achaemenids’ permission to return to Palestine
and restore the Judean cult, there is virtually no specific
evidence concerning the status of the Jewish community of
Babylon. That such a community remained there is evident
from its mention, for example, as the home of Ezra, and from
its existence in post-Achaemenid times. Later tradition emphasizes
the continuity of the Babylonian community; the
Seder Olam Zuta sets forth a line of exilarchs back to the deported
Jehoiachin (Jeconiah), the next to last of the kings of
Judah – evidence at least that the idea of exiles who did not
return was credible later on. Scholars have sought to document
Jewish business success in Babylonia on the basis of personal
names in cuneiform texts of the family of Murashu in Nippur
from the reign of Artaxerxes I, an attempt which while
plausible puts severe strain on the linguistic evidence. That,
in the course of time, Jews attained positions of privilege and
responsibility is inferred from Nehemiah’s service as cupbearer
at the Achaemenid court. Some may not have been trusted;
Eusebius (Eusebius Werke, ed. by R. Helm 7 (1956), 112–3) relates
Artaxerxes III’s deportation of Jews to Hyrcania, on the
Caspian Sea, as the result of a revolt around 350 B.C.E.
Seleucid Period
Alexander led a Macedonian army in the conquest of Babylon
in 331 B.C.E. and died there after his Bactrian and Indian
campaigns in 323. His generals thereupon dismembered his
empire in a struggle for control of it. The dynasty of Seleucus,
which was to rule Mesopotamia for two centuries, was
heir to a domain without a stable ethnic base or heartland.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 25