lethargic_man | Monday, March 5th, 2012

At the end of the Esther chapter, in the middle of Book XI (covering the Persian period), the narrative runs out of Biblical source material (or so I thought; actually there's a few last passages from the Book of Nehemiah later on). I was looking forward to this, as I'm not very familiar with Second Temple history, and thought I would learn a lot.

Actually, as it turns out, Josephus covers the period between the close of the Bible and the beginning of the Hasmonean revolt, which he covers in a lot of detail, quite fast, and much of what comes in between I was already familiar with in the first place; though there were still passages that were completely new to me. I'm not blogging everything that's interesting, though; you'll just have to read the book yourselves!

( How the Samaritans were re-Judaised )

This seems to be an extended midrash on Nehemiah 13:28, within a few verses of the very end of the Bible's history:

And one of the sons of Joiada, the son of Eliashib the high priest, was son in law to Sanballaṭ the Horonite: therefore I chased him from me. וּמִבְּנֵי יוֹיָדָע בֶּן־אֶלְיָשִׁיב הַכֹּהֵן הַגָּדוֹל חָתָן לְסַנְבַלַּט הַחֹרֹנִי וָאַבְרִיחֵהוּ מֵעָלָי׃

The strange thing is that Josephus presents this history as entangled with that of Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Empire. Sanballaṭ was the leader of the Samaritans during the time of Nehemiah (mid to late fifth century BCE), whereas Alexander's conquest of the area happened in 332 BCE. Wikipedia provides the answer, that Josephus conflates Sanballaṭ I with Sanballaṭ III.

The Talmudic history of the world loses two centuries of history, presenting the Persian period as covering just eighteen years, whereas in reality it was two hundred and eight. (I think this is a major contributing factor to why Archbishop Ussher's count of the age of the world places it now as a little over six thousand years old, whereas in the Jewish count it's still only 5772). I mentioned early on in my notes that Josephus comes up with a larger figure; at some point I need to go through Josephus with a fine-toothed comb and find exactly where his discrepancies come from.

[Please comment at my collected Book XI notes post, on Dreamwidth for preference, or on LiveJournal.]

Josephus notes