In Herodotus, Where Are The Jews?

While the Tribe doesn’t appear in the 2,500-year-old ‘Histories,’ released in new translation, the book provides an important context for understanding the Bible.

Herodotus’ “The Histories,” considered the first work of history, describes the rise of the Persian empire in the 5th century B.C.E. The Persians absorbed the Jews living in the Mediterranean too and helped them rebuild the Second Temple.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

Herodotus, the Greek author credited since Cicero as the “Father of History,” is more comfortably described today as an intrepid ethnographer. His opus, “The Histories,” written in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E., recently re-translated and published as “The Landmark Herodotus” (Pantheon), describes in rich Homeric prose the many varied and peculiar peoples that inhabited much of his known world. Based on his travels, Herodotus documents the cultures living in the islands of his native Greece, Asia Minor, Phoenicia, the northern tip of Africa and, perhaps, the brim of the Black Sea. The purpose, many scholars have since argued, was to make the Greeks’ defense of their lands from Persian invaders all the more sweet. By depicting the vast diversity of cultures the Persians

managed to conquer before attempting Greece, Persia’s defeat at the hands of the Greeks and their quickly cobbled Lilliputian armies would be all the more spectacular.
But given Herodotus’ curiosity in the world beyond his borders, it may seem a little strange to modern readers, if completely justifiable, that he never once mentions the Jews.

From the middle of the sixth to the fifth centuries B.C.E., biblical scholars are certain that Jews were living throughout the ancient Mediterranean. And what’s more, several held prominent positions in the Persian imperial court and probably even fought in the Persian Empire against the Greeks. Cyrus the Great, the first villain in Herodotus’ history of Persian conquest, was to the Jews a near Messiah. After defeating the Babylonians and absorbing their empire, Cyrus invited the Jews of the Babylonian exile back to Jerusalem, in 538 B.C.E. His successor Darius I completed the rebuilding of the Second Temple, which stood for more than 500 years before the Romans destroyed it once again. And crucial developments, mainly the beginning of a biblical canon and a heightened sense of a Jewish identity, were set in motion during this time.

In short, the Persian Period — what historians of ancient Jewish history call the era from 538 B.C.E. to 333 B.C.E., when the Persians ruled much of the ancient world — was a boon for the Jews.

“This was a significant time for the Hebrew Bible and for Judaism,” writes James L. Kugel, an emeritus professor of the Hebrew Bible at Harvard, in his new book “How to Read the Bible” (Free Press). It was “a period when numerous biblical texts were being edited and put into their final form, and when several of the most characteristic features of the later Judaism were first taking shape.”
In fact, it may be because this was the beginning of a formation of Jewish identity that explains Herodotus’ obliviousness to the culture. Though scholars suggest that Herodotus might be referring to the Jews when he describes the odd custom of circumcision among the “Syrians of Palestine,” they say that that inference could be easily dismissed. “The Phoenicians and Syrians of Palestine agree that they have learned this practice from the Egyptians,” Herodotus writes, in Andrea L. Purvis’ new translation. In other words, many cultures in the area practiced circumcision too.

The larger point to be made stems from the fact that the Jews of the two ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been living in some form of exile for nearly 200 years before Cyrus invited them back to Jerusalem. The Assyrians destroyed the kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E., dispersing for eternity what is now called the 10 “lost tribes” living there. The Babylonians conquered the separate kingdom of Judah centuries later, in 586 B.C.E. (The kingdom of Israel seceded from Judah in 931 B.C.E.) It was the Babylonians who destroyed the First Temple, leading to the first diaspora in Jewish history that scholars can document as fact. And the event would have a profound effect on Jewish consciousness, as Psalm 137 elegizes: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
From here on, the Judeans, from which the term “Jews” derives, “would have to define themselves in relation to the new peoples amidst whom they were living” in exile, said Rachel Friedman, a classics professor at Vassar College who also teaches in the Jewish Studies Program there. In the Babylonian exile, lasting less than 50 years before the Persian period began, the Judeans would be forced to ask: who is a Jew?
But these Judeans communities living in exile were forming their own wildly divergent forms of Judaism — “Ywhm-ism,” the belief in a single god named YWHM, is in fact a more common denominator, many scholars suggest. So there was no clear answer to who, or what, was a Jew. A piece of papyrus found in Elephantine in Egypt from this time suggests that the Jewish community there had built their own temple to YWHM, something then prohibited in Hebraic law. The “Murashu texts” found in Nippur in Babylonia (present-day Iraq) show some Jews even prospering in exile. Both suggest there was no reason for these Jews to return to Jerusalem, which would complicate any attempt at a unified Jewish identity.

Maybe then Herodotus didn’t just skip over Jewish culture; there was no single, identifiable Jewish culture to speak of. “Herodotus doesn’t know about Jews,” said Lisbeth S. Fried, a biblical scholar at the University of Michigan. “But he gives the whole context in which to understand the Bible.”

And scholars of the Hebrew Bible have certainly used Herodotus’ "Histories" to better understand biblical literature. The most important biblical books that overlap with Herodotus’ work are Ezra and Nehemiah, which are part of the Writings, one of three branches of the Hebrew Bible. (The backbone is the Five Books of Moses; Prophets make up the third branch.) Both works — the one by Herodotus, the other, Ezra and Nehemiah, thought to be by one author — were probably written in the same time, the mid-fifth century B.C.E. So “it would not be correct altogether to ignore the probability that there was such an interchange” of influence, wrote Willis J. Beecher, one of the earliest biblical scholars, in 1889.

But current trends in biblical scholarship deduce possible influences from literary similarities, like structure and theme, rather than congruities in historical detail. The authors of the Bible, scholars say, were smitten with political agendas, making it difficult to read them as any kind of objective history at all. And classicists say Herodotus probably never visited many of the places he describes. Much of “The Histories” is hearsay — in a famous passage, he recognizes the pratfall: “I am obliged to tell what is said, but I am not obliged to believe it.”

A scholarly book from 1993 titled “The Relationship between Herodotus’ History and Primary History” (Scholars Press), by Sara Mandell and David Noel Freedman, argues that both Herodotus and the Bible, much of it canonized and organized by the authors of Ezra-Nehemiah, were both divided in a similar scheme. And perhaps more suggestive of a mutual influence is that both narratives are driven by a similar cosmic force. The narrative of Greek victory in “The Histories” is driven by the Greek notion of Fate and their leaders’ adherence to the oracles. In Ezra-Nehemiah, God rewards the Jews who obey the Mosaic laws. More recently, the scholar Thomas B. Dozeman has suggested that that both texts make a striking case for law-abiding societies, with Herodotus often writing admiringly of the Persian legal system administered in Palestine. “The result is a new world order in which Aramaic civil law and Hebrew religious law reinforce each other,” Dozeman wrote in a 2003 journal article titled “Herodotus and Ezra-Nehemiah.”
And yet all scholars advise caution. As the old saw goes, correlation does not imply causation. Herodotus probably never met a Jew; the author of Ezra-Nehemiah never mentions a Greek. In fact, it may be the fundamental difference between the texts that is most enlightening — a stark reminder of the subjectivity of experience. For Jews, the 200 years of Persian rule was primarily a benediction of good governance and grace. For the Greeks, staving it off was the blessing.

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