Leuchter, Mark<scp>:</scp>An Empire Far and Wide: The Achaemenid Dynastic Myth and Jewish Scribes in the Late Persian Period<scp>.</scp>New York: Oxford University Press, 2024; pp. xii + 169

This programmatic volume aims to contribute to the study of Jewish texts and scribes during the Persian period (c. 539–332 bce). Leuchter uses a specific ideological construct of the Persian Empire under the Achaemenid dynasty, what he terms the “Dynastic Myth,” as the lens through which to view several biblical and non-biblical texts. He does not make the claim that these texts were written as part of a resistance to empire; his analyses are more nuanced, and he concludes that the texts evince a range of reactions to imperial power. Even if I do not always agree with his assumptions or his conclusions, I found the Leuchter's arguments stimulating and challenging. Leuchter argues that scholars have not recognised that the Persian period was not merely when most texts of the Hebrew Bible reached something approaching their final form, but also the period whose underlying ideology shaped both the form and contents of those texts. This underlying ideology, as expressed in the “Dynastic Myth,” shaped life in the Persian Empire in such a way that all textual products of the period reflect it. This argument is congruent with Arnaldo Momigliano's observation that both Greek and Jewish identities were shaped in reaction to Persian Empire (The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, 1990). Leuchter works specifically with what he defines as the “Dynastic Myth.” In Chapter 1, “The Achaemenid Dynastic Myth,” Leuchter describes this myth as the ideology underlying both the text and image of the Behistun inscription. This narrative describes and emplots the rise of Darius I as king of Persia as the divinely chosen ruler (the Persian Man) that created order from the Lie as an earthly reflection of a cosmological concept. Most significantly, the order to copy and circulate the myth's narrative throughout the empire is included in the myth itself. This scribalisation of the myth created local scribes as “agents of Achaemenid ideology” (p. 25), thus giving them the power to interpret and adapt imperial texts in such a way that their productions became backed by imperial authority. Leuchter's framing would have been even stronger, I think, if he had used Bruce Lincoln's writings both on myth and on Achaemenid Persian religion (missing from his bibliography; see e.g., Discourse and the Construction of Society, 1989; “Happiness for Mankind”: Achaemenian Religion and the Imperial Project, 2012), although Lincoln's ideas are refracted by the scholarship Leuchter cites, especially my own and that of Jason Silverman. Lincoln's analysis of the Achaemenid ideology of empire as being a static paradise would have sharpened Leuchter's analyses in the succeeding chapters, especially in Chapter 5. In Chapter 2, Leuchter describes the role of priestly scribes in both Jerusalem and Elephantine in the dissemination and adaptation of the Dynastic Myth in Jewish life in those communities: “to be a Jewish scribe was to be an imperial scribe in all practical respects” (p. 38). The education of imperial scribes, through memorisation and repetition (drawing on the work of David Carr; e.g., Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, 2005), positioned them as the mediators of the Myth. He argues that the redaction of the Pentateuch in the mid-fifth century bce was a play to position Aaronide priest-scribes as the authoritative interpreters of torah, enabled by the rise to prominence of scribes under Persian rule. As such, he argues for the creation of a single-scroll Pentateuch symbolically closed by the death report of Moses, the ultimate priest. I note that it was not physically possible for the entire Pentateuch to be written on a single scroll in antiquity, so this argument is better understood as a scribal collection analogous to other long form works from antiquity. More convincing is his argument that by adopting Aramaic script for Hebrew language texts, Jewish scribes were encoding their textual tradition within the imperial tradition. Moving from the Pentateuch to Ezra-Nehemiah in Chapter 3, Leuchter makes a bold, although ultimately — to me — unconvincing argument that the historical Ezra should be dated to the reign of Cambyses (i.e., pre-522 bce) rather than to the reign of Artaxerxes I (mid-fifth century bce). I am not convinced that the material in Ezra 7 speaks to a pre-Behistun period of the Persian empire. Rather, the genealogical framing of the figure of Ezra is consistent with Darius's framing of himself at the beginning of the Behistun text, and the idea that the hand of the deity was upon “him” (easily read as Darius) is consistent with Darius's descriptions of himself throughout the epigraphic corpus as having been aided by his deity. In Chapter 4, Leuchter turns to a long-held interest of his, the Levites, and in this case, their role in the formation of the Book of the Twelve. If the Pentateuch was redacted by Aaronide priest-scribes, then the Book of the Twelve was redacted by Levite-scribes who placed Moses in a role analogous to Darius in the Myth. The prophets' torah (instruction) stands in the place of Achaemenid Law. In this way, the Book of the Twelve is read by Leuchter as compatible with the myth, not in opposition to it. The final body of material Leuchter analyses, in Chapter 5, is the Shemihazah/Asael narrative in 1 Enoch 6–11. Leuchter argues that this material represents a repudiation of the myth, presenting the death of the Persian Empire. This material is usually read as an allegory of the early Hellenistic period under the Diadochi, but Leuchter places it a generation or so earlier. Enoch was written in Aramaic, the Persian imperial language, not in Hebrew in Aramaic script. Leuchter argues that by using Aramaic, scribes were rejecting the idea that Hebrew texts were part of the Aramaic scribal system. However, it may merely demonstrate writing about the empire in the empire's language. Leuchter's primary contribution is to show how Achaemenid textuality and scribal activity was not merely a matter of technology, but instead a matter of technocratic reorientation of elite culture in Persian-period Yehud (Judah) to conform with a powerful imperial myth. Because the Dynastic Myth commanded its own textualisation, all textualisation undertaken during the Achaemenid regime carried its mythological imprint. Thus, all Persian-period Jews were Achaemenidised. With the acceptance of this fact, we can more productively analyse their texts.