POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 21
In comparison to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who were mainly inter-
ested in collecting tribute from their subjects, and punished brutally those
who failed to pay, the Persians were mild but interventionist. Cyrus posed as
a liberator, a restorer of gods and peoples following the depredations and
deportations of the Babylonians, and this pose became a fixture of Persian
imperial rhetoric. In practice, the Persians tended to patronize native oligar-
chies, preferably those with strong connections to temples, and encouraged
them to try to regulate the legal and economic activities of their provinces.
This last consideration may help explain the imperial patronage of the Torah.
Though probably the wor kmostly of reformists and radicals, the Torah
claimed to be the traditional law of the Israelites and was the only Jewish law
code available. An Egyptian text informs us that the emperor Darius I had
created a committee of Egyptian priests to compile an authoritative code of
Egyptian law, and Artaxerxes or another Persian emperor, in authorizing the
Torah, may have been doing the same sort of thing for the Jews.^4 The desired
and sometimes attained result of the Persians’ interventionism was a smoothly
running, peaceful, and consistently profitable empire, which depended on the
loyalty of the hand-picked oligarchs, a royal provincial administration more
elaborate than anything the Babylonians had had, and mild intimidation pro-
duced by the presence everywhere of small numbers of Persian-commanded
garrison troops.^5 Persian policy thus contrasted with Babylonian, with its alter-
nating periods of complete laissez-faire and brutal terror. In some cases, then,
Persian interventionism practically created the nations the Persians ruled. It
is in the light of these practices that the events reported in the biblical books
of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, and Zechariah should be seen.
The regime initiated in Judaea by the Persian emperors and their Jewish
vassals lasted, with a few interruptions, until the middle of the second century
B.C.E. Though the history of Yehud/Judaea (the province acquired its Greek
name after Alexander the Great conquered it in 332B.C.E.) in much of this
period is very obscure, the apparent institutional stability of Judaea suggests
driven, usually analysis-resistant narratives), written to serve the purposes of Jewish leaders in the
third or second centuriesB.C.E., as if they were more reliably attested than Nehemiah.
(^4) See W. Spiegelberg,Die sogennante demotische Chronik des Pap. 215 der Bibliothe`que Natio-
nale zu Paris(Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1915), pp. 30–32; M. Dandamaev and V. Lukonin,The
Culture and Social Institutions of Iran(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 125;
J. Blenkinsopp,The Pentateuch(New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 239–42; E. Bickerman,The
Jews in the Greek Age(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 29–32.
(^5) On the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, see A. L. Oppenheim,Ancient Mesopotamia: Por-
trait of a Dead Civilization(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 165–68; for a
general characterization of the Achaemenid empire, see Dandamaev and Lukonin,The Culture
and Social Institutions of Iran; for a discussion of and literature on the Achaemenids’ restorative
radicalism, see P. Briant, “The Seleucid Kingdom and the Achaemenid Empire,” in P. Bilde et
al., eds.,Religion and Religious Practice in the Seleucid Kingdom(Aarhus: Aarhus University
Press, 1990), pp. 53–60.