Persian-Style Historiography in Ezra-Nehemiah

Abstract Ezra-Nehemiah serves as a case study of positive influences of Achaemenid Persian history writing on Jewish and Greek historical texts, as suggested already by Arnaldo Momigliano in the 1960s. At least three signature aspects of Achaemenid historiography have been co-opted by the author(s) of Ezra-Nehemiah. First, the book features Persian-style bureaucratic documentation in the form of charts, distinctive in their rigorous categorizing impulse and culmination in a sum, and embedded into the historical narrative of the return from Babylon. Whether these charts are based on “authentic” and recoverable “originals,” or, more probably, a studied simulation of Achaemenid-style bureaucratic documents, they construct authority for the Judean community by choosing as a model real imperial charts with all their authoritative trappings. A related technique is genealogical self-presentation, a concern that mirrors the rhetoric of the Achaemenid kings in their royal inscriptions. Finally, the intertwinedness of juridical and historiographical roles in the person of the king, a rhetorical stance originating at least with Darius I, is echoed in the famous instruction to obey “the law of your God and the law of the king” (Ezra 7:26) as well as in the regulatory—and imperially authorized—roles of Nehemiah and Ezra in the Jewish community.