Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 39:1 (NA 1988)
Article: The Governors Of Judah Under The Persians
Author: H. G. M. Williamson

TynBul 39:1 (1988) p. 59

The Governors Of Judah Under The Persians

H. G. M. Williamson

The Tyndale Biblical Archaeology Lecture 1987

Dedicated to the memory of C. J. Hemer

In 1934 Albrecht Alt published an essay on the history of the political status of Judah in the post-exilic period which, like so many others of his writings, set the agenda for scholarly discussion in the ensuing half-century.1 A major conclusion of this study, and one which has been adopted by many scholars since, was that the arrival of Nehemiah in Jerusalem was accompanied by a major change in Judah’s constitutional position. Previously, the Persians had taken over from the Babylonians a system whereby Judah was subsumed within the province of Samaria. Those such as Sheshbazzar and Zerubbabel who preceded Nehemiah and who are designated peḥâ usually translated ‘governor’, should be understood rather as special commissioners whose role was restricted to specific and chronologically limited tasks in connection with the Jerusalem cult. Under Nehemiah, however, Judah was granted limited independence with its own governor — limited because, of course it was still a part of the Persian empire. It now became, in effect, a province alongside that of Samaria within the Satrap, of ‘Beyond the River’2 It was this new development, Alt suggested, which provoked the vigorous opposition which Nehemiah at first encountered.

TynBul 39:1 (1988) p. 60

Alt’s essay was largely based upon a careful, if sometimes speculative, examination of the Biblical texts. In1934 there was little enough light of any sort that archaeological research could shed on the often obscure history of the Levant during the Persian period, and of course with regard to so specific a proposal as that which Alt was advancing it would not have been surprising if no trace of it whatever had survived in the archaeological record.3 Nevertheless, with characteristic thoroughness, Alt marshalled in a dozen lines and two footnotes what evidence he could from that quarter, namely the evidence from the Elephantine Papyri that by the year 408 BC, at any rate, Judah was a separate province with its own governor alongside Samaria, and, more significantly, the evidence as known at that time from seal impressions and coins that it was from this period on that the official title of the province — yhd — came into common use.

During the half century since Alt wrote, there have been a number of further discoveries of similar mat...