Yeb” (Elephantine) is established by the figure of Sanballat, the governor of Samaria who is mentioned in the epigraphic material from Samaria as well as in the papyri from Elephantine. In both cases his sons are mentioned too as they either represent their father or succeeded him in office. There is one son with a Yahwistic name attested on a seal from Samaria (WD 22). Then we have the two sons called Delaiah and Shelemiah in the papyri from Elephantine where they were involved in the rebuilding of the temple in Elephantine (TADAE A4.7–8 and A4.9); they may also be represented by the abbreviations dl and šl on Samarian coins. One of the Samarian papyri from the year 354 BCE also mentions a governor called Hananiah. This attestation helps to reconstruct the list of the governors of Samaria from Darius II down to Darius III: Sanballat and his sons Delaiah, Shelemiah and [?]YHW (Delayahu?) in the first half and Hananiah in the second half of the fourth century BCE. The common assumption of two or three governors bearing the same name – an assumption trying to harmonize the epigraphic material with the account of Nehemiah (Neh. 2:10.19, etc.) and Josephus (AJ 11.302–303) – is superfluous (Kratz 2004: pp. 93–106; Dušek 2007: pp. 516–549, 2012a; followed by Lemaire 2015: p. 83).
To complete the picture let us mention in passing a further corpus of inscriptions, namely Aramaic and Hebrew votive inscriptions discovered on Mt. Gerizim. According to the excavators these inscriptions could date back to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE (Magen Misgav, and Tsfania 2004; Magen 2008: pp. 227–242) but they appear more likely to be products of Hellenistic times (Dušek 2012b; De Hemmer Gudme 2013). They are, nevertheless, relevant for the Persian period as they refer to a temple already founded in the fifth century BCE that was the central sanctuary of the worshippers of Yhwh in the Province of Samaria (Magen 2008). Like the persons whom we know from the material from Wadi Daliyeh and from the coins who bear Yahwistic names, so the Yhwh worshippers from Mt. Gerizim were “Samarians” or “Samaritans.” This label – like “Judeans” in the Province of Yehud or in Elephantine – is nothing more than a local, political, and ethnic attribute. In Hellenistic times these Samarian Yahwists occasionally called themselves “Israelites” (Delos) and accepted the Pentateuch, the Torah of Moses, as their holy scripture. Whether this was already the case during the Persian period is a historical problem yet to be solved (Knoppers 2006; Kratz 2007, 2015; Dušek 2012b: pp. 65–118), as is the relationship of the Yahwists represented in the inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim to the Yahwists known to us from epigraphic material of the Achaemenid period.
Literary Sources
Literary sources that are attested archeologically in the Achaemenid period are only known to us from Elephantine: Here we have the “Words of Ahiqar” and an Aramaic version of the Bisitun inscription (TADAE C1.1 and C2). Otherwise we have to rely entirely on the biblical tradition and on the tradition dependent on it, such as the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus.
In contrast to the literary works from Elephantine that fit well into the picture reflected by the epigraphic material, the biblical tradition contains a series of particularities. On the one hand, it presupposes the situation reflected in the epigraphic material, and the Bible sometimes even contains information – especially names and individual dates or even literary pieces – that can be aligned with the archeological findings. On the other hand, in its vast majority the biblical tradition has little to do with the epigraphic material and should not be harmonized with it hastily (Edelman 2012). Rather, the Bible seems to be highly critical toward the historical situation and even rejects it by creating its own religious counter‐world, a world that centers on the Torah of Moses and/or the biblical prophets (Kratz 2004: pp. 93–119, 2015).
In a way the biblical writings are timeless. Apart from a terminus a quo if it is mentioned in a writing and the terminus ad quem of the biblical manuscripts from Qumran, that begin in the third century BCE, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to offer exact dates for a biblical text or to verify the historicity of the biblical statements and to reconstruct from them the history of Israel during the Persian period (Galling 1964; Williamson 2004). The historical evaluation of the biblical sources has to take all these factors into account and makes a literary‐critical analysis as well as an analysis of the Tendenz of text mandatory. Here, one has to accept that one will hardly ever reach beyond a well (or less well) argued hypothesis.
Within the biblical tradition we have to distinguish between writings that are set in the Persian period but not necessarily written during this period and those texts of which scholarship assumes that they were composed in Persian times even though Persia is not mentioned in them. The historical narratives in (2 Chron. 36) Ezra‐Nehemiah, 1Esdras and Esther as well as the prophecies in Isaiah 44–45, Haggai, Zechariah, and Daniel can be counted to the first group. In these writings the roughly 200 years of Persian rule over Judah and Samaria are condensed to three – if we add Esther, four – events: (i) the end of the Babylonian exile and the rebuilding of the temple under Cyrus and Darius (2Chron. 36; Ezra 1–6 and 1 Esd.; Isa 44:28–45:13; Hag.; Zech. 1–8; Dan. 1;6 and 8–11); (ii) the mission of Ezra under Aratxerxes (Ezra 7–10; Neh. 8; 1 Esd.); (iii) the mission of Nehemiah under Artaxerxes (Neh. 1–13); (iv) the rescue of the Jewish people under Xerxes (Esther).
In two cases the biblical tradition has a point of reference in history: the rebuilding of the second temple and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. Two – possibly authentic – prophetic oracles from the time of the reconstruction of the temple have come down to us and are now incorporated into the book of Haggai: Hag 1:1.4.8 and 1:15–2:1.3.9a. Both oracles are dated according to the ruling king Darius and call for the beginning of the building activity. Scholars generally identify this king with Darius I but there are dissenting voices that place the building of the temple during the time of Darius II (Dequeker 1993) or Artaxerxes I (Edelman 2005). The two oracles were gradually supplemented within the book of Haggai and joined with the visions of Zechariah that are only secondarily connected with the temple. Both prophetic books contain some Persian flavor, but we cannot derive reliable historical information from them. Even the role of Serubbabel and Joshua remains unclear as they both appear only in secondary, i.e. later, passages (Kratz 2004; Hallaschka 2011). The same has to be said of the figure of Sheshbazzar, who is mentioned only in Ezra 1:7–11 and Ezra 5:14–16 (6:5?) and who cannot be placed historically (Kratz 2004: pp. 101–102, 105–106).
The oracles in Isaiah 44–45 (Kratz 1991a), the narrative in Ezra 1–6 and 1 Esdras (Kratz 2000: pp. 56–67), as well as the literary reflexes on the beginnings of Persian rule in the book of Daniel (Kratz 1991b), have to be seen as later literary creations that have little historical value. A comparison of the Aramaic narrative in Ezra 5–6 – which is the literary nucleus of Ezra 1–6 where we find the older variant of the two versions of the famous edict of Cyrus (Ezra 1,1–4; 6,1–5) – with the papyri from Elephantine shows that this narrative appears to work with general historical knowledge and contains quite a bit of the flavor of the time. This, however, does not imply that the material has to be regarded as historical. Rather, Ezra 5–6 are written in the spirit of the biblical tradition and they are indebted to the Chronistic view of history (Kratz 2006).
The mission of Nehemiah, too, has a concrete historical anchor: the building of the walls of Jerusalem (Kratz 2000: pp. 68–74, 2004: pp. 93–106; Wright 2004). The original building report is a short first‐person narrative: Neh. 1:1a.11b; 2:1–6.11–18; 3:38; 6:15. The mission is commonly dated to the year 445 BCE, the 20th year of Artaxerxes I. The reason for this dating is the figure of Sanballat, governor of Samaria, who is mentioned not only in the papyri from Elephantine for the time around 410 BCE but also in the book of Nehemiah. This dating, however, is not certain as Sanballat does not appear in the original building report. On the other hand, the building of the walls fits well with Persian policy of the fifth century (Hoglund 1992; Carter 1999; Lipschits 2006, 2012) as it would transform Jerusalem into a fortified garrison and possibly also into the capital of the Province of Yehud. Nehemiah reminds one of the ambassador Hananiah who is mentioned in the papyri from Elephantine (Kratz 2009). All the other passages of the book of Nehemiah, including those designating Nehemiah as “governor” (Neh. 5:14–19; 12:26), are secondary literary supplements
