Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE INVENTION OF THE EXILE 153
with Hagar until forced by Sarah to send her away; Joseph took the Egyptian
Aseneth to wife; David married a princess of Geshur; and Solomon, the great
lover, had no qualms about taking Edomite, Sidonite, Ammonite and Moabite
women, among others. When these stories were written, whether during the
Persian or Hellenistic period, a child's religious and communal identity was
not determined by the mother, and evidently the anonymous authors were
unperturbed by this issue.
The oldest extrabiblical evidence of people having adopted the Jewish religion,
or aspects of it, is found in documents from the Sumerian city of Nippur,
dating from the Persian period. In these documents, quite a few of the paternal
names are typically Babylonian, whereas their children's names are typically
Hebrew While it is true that many Jews had non-Hebrew names—Zerubbabel
son of Shaltiel and Mordecai the Jew are among the best known—the tendency
to give Hebrew names to the children of Judaized converts was not a passing fad,
and could be an indication of conversion at a fairly early stage. There are similar
examples in the Elephantine papyri, where the parents bear Egyptian names and
the children's names are frequently Hebrew Here the conversion hypothesis
looks stronger, but Judean emigrants did not have Egyptian names. In those
documents there are also cases of adults taking Hebrew names, and of marriage
with gentile men and women, who join the expanding community. The religion
practiced by the inhabitants of Elephantine was not purely monotheistic, and they
did not know the Bible. 51 It is reasonable to assume that the community of Jewish
believers in the province of Yehud, which included the region around Jerusalem,
also increased in spite of Ezra and Nehemiah's strict isolationist policy.
It is not known when the biblical Book of Esther was composed. Some
assume that it was first written in the late Persian period, and finally redacted
in the Hellenistic. It is also possible that it was composed after the conquests of
Alexander the Great. Toward the end of the story, after the triumph of Mordecai
and Esther over Haman the Agagite in faraway Persia, it says, "And many of
the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them"
(Esther 8:17). This is the only mention in the Bible of conversion to Judaism,
and this statement about mass conversions—not at the End of Days but in the
present—indicates the strengthening confidence of the young Jewish mono-
51 Not a single biblical text was found among the papyri of Elephantine. This
is significant, since some of them were written in the late fifth century BCE. The only
composition found at the site was the Aramaean-Assyrian Ahiqar, On the Judaizing in
Nippur and Elephantine, see the doctoral dissertation of Uriel Rapaport, Jewish Religious
Propaganda and Prosclytism in the Period of the Second Commonwealth, Jerusalem: The
Hebrew University, 1965 (in Hebrew), 14-15, 37-42.