An Empire Far and Wide The Achaemenid Dynastic Myth and Jewish Scribes in the Late Persian Period

The Persian period (539-332 BCE) sits somewhat awkwardly within the study of Second Temple Judaism. Amidst a myriad of issues and debates, the approach to the Persian period is fundamentally complicated by the difficulty in labelling communities -- whether or not the communities in the province of Yehud, in Egypt, or in the Eastern Diaspora can even be called "Jewish," a label denoting a type of ethnic and religious symbiosis that some scholars are hesitant to identify any time before the mid-2nd century BCE.

This uncertain position of the Persian Period in Jewish memory is nothing new -- in fact, it can be traced back to nearly two thousand years. Yet it can lead contemporary scholars to exercise too much caution when dating, analyzing, and discussing ancient scribal texts. Utilizing recent tools to examine scribal methods, Mark Leuchter takes a definitive approach. An Empire Far and Wide focuses on a careful selection of literary test cases to better understand how Jewish scribes in Persian Yehud interacted with a feature of Persian imperialism that has not received adequate attention: the dynastic mythology of the Achaemenid rulers and the way it shaped emerging Jewish identity in the Persian period.

Leuchter works from the determination that we can indeed apply the terms "Jewish" and "Judaism" to certain Persian period communities with certain caveats. This book illuminates the fact that the Persian period is hardly a "dark age" of study -- it reveals important dimensions of Jewish culture of the era. The textual record of the learned Yehudite Jewish caste of the Persian period provides us with monumental insight into a larger intellectual history -- one shaped by centuries of imperialism extending back, and forward, in time.

Mark A. Leuchter is Professor of Religion and Director of Jewish Studies at Temple University. He is the author of The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity (2017), and Samuel and the Shaping of Tradition (2013).