Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [105]
With the destruction of the First Temple, the end came to the first Israelite state. After a sojourn in Babylon of more than a generation (597-539 BCE), where the Judeans encountered Babylonian religion directly, the Jews returned to the land of Judah, due to the beneficence of a new conquering people, the Persians, who vanquished the Neo-Babylonian Empire by pouring down into Mesopotamia on horseback from the eastern high plateau steppelands and who ruled from the area today known as Iran.
Some Israelites-not all, but some-returned from Babylon to rebuild their state on their ancient model; but they returned to a whole new world, where the old models of the state fit less and less and the previous unity of people and purpose was irrecoverable. They were no longer an independent nation, living on their own with only their own internal ideological battles to fight. Rather, they were confined to a smaller and subservient state, called the district of Yehud (Aramaic for Judah; Hebrew: Yehudah) or the province of “Across the River,” in turn part of a larger Syrian satrapy whose official language was Aramaic, in turn part of a vast empire ruled by a people who spoke Persian. They were two languages away from their rulers who resided in faraway Iran at the other end of a well-developed imperial bureaucracy. Since they came from Yehud, a resident was a “yehudi”-a Judean, a term which eventually comes to mean “a Jew.”1 It took centuries before the religious implication of the name, which is so clear to us, became the primary meaning of the term.2
As member states of a large empire, they were aware of many different cultures with many different gods and many different ways of understanding our final ends. Ever wary of offending YHWH, especially after their terrible exile and punishment at His hands, they did not seek out the new ideologies: in fact, they tried, at first self-consciously, to reconstitute the previous state. But that proved impossible, as the Persians prefered to rule through the priests and not a king. The priests shortly became the ruling class in Judea while the kingship simply disappeared. In any event, their attempt imaginatively to reconstruct and record their past and their plans for the future is known to us today as the Bible, or at least the five books of Moses. The documents we understand as the core of the Bible were assembled in this period by the new aristocracy of Judea, the priests.
As the Jews heard about more attractive hereafters, they gradually revised their own conceptions of the afterlife in ways that give credit to their patient, long-suffering LORD. The result, which moved them toward a new Jewish synthesis of views of the afterlife, began as a group of tendentious and conflicted, but related, arguments about what the afterlife might be. The Jewish nation entertained, both accepting and rejecting, aspects of Persian and Greek thought. They did not accept these new notions uniformly but entertained them in various groups and classes of people. In a way, this shows that the reason for the polemic against Canaanite thought was not pure ethnocentrism but a reaction against something offensive in Canaanite culture itself, for the Jews readily accept notions of the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul, which came from Persian and Greek cultures respectively. This new synthesis would have far-reaching effects for our contemporary notions of the hereafter. At the beginning of the Hellenistic period (starting ca. 332 BCE), we have but hints of what the social and economic backgrounds of these concepts were. By the end of the period, we have very good ideas about the environment in which these notions grew and how they served society.
The Difficulty Studying Iran
IRAN’S INFLUENCE on Israel remains a true mystery.