Hello everyone, welcome back.
This is our third and final little section on the Empire Next Door.
We're going to be talking about the Persians, right?
John Belts is with us again for the last time.
Why don't I open and pray?
Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity to study the cultural background of your word.
We ask that you would bless John with wisdom, that you give us ears to hear.
We pray, Lord, that this would be a fruitful time for us and for our church.
And we ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
All right. Hi, everybody. Good to see you all today.
So it's been a little bit since we didn't have class last week, obviously, because we had Easter.
So I'll just start with a little bit of review from where we were previous two sessions.
So we started with a little bit of introduction about the fact that the ancient Israelites in the Bible are not exactly big players on the scene.
They end up sort of being the little guy between some more powerful empires geopolitically.
We talked about the fact that even though they're a small power, the area, geographically, the area that they inhabit is highly desirable by those empires.
As sort of a land bridge connecting Asia, Europe, and Africa.
We talked about the Assyrian Empire.
That's me looking scared again.
We talked about the Babylonian Empire.
Babylonian Empire.
Where...
Oops.
Ah!
Stop that.
Where's my map?
There's my map.
We talked about the Babylonian Empire.
And if you'll remember a little bit, we had, you know, the Assyrians kind of menaced Judah.
They destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel.
The Babylonians finally destroy Jerusalem and carry off a lot of the people into captivity in Babylon.
And now we'll get the Persians, sort of the conclusion to our trilogy.
There's sort of a metaphor that I used when I was teaching this for a class one time,
where I said it's like the Star Wars trilogy, right?
From the Judean perspective, this is the Star Wars trilogy.
You have the Assyrians come, right?
They have a Death Star.
They blow up the northern kingdom, otherwise known as the planet Alderaan.
And then, right?
But then Sennacherib's Death Star is destroyed outside the gates of Jerusalem.
So, you know, the Babylonian Empire is kind of the empire strikes back, right?
They come in.
They take out Jerusalem.
Now we're going to get the return of the Judeans.
Glad you're getting the metaphor.
This makes my day.
Okay.
So, what we're going to do today in talking about this third empire, the Persians,
I'm going to start with a little bit of history of sort of the Persian Empire itself.
Then we're going to talk a little bit about their culture,
so what that was like, what made them similar and different to the empires before them.
And then we're going to talk specifically about some of the biblical connections
that we get with the Persian Empire.
And I wanted to start with two biblical references to kind of give us a little bit of sort of a jumping off point.
So, they're both from Ezra.
The first is from the very beginning of the book.
Thus says King Cyrus of Persia,
The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth,
and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem in Judah.
Any of those among you who are his people, may their God be with them,
are now permitted to go up to Jerusalem in Judah and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel.
He is the God who is in Jerusalem.
And then later in the book, in Ezra 6, we get a letter written from a Persian emperor,
and he gives some instructions, and then he says,
Furthermore, I decree that if anyone alters this edict, a beam shall be pulled out of the house of the perpetrator.
Who shall then be impaled upon it?
And the house shall be made a dunghill.
So, I bring these two passages up here to sort of,
there's sort of a dichotomy that we're going to get with the Persians.
On the one hand, the Judeans will really seem to like them,
because Cyrus will issue this decree allowing the exiled Judeans,
who were carried off by the Babylonians, to return to Jerusalem if they want to.
And they tend to have pretty good relations, the Persians and the Judeans.
On the other hand, the Persians are still very ruthless,
and they will use this kind of very graphic public execution.
So, we often get this sort of idea that the, you know, we talked about this in the previous sessions,
but the Assyrian Empire gets this reputation for being sort of very incredibly ruthless,
reveling in their cruelty.
The Babylonians also get a reputation for that,
although in their own sources, they don't seem to be quite as
reveling in their sadism as the Assyrians.
And the Persians kind of, they get a little bit of a reputation in the history of being
sort of the benevolent empire, the nicer empire.
And in some ways, that's true, and in some ways, that's not.
As you can see, they're still more than willing to threaten people with impalement.
Right?
So, but let's talk a little bit about what this history looks like.
So, as I said before, we had, or last time, I should say, we had the Babylonian Empire.
And the Babylonians had previously, if we go back even further, this is the problem,
the more of these that you do, then the more you have to review every time.
Right?
So, the Babylonians had originally teamed up with a group called the Medes to take out the Assyrians
when they kind of got a little bit tired of the cruelty that the Assyrians used in dealing with people.
There's later some friction that kind of happens between the Babylonians and the Medes.
A group called the Persians, probably a fairly sort of newcomer group on the scene,
takes over the Medes, and there's sort of this long shared border that they have,
and there's sort of a, there's a tension there for a little while.
And eventually the, this sort of coalition of Medes, Persians, Elamites, and probably a couple other groups of people
united under this ruler by the name of Cyrus, invade the heartland of Babylonia there in southern Mesopotamia.
And this coincides with the reign of the last Babylonian king by the name of Nabonidus,
who was very unpopular in some circles.
So, there were certain factions in Babylonia that also probably welcomed this sort of regime change.
And Cyrus seems to have, when he took over, played to some of these groups, right?
There were certain priestly groups who didn't like some of the religious changes that Nabonidus had initiated.
And so, they probably were grateful to Cyrus, and he, in turn, patronized them to get loyal supporters in his new territory.
And certain groups of foreign deportees as well.
Cyrus seems to have patronized them as well.
Not patronized in terms of they're there, but patronized in terms of giving money and support too.
And the Judean exiles seem to have been one of those groups.
So, Cyrus's empire, as you can tell, stretches a lot further than the previous two empires we've looked at.
It goes sort of from what is today Iran out in the east there down up through, like, to the coasts of Turkey, what is today Turkey in the west.
And his successors will actually get down in and conquer Egypt for a while, which even the Assyrians weren't really able to do.
They were able to raid there, take back loot, but they weren't really able to hold that area.
And sort of like we did with the Assyrians and the Babylonians, I want to divide the history of the Persian Empire into sort of three periods.
We call this, so the first one being sort of the rise to power.
This is the reign of Cyrus and his son Cambyses.
Cambyses is actually the one who takes over Egypt.
Then we get the reformers, or a group I have termed the reformers.
Cambyses actually dies under mysterious circumstances.
And a Persian noble by the name of Darius seizes control and takes out a number of potential rivals for the throne.
He claims ancestry from a royal figure named Achaemenes, which is where we then get the term Achaemenid from.
So this is sometimes called the Achaemenid Persian Empire.
And Darius makes a number of major administrative reforms in the empire to kind of help keep it together.
So he divides it up into a series of satrapies or sort of provinces.
He does a number of different reforms in terms of the administrative languages that they're using.
Is this for Aramaic? Did they use Aramaic?
Yeah, this is probably when he is probably the one who initiates the move towards putting all their administrative apparatus in Aramaic.
As opposed to, they were trying to do it in Elamite for a while, which is interesting.
And is that ultimately why hundreds of years later many Jews were speaking Aramaic?
Partly, yeah.
We'll get to that a little bit when I get to culture.
But, yeah, that helped a trend that was already happening of Aramaic being a commonly spoken sort of lingua franca throughout the Near East.
So we have Darius and then we have his son Xerxes.
Both these figures, again, might sound familiar if you know some Greek history.
Or, again, they both show up in the Bible.
We'll get to that later.
But both Darius and Xerxes actually will campaign into the Aegean and into Greece.
And that will show up in certain Greek sources like Herodotus and, I think, Thucydides and stuff like that.
So those wars between the Greeks and the Persians are well attested in the Greek sources.
They talk about that a lot.
That was a big, pivotal moment for them.
And then we have a period after that that I've sort of referred to as, like, the status quo.
It's a lot more static than the two periods before it.
It's also a lot longer, right?
So we get the 460s down to about 330.
Right, so that's 130-some years.
It's not really static.
There's definitely things that are happening.
There's sort of more politicking that happens between the Greek city-states and the Persians in the western part of the empire.
Egypt keeps trying to rebel and they keep having to smash it down.
But the grand sweep of the empire and its borders remains fairly consistent.
Again, there's a few, like, attempted coups and things like that.
But the empire sort of continues to function.
And this is probably a result of some of these administrative reforms that were made under Darius.
It kind of allowed the empire to sort of continue to function.
And we'll talk about that in a sec.
But the empire continued to function basically until a guy by the name of Alexander,
who is Macedonian, conquers Greece, while his dad, I guess, conquered Greece,
launches a campaign into Persia at a time that was sort of politically inopportune for the Persian monarchy.
And he's able to take, basically, at that point, he's able to take over the Persian empire.
And so Alexander is often thought of as, like, the last Persian king, even though he's Greek slash Macedonian.
But after his death, the empire begins to fracture within a few years.
And his generals kind of end up dividing up the empire between them.
And we'll get a whole series of empires that are sort of carved out of this territory.
But that's kind of, and that's sort of where we put the end of the Persian empire.
So in terms of culture, so this is an inscription that is, so interestingly written in,
this inscription is written in Babylonian, Babylonian Akkadian.
But it is an inscription by a Persian king.
So the Persians tended to be a lot more decentralized than a lot of the previous empires,
like the Assyrians and the Babylonians.
They tended to allow provinces and the governors of those provinces to be fairly independent
and have a significant amount of autonomy as long as they paid taxes,
provided levied troops for the royal campaigns and stuff like that.
And they also drew a lot from the cultures that they conquered.
So they sort of have this model that, you know, if they take over your region
and you have really good metal workers, they'll say,
hey, why don't you send us some metal workers?
If we ever have any metalworking needs, we come to you, right?
Just pay your taxes, send troops when we need them, don't rebel, everything's going to be good.
So this is sort of that, like, lighter touch that historians sometimes talk about
with the Persian Empire, that they weren't quite as demanding or quite as cruel.
They were, again, a little bit easier to deal with if you're a conquered people group
than the Assyrians and the Babylonians.
Although, again, as we said, they do tend to do things like impale people.
In fact, most of the other claimants to the throne that Darius had to contend with
after the death of Cambyses, when he captured them, he mostly just impaled them.
Or he cut off their noses and ears and paraded them around to show what happens
if you go against him.
So he was not a nice guy.
But anyway, sorry, I digress.
This, I bring this inscription up to show partly that when the Persians took over,
for example, Mesopotamia, rather than instituting Persian as sort of the language
that they would make everyone use, they even put, they put even royal inscriptions often
in Babylonian.
And we actually have cases where we'll have, this is actually, I think,
one of a set of three slabs in different languages.
So there's one that is written in Persian, there's one that's written in Babylonian,
and there's one that's written in Elamite.
And they will commonly do these trilingual inscriptions.
And then some of them you find from Egypt, and they're quadrilingual.
They'll add in Egyptian, too, because the Egyptians were really kind of,
they really wanted their language to be represented.
So the Persians said, well, okay, we'll start putting Egyptian on there, too.
So they started to, again, sort of incorporate a lot of languages
and a lot of even artistic styles from some of the peoples that they conquered.
As Tom mentioned earlier, right, so the language, the Aramaic language,
which originated here in what's today Syria,
was becoming sort of more of like a lingua franca throughout the Near East.
And this was happening as early as the Assyrian period.
There's Assyrian kings who have letters where they say,
stop writing to me in Aramaic.
I would like you to write to me in Akkadian.
So this was so popular that people were kind of trying to make it a more official language.
And the Assyrian and Babylonian kings didn't really want to deal with that.
But the Persians saw this as an opportunity.
They said, well, if everybody wants to speak this one language,
why don't we just use that?
And so they did.
And this, of course, then accelerated the usage of Aramaic throughout the Near East.
So we have it being used down here in Egypt.
We have texts from Central Asia that are written in Aramaic,
although I think it's fairly bad Aramaic.
It was definitely somebody who had just picked this language up fairly recently, right?
So they have this sort of sense in which they can use sort of the tools around them, right?
They conquer a people group and they're like,
well, what can you sort of contribute to sort of our larger conglomeration that we have here?
And their art draws a lot from Mesopotamia.
When they conquered Mesopotamia, they did a lot of this sort of hybridization,
not hybridization isn't quite the right word,
but sort of incorporating it into their own sort of style and aesthetic.
So these are some Persian columns that, along with this text,
these are now in the University of Chicago.
They did some excavations in what is today southern Iran
and have some different Persian stuff there.
The inscription on the right here is an inscription in Old Persian.
Again, one of a series that was probably a trilingual inscription.
I have a quick question.
Yeah.
I have two questions.
First, was there like a technological innovation
that allowed Persia to conquer all their lands?
Like what made that so formidable?
Was this a simple American army?
I don't know what the provinces is.
What was so terrifying about the first part?
So there's some suggest, there's certain Greek authors
who suggested that they might have had some organizational innovations.
We're not quite sure how much we trust them because there's,
correct me if I'm wrong on this, Tom,
but I think it's Herodotus who says that,
it was a Greek historian,
who says that before Cyrus,
all of these Near Eastern armies,
they had just a bunch of dudes.
They weren't organized.
They'd have like archers and spearmen and swordsmen
all kind of together,
and they'd just sort of throw them into battle
like a big, you know, sort of mass of people,
like a big mob.
And Cyrus was like,
well, we should start organizing them
and put the archers here and the spearmen there and stuff.
And we know that's actually not true, right?
Because we have depictions of battles
from previous empires
and previous civilizations in the Near East,
and we know that they organize, right?
It's,
any large human endeavor is going to have to organize,
and the Mesopotamians were great at organizing things.
That's why they developed the cuneiform writing system,
was to help them organize stuff better.
So we know that that's not true,
but Herodotus may be saying this
because he had heard some stuff about
some kind of logistical reforms
that they may have done,
and he kind of just didn't get the full detail of it,
or he heard it second or third hand.
So the other reason,
one of the other possible reasons is,
again, like this sort of different alliance of peoples,
the fact that you have Medes up here,
Persians here,
Persians take over the Medes,
then they take over another group here
in central Anatolia.
So they kind of have a lot that they have going on,
and then combined with the fact
that a lot of people in Babylonia
really didn't like Nabonidus,
their current king,
it makes that a lot easier.
It's presented in the sources
as though that campaign took
like a very short amount of time,
like they went in
and just took over Babylon like that.
There's been some research in recent years
that suggested that it may have been
a little bit more of a slog
for the Persians to get through there,
but you can tell,
I mean, they're already,
so this is mountains right here,
so it's very easy for them to kind of,
they're relatively safer up in the mountains,
but they can kind of swoop down
into what is essentially the Babylonian's
sort of core or heartland
right there from the mountains.
So strategically,
they have a good position,
right?
And it's one of the constants
throughout Mesopotamian history,
sorry, this is another digression,
but one of the constants
throughout Mesopotamian history
is that these peoples here
living in the sort of river valley
of the Tigris and the Euphrates
are always kind of at the mercy
of mountain peoples,
as they saw them,
who live up there in the mountains
and can strike and then retreat.
So they have to sort of build
these larger civilizations and empires
that have the resources
and the infrastructure
and the organization
to be able to either withstand attack
or in some cases,
go up into the mountains
and try to knock these people out
before they become a problem.
So it's one of these things that,
some of the things happening
in Nabonidus' reign
meant that he might not have
contained that situation
as well as he could have
or should have combined
with just sort of
the historical factors
of this ever-growing alliance
of people up there.
He might have been kind of doomed
even if he had got his act together.
Why are you on the map there?
Sure.
Where are the Elamites?
So they're also right here.
Okay.
Yeah.
In fact, so the Persians kind of,
it seems like they kind of
come into that area
and sort of mingle together
with the Elamites
so that when you have,
sort of to the point
that when you have people
later calling themselves Persians,
they may also be like part Elamites.
It's sort of a,
it's one of these things
where like ethnicity
gets kind of tricky.
And again,
so from sort of Cyrus
through the early reign of Darius,
they're actually trying to,
the Persians are actually trying
to use Elamite
as their administrative language
before they got the idea
to be like,
you know what?
Everyone's just speaking Aramaic.
Let's just use Aramaic.
It's just too hard, right?
You know, no one's going
to learn Elamite
that we only use
in this one little area.
It's so much easier.
So many people speak Aramaic.
Let's just use Aramaic.
Does it make sense
with the alliances
because it seemed like
the Lord always
chided Israel
for trusting these alliances
with the surrounding nations
versus trusting him
for their defense
and their salvation.
And it makes sense
that Persians
were really big into alliances
and that we really tempted
when that comes from the empire.
Well, this is,
well this is,
and we can come back to this
maybe in the Q&A a little bit,
but this comes back
to the,
do, do, do, do, do,
this sort of thing, right?
If you're,
if you're this guy,
making an alliance
is a good thing for you.
You can do that.
That's fine.
If you're this guy,
you're trying to make
alliances to survive,
but those alliances,
like you don't have any power
in those alliances.
So a lot of times
when the prophets
warn people about,
you know,
don't trust Egypt,
it's because,
don't make an alliance
with Egypt,
it's because you can't
trust Egypt, right?
Egypt doesn't have your back.
Egypt just wants you
to be a buffer zone
against this guy.
They want you
as a meat shield
against that guy,
and this guy wants you
as a meat shield
against that guy.
So that's a big part
of it as well.
There's a geopolitical aspect
to that as well
that goes into it.
Whereas, again,
for the bigger guys,
like the alliances
make more sense,
you know,
because they want people
to sort of be part
of their agenda.
So the power dynamic
is sort of in their favor.
Okay.
The other thing I'll say
before we move on
from Persian culture
is that the Persians
also in this sort of,
along with this sort of
decentralized sort of model
that they have,
they actually have multiple,
they have like five capitals.
So they have,
there's two capitals,
well, three over here
in sort of the Persian heartland.
They have Susa,
which was an Elamite city,
shows up in Esther, right?
That's where most of the action
takes place in the book of Esther.
They have a city called Pisargaday,
which I think was founded by Cyrus,
if I'm not mistaken,
and Persepolis,
which I think was founded by Darius.
Then there's also,
further up here,
there's a Median capital city
that they used as another capital
called Ekbatana.
And then they also used Babylon here,
or sorry,
it's closer to there,
closer to Baghdad,
as another capital city
within their empire.
So that's, yeah,
it's like five capitals.
And they kind of,
the royal court seems to have moved
between these different capitals
at different points,
just because they could.
As I said, too,
they bring a slightly different
royal ideology with them.
So we talked about with the Assyrians,
how they have this idea
that the king is the high priest
of the Assyrian god Ashur,
and sort of,
he is the mediation
between that deity
and humanity.
With the Babylonians,
we had a slightly different idea
that the Babylonian king
is the king,
he's not the priest.
There are also priests,
and there is the king.
And so then you have
these semi-independent temple estates
that control a lot of,
have a lot of power
within Babylonian society
that are distinct from the king.
With the Persian kings,
they sort of continue,
again,
that slightly decentralized model
or this model of essentially
sort of provinces,
in some cases,
almost have their own
semi-autonomy.
To the point that
in the status quo period,
there's actually two
provincial governors up here
called satraps,
and two of these satraps
actually go to war
with each other.
And the king is just like,
you know what,
just keep paying your taxes,
I don't care what you guys
do to each other.
You know,
the king doesn't really
get involved.
They were,
however,
like I said,
just still just as,
could be still just as ruthless
as the Assyrians
and the Babylonians.
Darius and his successors
state in their inscriptions
that they were fiercely opposed
to what they called
the lie
and that all their opponents
they styled as being
servants of the lie.
And this seems to have been
an ideological thing.
It may be related to
what later we will term
the religion of Zoroastrianism,
which they seem to have had
some early form of.
It's not the same
as what we see in later
Zoroastrianism.
That's a whole other issue.
But in Zoroastrianism,
there's sort of a duality
between the good god,
Ahura Mazda,
and the evil god,
Ahreman,
who is sort of the,
known for lying
and deception,
whereas Ahura Mazda
is known with truth
and truth saying.
So, actually,
this inscription here,
this Persian inscription,
it starts off
referring to,
right here,
Ahura Mazda,
right there.
So this is,
oops,
so we know that they're
at least worshipping
that god at that time.
Whether that looks the same
as later Zoroastrianism
is a big question.
But,
these references
to the lie
seem to be
also part of that
religious and
royal ideology.
Yeah, Tom?
What roughly,
what is that description?
That is,
I don't remember
which king this is.
I want to say
that might be Xerxes.
Okay.
So,
yeah.
Like 400s,
500s?
Yeah,
400s.
Yeah.
I'm going to ask you
a really crazy question.
This looks like
a different material
that it's made out of
than a lot of
the other clay pieces.
Is this indeed
a different material?
Yes.
So this is stone.
Okay.
Yeah.
So we sometimes get
cuneiform carved
really, really nice
on stone
and we sometimes get it
impressed on
clay tablets.
Yeah.
So it'll look very different
in those two media.
Right.
Even though they,
if you see them
out and about,
you're like,
it's hard to tell
sometimes which is which
unless you get
a good look at it.
But yes,
they are different.
That one's also
stone there.
Yeah.
I have a question.
In any of the
Persian literature,
was there any
acknowledgement of
there's this
small nation
of Israel
and Judah
but we heard
there's
some
thing that
this god of theirs
did in Egypt
back in the
long time ago
at the exit.
because I was
reading the
Exodus this past
week.
I'm doing this
so all the
nations will
know that I
am the Lord.
And I'm just
wondering if
Persians,
was there any
sort of echo
of that
even during
this time
in 500 BC?
not that we
know of.
One of the
tricky things
for Persian
history is
that we
have some
of their
royal inscriptions
where they're
not going to
talk about
how cool
they think
other groups
are.
They're going
to talk about
how cool
they think
they are.
We don't
have a lot
of their
specific annals.
We have
some
administrative
documents.
One of the
tricky things
is as they
start writing
more in
Aramaic,
so whereas
Akkadian,
so Babylonian
Akkadian,
and Elamite
were written
with cuneiform
on clay,
and so it
was, well,
Old Persian
was also a
cuneiform script.
Aramaic was
not.
Aramaic was
mostly written
on papyrus
or parchment,
and so
most of the
time,
unless it's
stored in
a very dry
climate and
we get
very lucky,
it mostly
disintegrates.
So if they
would have
had it in
their records
or their
annals or
in their
literature,
probably we
don't really
have it.
There's very,
very little of
that material
that we have
available to
us right now,
just with the
sort of accidents
of history.
So it would
be really
interesting to
see if they
had anything
like that,
but most of
what we have
from the
Persians are
these kind of
royal descriptions
where it's
very much the
king talking
about himself
and how
awesome he
is and
all of that.
Let's see,
anything else I was
going to say
there?
No, okay.
So let's move
on to biblical
connections.
Oh, sorry,
one more thing I
wanted to mention
here.
So I mentioned
that Alexander
was sort of
thought of as,
you know,
Alexander the
Great comes in,
brings Greek
culture with
him, but
it's still
sort of thought
of as kind
of the last
Persian empire
because he
rules over
that whole
empire,
plus Greece
and Macedonia
as well.
When he
dies,
there's a
whole succession
crisis,
and it's
honestly more
complicated than
Game of Thrones.
I have a lot
of difficulty
being able to
understand,
much less
articulate,
what happens
after Alexander
dies.
But for a
little bit,
his half-brother
is sort of
the king,
but ruled over
by a regent
because his
half-brother
may have had
some mental
difficulties.
And his
half-brother's
name was
Philip.
Well, actually,
his half-brother
changed his name
to Philip
when he became
king.
Again, like I
said, it's
complicated.
But,
earlier this
week, I
was in the
collection,
and I was
messing around
with some
tablets,
the collection
here that we
have at Yale,
and I was
messing around
with some
tablets,
and I knew
that this
was, based
on the style
of this
fragment,
that it
was from
that sort
of early
Hellenistic
period.
Because you
still have
in Babylonia,
there's still
these temple
communities,
the temple
estates are
still using
cuneiform for
some things,
even though
everybody around
them is
starting to use
Aramaic and
then eventually
Greek.
So I
knew that
this was
from that
period,
but I
was, and
I knew that
this was a
date formula
here, but I
was trying to
figure out what
the king's
name was, and
I was having
trouble reading
it.
And then I
realized that
it was,
read, so this
is year seven
of Mr.
Pilipsu, which
is how the
Babylonians wrote
Philip,
Pilipsu.
And so that's,
and year seven
was the last
year before
Philip died and
then everything
just kind of
fell apart.
So I thought
that was really
cool.
I was like,
oh, perfect,
this is right
at the end of
the time I'm
about to talk
about on Sunday.
I got very
excited.
So, because I'm
a nerd and
little impressed
triangles on
clay will get
me, you know,
very excited and
giddy and, yeah.
Anyway, like I
said, I'm a
little bit of a
dork.
So, as I said
before, and we
talked about it a
little bit, when
Cyrus takes control
of Babylonia, he
allows the exiled
Judeans to return
to their homeland,
and this might
have been part of
sort of his
larger sort of
PR campaign to
sort of style
himself as like,
hey, I'm the
benevolent ruler.
Everybody else
has just been
forcing you guys
to do stuff.
I'm not like
that.
I'm the nice
guy, but you
still better pay
your taxes or
I'll get really
upset.
You know, he
had that kind
of vibe to
some of his
PR, right?
So, his
allowing the
Judeans to
return is part
of this PR
campaign to
sort of get,
again, more
various groups
and sort of
demographic, right?
He almost seems
very modern in
the sense he's
sort of thinking
about his
demographics that
he has in
his empire and
like, what do
I need to do
to get this
demographic on
my side, right?
So, he allows
Judean exiles to
return to their
homeland.
There's a lot of
other like pro-Cyrus
Babylonian texts
that talk about
similar things where
they'll say, oh,
Nabonidus did all
these horrible
things and he,
you know, didn't
support these
temples and he
moved all these
gods, he moved
all their statues
around, but Cyrus
put them all back
in their temples,
right?
So, this is
something that is
a wider part of
his ideology.
And the Judeans
who return, right,
so they return to
this, the name of
the Persian province
was Yehud, which
basically just means
Judah, right?
So, they return
here and they're
sort of supported
and patronized by
later, not just
Cyrus, but later
Persian kings as
well.
And some of the
thought with that,
again, we don't
know how much of
it is like they
were like, oh my
goodness, they have
a really great
god, that's cool.
It may have been
that.
Some of it,
though, is sort
of probably
political in the
sense that they
want a really
good, they want
people they know
they can trust
here on that
land bridge that
connects to their
often rebellious
province in Egypt.
They want to
make sure that,
okay, if Egypt
rebels and we
have to send an
army there, the
people on the
way are going to
help us, they're
going to support
us, they're not
going to harass
our supply lines,
all this stuff.
So, yeah, if they
want to build a
temple to their
god, sure, yeah,
that's worth the
overhead of having
to pay for their
temple to make
sure that we have
loyal subjects
there.
So, Ezra and
Nehemiah is also,
if you're looking
for Persian
connections in the
Bible, Ezra and
Nehemiah is a great
place to look because
that's when you get
the history of these
returning exiles.
So, both, actually, I
don't know if Ezra was,
I can't remember if
Ezra was commissioned
by the Persians or
not.
Nehemiah was actually a
Persian appointee.
He seems to have been
in the royal court of
Artaxerxes I, who is
the first king in this
status quo period.
And he, if you read
through, like, Nehemiah
1 and 2, I think,
Artaxerxes ends up
appointing Nehemiah as a
governor of the
province there.
So, he's very much
a part of the Persian
imperial apparatus.
But, again, so this
restoration happens, and
part of the reason it's
able to happen and
that the Judeans are
sort of starting to
sort of develop their
local identity again
within that region is
partly because they
have this relative
independence from the
Persian emperor.
where it's not quite as
tied in as it was with
the Assyrians and the
Babylonians, who were a
lot more sort of direct
control.
But because the Persians
allowed for a little bit
more of autonomy, it
allows for this sort of
restoration period to
happen.
what I was going to say on
that.
I think that's it.
We get Darius showing up
in the book of Daniel.
Xerxes famously is the
king that shows up in the
book of Esther.
Right?
So, unfortunately, again,
we don't have enough of his
records to know, like, oh,
yes, and then today my
courtier, Haman, turns out
that he was a jerk and I
had him killed.
But I really like my wife.
She's cool.
You know, we don't have
that, unfortunately.
We do get, we know a
little bit more about some
of his other, actually, we
know about some of his
campaigns into Greece, for
example, because the Greeks
talk about it because they
were very proud of the fact
that he didn't succeed.
There was a movie about it
a number of years ago.
Not very historically
accurate, but when I was in
high school, it got a bunch
of us our age to actually
care about ancient history.
So that was, I guess, a
positive.
We know that Xerxes was,
Xerxes was ultimately
assassinated in some sort of
palace coup.
I don't remember what I was
going with that.
Anyway.
And then within the prophets,
so most of the prophetic
corpus takes place before the
exile or right up to
enduring, right?
So Jeremiah and Ezekiel are
like kind of at the very
beginning of the exile.
But there's some of it that
takes place after.
So Haggai and Zechariah, for
example, are, their prophetic
careers are taking place during
this early restoration period.
They talk about sort of the
need to build, you know,
Haggai especially talks about
the importance of rebuilding
the temple.
Zechariah talks about, delivers
oracles, talking about the
current high priest and the
current governor appointee,
Zerubbabel, who was Judean
exile, and sort of how God had
appointed them to sort of reign
over this period of restoration.
We get a few other post-exilic
prophets, but those are sort of
the two that I think are the
most relevant here.
Okay.
So I think now we'll move into
some more questions.
Tom, you have a question?
So forgive me if this is such a
huge tangent, but I want to ask
about Zoroastrianism.
Because most of the religious
backgrounds in the Bible are these
polytheistic religions that are
localized and they all kind of will
look to one another and be like,
oh, we worship similar gods or we'll
adopt our gods, et cetera, et cetera.
Zoroastrianism, though, is at least
later forms of the religion.
It's different because they've got
this kind of doctrinal corpus of
there's this one God you worship,
there's this negative God.
Anyway, but I've read that the,
you know, you'll hear these stories
of Zoroaster, the founder of
Zoroastrianism from like 3000 BC,
but then when you look at the
actual evidence for that, I've heard
similar things that you've alluded
to that we actually have, I've heard
like almost nothing before like
700 AD or 500 AD, like very little
about actual Zoroastrian belief.
And I was wondering if you, like I
know it never comes up in the Bible.
There's no word for Zoroastrianism
in the Bible as far as I'm aware.
Right.
But I was wondering if you could,
I don't know.
Yeah, so Zoroastrianism, it's super
fascinating.
If you ever get a chance to read
about Zoroastrianism, it's one of
these like, it's one of these
Near Eastern religions that I find
absolutely fascinating.
Manichaeism, we talked about
Manichaeism before.
That's another one.
It's wild.
But Zoroastrianism is really
interesting to read about.
Part of the problem is, is that a
lot of the sources we have for what
that religion looked like are from,
in some cases, the Islamic period.
Yeah.
Right.
So at that point, there, we know that
in early, earlier forms of
Zoroastrianism, they had a number of
different deities.
They had, you know, Hora Mazda and
they had Ahriman and then they had
a bunch of other deities that were
kind of like sub-deities under that.
Like Anahita and Mithra and different
deities like that.
But they might have really sort of
emphasized their sort of, their
variation of monotheism, we could say,
after the Islamic conquests, when they
really needed to sort of present
themselves as sort of people of a book
so that they could sort of survive
under Islamic rule by simply paying a
tax, right?
Like just, just like Jews and
Christians, right?
So, so there was, so there was that.
And so there's always a question of
like, well, how, how much did that
change the way that they even talked
about themselves?
Right.
So go back earlier.
The question of like, when did
Zoroaster or Zarathustra, this, this
prophet who supposedly started the,
even the fact that we call him a
prophet, right?
That, that might be part of this, this
campaign that they have to sort of make
themselves sound a little bit more like
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
But their, their founder, we'll call him
a founder, that's a little bit more
neutral, right?
Zarathustra.
Yeah.
Some historians were putting him like
back in like the early 2000s BC, but
they, their evidence for that was mostly
based on the fact that the, the
writings supposedly by Zarathustra were
called the Avestas, were composed in a
specific dialect that is only of Persian
that is only attested, or I should say an
Indo-Iranian language, that is only
attested in those documents.
And there were historical linguistic
arguments that they said, well, it's so
different from old Persian, for example,
that it has to be really, really, really
early.
And there were also arguments about like
migrations from Central Asia and stuff
like that.
Anyway, it's very complicated.
I think a lot of scholars nowadays will
either take sort of a hyper late view,
which says if there was a historical
Zarathustra, he was probably only a
generation or two before Cyrus, which is
probably a little extreme.
Some people would say like, well, go back
a couple hundred years, but it's definitely
not the early 2000s, right?
So you have that.
But there's definitely, there's a lot of
Zoroastrian concepts that very clearly show
up in these Persian royal inscriptions,
even to the point that like there's
certain phrases that sound like they might
be old Persian paraphrases or translations
of things from the Avestas, right?
So there's stuff like that.
There are some references in the Hebrew
Bible to things that might be sort of,
they don't directly reference Zoroastrianism,
but there's some things that might be sort
of riffing on it.
So there's a part, for example, in a description
of God in Isaiah, somewhere late Isaiah,
where it has a bit about, I can't remember
the exact line, but God who, describes God
as someone who creates, is it creates light
and, shoot, creates light and darkness.
Yeah.
Well-being and calamity.
Yes, that's what it is.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Good.
I'm glad somebody knew that because I
couldn't remember it.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a great passage, right?
So that's some of my favorite stuff in the
Hebrew Bible is that part of Isaiah.
But there's the thought that, I mean, again,
you can, this is, again, a little bit uncertain,
right, you can connect that to, like, oh,
Genesis 1 creates light and dark right there.
It's easy.
Some people have suggested that that may also
be a sort of a subtle kind of jab at the Zoroastrian god that, you know,
well, you have to have two deities.
We have one who's responsible for both light and dark.
We don't have a light god and a dark god.
We have one who does both of those things, right?
So there's certain things like that that might be sort of like little barbed jabs.
But with those kind of things, again, it's hard to know.
It's hard to know unless we have more context what they may or may not be arguing for.
So that's a very, very long answer to your question.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I'm just struck by the Persian Empire generally is that God is, like,
superintending history to fulfill his promise that he made to his people.
Like, during Moses' time, Moses prophesied to the people that you're going to go to exile
if you repent and turn to your God.
I'll have mercy on you and I'll gather you again from your exile.
And in Maya's time, like, that's happening and they're subsidizing the temple.
So it's like that actually the Persians are fulfilling the Lord's purposes
even though they have completely different reasons for doing it.
I think about Daniel.
He's prophesying about these kingdoms that are going to come, that are going to rise and fall.
I think the Persian might be in there.
But this everlasting kingdom is going to come.
So it's like the Lord is using these kings and political figures, like, as pawns in his hand.
He's, he's, they want geopolitical strategy.
But the Lord's purpose is, he's like, no, I'm building my kingdom through Persia.
So it's actually cool to see it from the other side, like, how Persians are kind of thinking about what they're doing.
Whereas the Bible kind of sees it from the Lord's sovereign prerogatives of how he's working on history.
Mm-hmm.
And that's where I think this is, one of the reasons this sort of historical study can be helpful is, you know,
it gets us to tease out a little bit some of this, the question of historical causality, right?
Like, why did a certain event happen?
And it's, it's often hard, it's often hard to pinpoint, like, one specific, you know, you can talk about, like, World War I, right?
Like, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused World War I, but so did the fact, but so did the fact that there were these, like, crazy system of alliances in Europe at that time.
So did, you know, like, like, European imperial colonialism, because you had, you know, all these different imperial powers kind of eyeing each other up and trying to take out their rivals, you know, like, there's so many different things, right?
And those are all just political factors, right?
There's all kinds of different factors on so many different levels that go into causing a historical event.
And what we're getting oftentimes in the Bible is sort of the, the, I won't say the reaction, but sort of, you know, there's things going on around them.
And we're getting sort of the voices that are sort of saying, like, but actually, like, in response to that, instead of what you're seeing around you.
But we only get this, we're only getting the answer to the question.
Like, we need to, it's like Jeopardy, right?
You have to say the question.
So we're kind of going back and sort of seeing, like, what, what are the questions they're trying to answer in the biblical text, right?
So you get this again, you know, again, in, like, the Book of Kings, for example, which seems to have been written in the early exile.
And you read the Book of Kings, and it is a history of Israel and Judah, but it's also a history that focuses very much on the question of why are we in exile right now?
You know, so it's, it's, it's always, history always has a purpose.
History writing always has a purpose to it, right?
There's history with a capital H, which is, like, stuff that happens in the past.
And then there's history as we, as we, we talk about it, and we write about it, and we do history.
And that's where we talk about causality, purposes of events, you know, all kinds of different issues like that.
That's where it gets really sort of interesting.
You know, it's like the type of history of the Bible is, it's not, it's a specific type of history of what God is doing in history.
It doesn't mean that there are other political, like, other political factors cause something to happen, but the lens in which the Bible writers are talking about, it's a very specific type of history.
Yeah.
That's why, too, yeah.
I keep those things, like, it's both ends.
Mm-hmm.
That's why, too, I often talk about sort of what I, what I do with, with this kind of thing is, it's not so much, you know, people will ask me if I'm trying to, to, is this apologetics?
Are you trying to prove the biblical text is accurate?
Or are you, you know, sometimes if I come to a conclusion people don't like, or they say, are you trying to disprove the Bible?
And I'm like, well, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not trying to do either one.
What I'm trying to do is illuminate the Bible, get us to be able to read it better.
Because we can illuminate more of, like, what some of those, tease out some of those, those causes a little bit further.
And as you say, too, right, the, the, the type of history being given in the biblical text is very much a, a theological history or a spiritual history, right?
So, again, do look at the book of Kings, we get Manasseh, right?
And Manasseh rules for 55 years.
That's a very long reign.
I think it's the longest reign of a Judean king, except maybe for David.
I'm not, I can't remember exactly now.
But, was it 33?
Okay, so he rules longer than David, right?
The only thing we hear about Manasseh is that he practiced a lot of idolatry.
That's the only thing we hear about him.
We don't hear about his foreign policy.
We don't hear about his sort of, did he, what did he do for taxation?
What did he do for, like, did he go on military campaigns?
Like, what, we don't hear about any of that.
And it's because of the kind of history that we're getting in the Bible.
Which doesn't mean it's bad, right?
This is, it's a very good kind of history.
But we also have to keep in mind that there is a lot more that helps us get a picture of what's going on there.
So, anyway, sorry, that was like a second lecture on top of all that.
Yeah.
Two separate things.
One, what you just said is why I find the old Hebrew classification of Joshua Judges, Samuel Hines, as the former prophets.
Yes.
To think of them, not as simply this is what happened, but this is God's telling.
Yeah.
I agree.
This is part of the reason, part of the reason why I use the term Hebrew Bible.
It's part of the reason why I like their, and I don't know how familiar people are with this,
but there's, the ordering of the books that we have in the Old Testament is a little bit different than the way it's organized in this sort of more, probably more original Hebrew form.
They have a different ordering of the texts, and it means that the texts get classified a little bit differently.
So, what we call the history books, a large portion of those are called the former prophets in the Hebrew Bible, right?
So, it's that classification I find in some ways to be a little bit more helpful in sort of getting a sense of like, oh, that's what this text is doing.
Yeah.
Second question.
Tyler's first question about technological innovations of Persia.
Mm-hmm.
I remember reading a comment here in Zechariah.
They talked about how their better roads in their Pony Express mail system allowed them to respond to rebellions much faster,
and that was a big part of how they came to power.
Is there a truth to that, that they were actually just really good at putting down their rebellions before they took root?
Yeah.
So, one of the things, I don't know if I would say before they took power, but sort of as they take over all this territory, right, they, you need to have communication,
you need to have ways of moving armies, moving messengers, moving goods and supplies throughout an empire that's this big, right?
Again, this is so much bigger.
I mean, you know, we had the Persian, or sorry, the Assyrian Empire, right, fairly big.
Same thing with the, whoops, the Babylonian Empire, also fairly big.
But when you get something that's even larger than that, whoops, you really need to have a good way of communicating and transporting things.
And so they did develop a system of roads, sort of like an early highway system, essentially, or like you mentioned, sort of like a precursor to the Pony Express.
And they were able to sort of transport a lot of, again, armies, goods, a relatively, for the time, fast communication system.
You know, right, not quite the same as when I, you know, Zoom with a friend who's, you know, in Europe or something like that, you know.
But still, like for that time, very, very fast.
I'm willing to take more questions.
I also realize that it's 10 o'clock.
So if anybody wants to leave, you can.
I'm more than willing to stick around for a little while and talk about more stuff, answer more questions.
So, yeah.
The only thing that I have, it has nothing to do with anything you were talking about.
But you talk about how the part of the Caden, we have no idea what really happened during that time.
And I'm like, so people think, you know, our civilization.
Like, you know, we really don't know.
Everything's on magnetic stuff and it's all.
Yeah.
I mean, like, most of what, most of our records aren't even really on anything that's going to decay.
Like, you've got to have a machine to read it.
Even if it makes it through the Caden process, you know, you've got to have, you know, a PC to look at it.
Well, think about somebody who, you know, if, I have historian friends who talk about this.
And they say, you know, if I'm studying someone, you know, people do modern history.
And they say, well, a couple decades ago, right, you know, you can go through someone's papers, right?
Like, somebody will, when they pass away, you know, they might donate, their family members might donate their papers to a certain archive if the person's, like, relatively somewhat famous.
But we don't have that today, right?
Or we might, but, you know, you get into the 90s and all of a sudden you're like, okay, I'm studying this person who lived in the 90s.
We have his papers, but his papers include floppy disks.
Right.
I don't have a floppy disk reader anymore.
You know, like, what do you do with that?
How do you, you know, so there's similar things that, you know, may be going, again, I have historian friends who talk about this.
And they're like, we need to do something to figure out, you know, or so much that it happens over email.
Right.
So much of what a, you know, you can look through, I mean, like, a lot of famous, some famous people, like, you can look through, like, C.S. Lewis's correspondence, right?
Like, I'm pretty sure that's published.
You can buy a book of that.
Even if I become famous, which I don't think I'll ever be C.S. Lewis famous, and I kind of hope not.
But, like, I have so much in email.
Like, no one's going to publish my, I hope no one ever publishes my emails, right?
That'd be so boring.
But, like, but.
But as a historian, you know that stuff that they thought boring, you're getting a lot out of it.
Well, that's true.
Yeah.
You're looking at these inscriptions, and sure, it's only halves, but you're getting stuff out of it.
Yeah.
That's true.
But, yeah, email.
And it's not even a floppy disk.
I mean, like, some of the stuff, you know, some of the, you know, like, I go back to Commodore 64 days.
You know, so guys that, like, are using Commodore 64 or Apple IIs or, like, that's lost.
Yeah.
You know, unless you go to a museum and you find a working Commodore 64, you're really out.
Yep, you're stuck.
I was just going to say that this problem, it's throughout the entire ancient world that, like, if you look at, in the first century AD, what civilizations are producing a lot of historical documents that were made to this day.
And there were a lot of civilizations that were writing and stuff, but there's only really, like, two.
And it's China and Rome.
Everybody else, Persia, the Indians, they just, their stuff is just pretty much mostly lost.
And so, like, for, and that's first century AD.
If you go back further, sometimes it's better because they're writing on different materials.
On clay, yeah.
But sometimes, obviously, it's also hard to make it longer.
And so this is not just a Bible thing.
Like, the Zoroastrians had the same problem.
The Manichaeans had the same problem.
Like, the Hindus, they had the same problem.
The Buddhists, like, they can't, they have worse problems.
Because they don't, we have a much better archive, at least in the Christian period.
That's what I'm saying.
It wasn't necessarily related to the way it was talked about.
Yeah, yeah.
But just, like, the whole, the whole concept of, like, being able to go back to civilization, you know, and, like, literally the whole world now is on this digital system.
Yeah.
But it's...
I'm a discussion of people like my wife who have journals like me.
The Laura Bush archives.
They're all out of it.
Right about this meeting, Laura.
Yeah.
Otherwise, there'll be no record of it, you know, once we, yeah.
Yeah.
Do you have your journals, too?
Yeah.
But I think one of the things, going off Tom's point, too, right, you know, one of the things is, you know, so we have...
There's two different kinds of, like, historical sources that we have here.
We have, like, contemporary sources that survive, right?
So these are things, like, that are on stone or, like, bits of paper, parchment and papyrus that do survive.
We have clay because it survives, right?
Right.
We also then have...
The reason that we have sources that go back from, like, the classical tradition or from the Bible or, again, like, going further afield to, like, the Hindu tradition or the Buddhist tradition is because they're texts that get copied and passed down.
Right?
Until either...
Until modern times or until recent enough that those copies still exist.
Right?
So these are sort of the two kinds of historical sources that we deal with, and they each have problems, right?
The problem for the transmitted text is they're usually pretty complete, but then we always have to sort of figure out, like, what happened to this text along the way?
Like, did somebody mess up when they were copying it?
Did somebody, you know, scribes...
Before the printing press, scribes often felt, you know, that it was okay for them to add stuff into a text or sort of clarify something that didn't make any sense or update what seemed like an outdated verb form or something, right?
You know?
Sort of updating these and vows to you and your, right?
You know?
So that's the problem with transmitted text.
The problem with sort of contemporaneous excavated texts is, like this one, is that they have holes in them.
Right?
And also, again, sometimes they're in formats that don't make sense to us or that take a while for us to kind of figure out, right?
This one, like, this is an astronomical text.
I can't really read astronomical texts.
It's partly I don't have the mathematical brain, too, and I haven't tried as much.
I have a friend who does, and I'm trying to get him to explain it to me.
But also, like, again, like, they're using all this kind of format, formatting conventions for it that I just don't know.
Right?
So there's always...
There's a learning curve there, whereas transmitted texts are usually made easier, right?
They can be translated.
They can have, like, commentaries added to them.
They can have other things added to them to make them easier for later generations of readers to understand.
Any other questions?
Thoughts?
Yeah?
Are there any...
Is there any light you can shed?
I've understood that the Magi, because of the Jesus, were understood to have come out of some sort of Persian tradition,
which I've heard said originated in Daniel, from Daniel.
Mm-hmm.
Were the Persians really big into astrology, or, like, are there any interesting things?
Yeah.
So we do know...
And, Tom, you can jump in and correct me at any point, since this is closer to your wheelhouse than mine.
But, so part of the reason that we think that they may have been associated with Persia is because of the term magi, right?
Magus in Greek that's used to describe it, which is...
Which is a...
Like, magush is a technical term that comes from Persian.
It's used in the Greek tradition, both to refer specifically to people that the Persians would have said, yeah, that's a magush.
And also, in general, in...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in Greek, it also becomes a term that can be used for any kind of...
Sort of priest or magician or ritual specialist who is kind of outside of...
Kind of whatever the author thinks is orthodox.
Right?
So in the same way we use, like...
We might...
We might refer to somebody as a magician or a sorcerer, right?
But then suddenly, if, you know...
If you go to a Catholic church, for example, you're not going to call the priest...
You're going to call him a priest.
You're not going to call him a magician.
Even though he's, you know...
Doing communion and saying, this is Christ's body, we're not going to be like, oh, what is this?
You know, like...
So there's sort of...
There's kind of a...
There's sort of an us and them that goes on.
So people...
One of the things is, with the Magi in the New Testament, is we're not entirely certain if that term is being used to say, like, these were people from just some other kind of Eastern culture.
Could have been Persian.
Could have been Babylonian.
Could have been Nabataean.
Could have been who knows.
Or were they specifically Persian Magush priests?
I don't know if you have any further light on that, Tom.
I have a similar thing.
There's an ancient Greek historian named Josephus.
And I think he talks about the Magi.
Not those...
Not the three Magi.
But just the concept of Magi.
And he mentions that...
So he's writing in, like, 90 AD.
So it's a pretty good source for us in the Bible.
And he mentions kind of the same thing.
He's like, some of these guys are just astronomers.
They're just...
But then some of them are more, like, what we would call, like, magic people.
Like, they're casting spells.
Like, ritual healers or things like that.
Yeah.
They're very much from astrology.
And...
But I will say that astronomy in the ancient world was more closely went with astrology than it is today.
So there were some ancient astronomers that were pretty straight cut and dry math folks.
But a lot of them also got involved in some other things.
So I think, though, the...
So some people theorize.
They wonder if these Magi who came to visit Jesus really, really...
I'll move forward to the same here.
That were really...
If it's talking about, like, another religious tradition.
If this is coming from Persia and it's showing that, like, the Jews were living in Persia for hundreds of years.
And there may have been some traditions about this.
That's why they're interested in Jesus.
Could have been they saw this crazy thing in the sky.
That's all it was.
And so they're coming.
It's a little mysterious.
So regarding whether Matthew's trying...
He hopes his audience thinks that there was something in the sky that was seen.
Or if he's trying to show there was...
Even alternative religions are acknowledging the Christ who is coming.
Or both.
It's a little...
It's not entirely.
And it is...
I will say, too, with Persians and astrology and astronomy, right?
So it does...
Again, because they probably wrote most of this stuff on papyrus or parchment,
we don't have a ton of Persian astronomy.
Stuff that I've read from people who sort of look at the diffusion of astronomical knowledge in the ancient world,
there does seem to be relative consensus that this Babylonian astronomy was probably what was sort of passed on to the Persians.
So the...
Passed on to the Greeks, right?
And on to the Greeks, yeah.
So I think I mentioned this last time when we did Babylonia, but I'll just say it again.
So Babylonian priests over this time, over a couple hundred years,
would every night go to the top of their temples and look up at the night sky,
and they would just record where things were.
And eventually they noticed patterns,
and they developed mathematical models to sort of analyze those patterns
and describe those patterns and be able to predict stuff.
And that's when it got exciting for them, when they realized they could predict things.
And they actually passed on a lot of this knowledge to other cultures.
So, for example, the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, who wrote this book called The Almagist,
which was kind of like the textbook that you read for astronomy,
basically up until Copernicus, essentially.
Ptolemy has, in the back of his book, he has a bunch of, like, tables of data.
And he says that he got this data from...
He calls them Chaldean priests.
What he means is Babylonian astronomers.
And even the way that they're dated, right,
because they didn't have, like, a sort of consistent, sort of like we do, right,
you know, 536, you know, B.C. and 57, A.D., you know, A.D. 57.
You know, they didn't quite have that,
so they dated by, you know, the fifth year of King X, right?
And when Ptolemy has these listed out this way,
he uses the names of these Babylonian kings,
and later Persian kings, and so forth.
So we know that this is the...
It corroborates the idea that this is data that he's getting
from these kinds of records, right?
He, in whatever form, somebody brought this data to him,
and he put it in his book.
And that's been used ever since, to some extent.
And he's writing after Matthew,
so that just shows that that tradition was still alive
during Matthew and Jesus' age.
This...
So they could have been these Caldean astronomers.
Mm-hmm.
King.
Yeah.
Well, I think the Septuagint,
when he talks about the magicians that Moses and Aaron
are from Egypt,
he's just a word that he can.
Yeah, probably.
Probably, yes.
Which corroborates the...
It can also just be a majority in terms of...
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's where we get the word magic from.
Yeah.
That whole issue in sort of study of the ancient world
is interesting in terms of what we term...
How we use the term magic, right?
Some people don't even like using the term magic
for describing things in the ancient world
because it can be a term to sort of mean, like,
anything that we don't think is legitimate.
Right?
Sort of like, we have priests, they have magicians.
Right?
We have, you know, we have doctors, they have magicians.
You know, it becomes sort of a term.
You know, we don't talk about our own magicians
unless we're talking about, like, stage magicians,
you know, who we all know do tricks.
Right?
You know, so some people try not to use the term
because it can be a little bit slippery.
I go back and forth on it.
I think if you define what you mean,
I think it can be okay,
but you have to be really careful to define what you mean by it
and then stick to that.
But anyway, that's a whole, like, scholarly issue of definitions.
So, any last questions or should we stop it there?
Thank you, John.
All right.
I'll be around if anybody wants to talk.
So, thanks for coming.
Hope you all enjoyed.