Although the concept of Wisdom is highly problematic, what is known as Wisdom literature – at least in the older Jewish tradition – is easily defined. It involves those literary works in the biblical tradition which have a didactic purpose, yet do not belong to the priestly tradition of the Torah which describes the revealed will of God. The books in question include therefore such texts as Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth), Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom. A series of Psalms has also been regarded as belonging to Wisdom literature, and rightly. Here, however, the category becomes less distinct since the majority of Psalms display certain traits of Wisdom literature, while yet conforming as a whole to the usual patterns of psalmodic composition. As the Psalms are discussed in another chapter, the present essay will refer only to those Psalms which are wholly influenced by the didactic character of Wisdom literature proper. Not until the Hellenistic period do more extensive overlaps occur, so that in addition to the Psalms even those literary works which do not belong to the didactic tradition are strongly endowed with the features of Wisdom literature, for example, Tobit and Baruch.

The dating of Wisdom literature poses greater difficulty – unless it can be traced back to a clearly identifiable historical author such as Jesus, the son of Sirach. Even then the material incorporated in such a work will display a character which is in many respects timeless, so that it can often be identified with older traditions. The book of Job and the bulk of proverb literature doubtless belong to the Persian period, that is, the early post-exilic period up to the advent of Alexander in 332 B . C . E . (In the case of Job one might concede that the final additions, and they alone, were made as late as the Hellenistic period.)

The function of this chapter is a limited one, confined to the consideration of the small Jewish (Judean) community itself, the sources for our understanding of its history, and an attempted reconstruction of the essential elements of that history in the Persian period. The wider background of the Persian empire and the information available to us regarding the position of the political units within the Palestinian area under Persian rule have been considered in chapter 4. The evidence provided by archeology is set out in chapter 5. Inevitably some points of overlap and of difference of interpretation must appear between the present discussion and what has preceded, especially since at many points there are great problems in the interpretation of the relatively meagre evidence. Nor can the history of the Palestinian community be satisfactorily understood without awareness of its relationship to those in Babylonia and in Egypt; the main stages of the history are associated with new figures who appear from Babylonia, and relationship with oneparticular Jewish group in Egypt, that of Elephantine, raises questions about both the chronology of the Palestinian community and the way it regarded itself, though no direct allusion to this Egyptian group is to be found in the biblical material. Discussions of these other areas are to be found in chapter 13. Clearly too the internal life of the community cannot be adequately considered without an awareness of its expression in religious writings such as are discussed in the two chapters that follow on ‘Prophecy and Psalms’ and on ‘Wisdom literature’ (chapters 8 and 9); and in the more general treatment of the religious life of the period there must be overlap and some differences of interpretation from what is here indicated (see chapters 10 and 11).

POLITICAL HISTORY

By the end of the seventh century b.c.e. only four major powers were left on the political map of the Near East: Egypt, Babylonia, Media and Lydia. In 550 the Persians, led by their king, Cyrus II, seized Media and over the next three years invaded Elam, Parthia, Hyrcania on the Caspian sea, and the whole of Asia Minor including Lydia and the Greek colonies. Between 545 and 539 b.c.e. Cyrus II conquered all the regions of Central Asia and Eastern Iran as far as the borders of India.

Following this, in the spring of 539 b.c.e. the Persian army attacked Babylonia and began to advance down the Diyala river valley. At this critical point, Ugbaru, the governor of Gutium (a Babylonian province to the east of the middle course of the Tigris) went over to Cyrus.

All the efforts of Nabonidus, the king of Babylonia, to resist the Persian advance proved doomed to failure. It was in the interests of Babylonia's merchants for an enormous empire to be created which would guarantee them a market and safe trading routes to Egypt, Asia Minor and other countries of the east, and they were therefore prepared to collaborate with the invaders. Influential priestly groups were also dissatisfied with Nabonidus. Although he continued to worship the ancient Babylonian gods Marduk, Nabu and their companions, he gradually began to promote the cult of the Moon god, Sin. Moreover, the Moon god whom Nabonidus patronized was not the traditional god Sin, but one whose symbols and forms of worship were more reminiscent of Aramaic deities.

INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM AND THE METHOD

The fact that in the latter part of the Second Temple period Judaism was undergoing far-reaching changes and developing new aspects, trends, themes and ideas, which were to be retained in part as belonging to the permanent stock of Jewish life and thought, has long attracted the attention of students of Judaism. The most obvious of these changes was in the use of language – the structure, syntax, morphology and lexicon of the later writings in Hebrew display differences which put them apart from the earlier books, and a new language was added to the range of sacred expression, which figures already in some of the later biblical books. These outward changes reflect some of the adjustments made necessary by the new situation of the world: the creation of the world empire of the Persians, their adoption of Aramaic as an official language for purposes of international communication, and the fact that both Hebrew and Aramaic absorbed a great number of Persian words and coined certain expressions under the influence of Persian, as they also didsubsequently under that of Greek. Many of these words and expressions were, naturally, in the field of government and administrative practice, but this was by no means the only field in which this linguistic impact was present. We have some words belonging to general civilian life, as well as some which became part of the Jewish religious terminology, although they were not exclusively of religious significance in their original linguistic background (for example, raz pardes, nahŔir).

A key point in the study of Achemenid religion is the date of Zarathushtra, over which scholars have been long divided. One group judged the issue on the evidence of the Gathas, the seventeen hymns attributed to the prophet. These are composed in the oldest known stage of ‘Avestan’ (the eastern Iranian language of the Avesta or Zoroastrian holy texts), and have their closest linguistic affinities with the Rig-Veda. The social and world outlook implicit in them is correspondingly archaic, and so it was deduced that Zarathushtra must have lived about 1000 b.c.e. or even earlier.

The other group of scholars laid weight on a date to be derived from a late chapter of the Bundahishn. This is a composite Pahlavi work, that is, it belongs to the secondary Zoroastrian literature preserved in Pahlavi or Middle Persian, most of which was written down between the fourth and tenth centuries c.e. The chapter in question contains king-lists designed to fill out a schematized world-history; and it gives a place to Kavi Vishtaspa, Zarathushtra's royal patron, which sets the prophet's floruit at ‘258 years before Alexander’. This is the date expressly recorded, as that assigned by the Zoroastrians to their prophet, by the early Islamic scholars al-Mascudi and al-Biruni. Its modesty and apparent precision made it seem credible to some modern scholars, who accordingly assigned Zarathushtra to the sixth century b.c.e., supposing him thus to have been an eastern Iranian con temporary of the Achemenid Cyrus the Great.

An account of the prophecy and Psalms of the Persian period – that is, the two hundred years of Persian rule over Palestine from 538 to 330 b.c.e. – is fraught with the same difficulties as any other history of prophecy and Psalms within a given period. The problems arise first from the peculiar way in which the literature of the Old Testament psalmists and prophets was handed down, and secondly from the particular circumstances in which the literature of prayer came to be written.

Thus in the first instance written prophecies and prophetic testimonies were rapidly collected into small anthologies; these were then put together to form larger collections and whole books. In the course of this anthologizing process, what were originally anonymous prophetic utterances were very frequently attributed to named prophets, either because within the oral tradition the sayings of well-known prophets had already been enriched by the addition of anonymous material, or because an attempt was made thereby to give authority to anonymous utterances as pseudo-epigraphic literature. The result of this whole process is that most prophetic books represent, not the sole product of a single author, but a complicated tapestry of utterances from a variety of sources. This means that scholars have to deal with an abundance of anonymous and pseudo-epigraphic texts which can be dated and placed in historical order only through an indirect approach. We must find and interpret evidence that will help us place the texts in the right order and we must produce arguments to establish which indeed are the pseudo-epigraphic texts.

Nowhere are the distinctive assets and liabilities of archaeology as a source shown up so conspicuously as in Greek and Roman history. While the decisive theoretical battles of archaeology have long been fought out on other fields and between bigger battalions, it is in the closer encounters of Classical archaeology that the more continuous attrition of empirical testing takes place. The experience has not had much influence on wider archaeological thought, but it has revealed certain assets on the part of archaeological evidence in an historical context: four of these, which I would single out as the most important, are its independence, its directness, its experimental character, and its unlimited potential for future extension. None of these qualities should be understood as implying objectivity. In so far as the ideal of total objectivity can be pursued at all, it is no more at the command of the archaeologist than of the historian. Less widely acknowledged, but in the long run just as important, are the peculiar liabilities of archaeological evidence. It is impossible simply to give a list of these; a great part of the discussion in this chapter arises from their existence. But one can say at the outset that archaeological evidence particularly lends itself to misunderstanding of one form or another: occasionally, to misunderstanding by the archaeologist of the identity of what he himself has discovered; much more often, to his misunderstanding of the meaning of his own and others' discoveries; equally frequently, to misunderstanding by historians of what is the scope of permissible inference from archaeological data in general or from a particular discovery. To these and other failures of understanding and communication, we must turn presently.

INTRODUCTION

There can have been few major civilisations in which the incision of words on stone or metal for permanent display or record has played no part at all. But if the making and display of inscriptions is attested in many cultures, it was so distinctive a feature of Graeco–Roman civilisation that it deserves consideration as a major cultural phenomenon in its own right. As a consequence of this, the sheer volume of inscriptions from the ancient world, primarily but not only in Greek and Latin, gives epigraphy a central importance in the study of its history and culture, in a way which is not characteristic of historical approaches to most other periods or areas. Thus, it was to an epigrapher of the classical world that the editors of a post–war French encyclopaedia turned when they wanted to include a section on epigraphy as a historical discipline in general.

The sheer profusion of epigraphic evidence – from tiny graffiti on walls or fragments of pottery, to stamps on jars, to the sepulchral inscriptions of innumerable individuals, to vast monumental inscriptions which may run to several hundred lines – creates its own problems. It would be a Herculean (and pointless) labour to work out even approximately how many Greek and Latin inscriptions have now been published; a guess of something over half a million might not be far out. Though many major projects for corpora of inscriptions have been undertaken – the great classics being the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and to a lesser extent Inscriptiones Graecae – none ever has been, or ever could be, completed without being already out of date.

If a scholar wishes to create a picture of a modern society in all its aspects, there is little of what he needs to know that he cannot find out, although there may still be much that he cannot understand. For the history of Greece and Rome, there is a great deal which is simply unknowable.

Towards the end of the Archaic age of Greece, there developed the writing of works of history which are recognisably the ancestors of those written today; from this point on there is an unbroken sequence of works by Greek and, later, Roman historians down to the end of antiquity. The investigation and characterisation of this historiographical tradition is among the first tasks which face a modern historian of the ancient world. But only a tiny part of what once existed survived the wreck of that world; in addition, the range of interest of historians in antiquity was rather narrow and it was limited, with a few exceptions, to political history; even where their interest was wider, they took for granted much that we wish to know, on economic conditions and even on political institutions. Moreover, there was a general tendency to explain all human actions largely in moral terms.

Much may, of course, also be learned from literary works besides the historical – epic poetry, tragic or comic plays, speeches, philosophical treatises, personal poetry; but many of these works are, like histories, the product of a restricted social class and share its limited vision, although they may also be unconsciously revealing of its assumptions and preconceptions.

All written texts provide evidence of the ideas, opinions, interests and levels of education of their authors, of the extent of their freedom and of the nature of their conditioning. Furthermore, insofar as a text is a work of literature, it bears the mark of a particular personality and of his unique interpretative vision; it reflects also the culture, the taste and the ideological, political and literary currents of the time; it may be representative of the historical context in which it is created and of political, social and economic factors. In approaching literary (and other) texts it is, of course, crucial to attempt to understand the intentions behind their creation and the means used to achieve these intentions; but the later history and transmission of a work are also anchored in the most diverse geographical and cultural contexts, which may enrich or alter its significance. A further problem arises from the likelihood of mistakes in the course of the copying of literary texts in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The preservation of a text which is at all close to its original is very rare; the recently discovered papyrus from Qasr Ibrim, which contains two virtually complete elegies of Gallus, is a case in point (JRS 69 (1979), 125–5). In feet, the very survival of ancient literature is often the result of mere chance or of interests quite unrelated to the intentions of the authors concerned.

The historian approaches ancient literary texts with historiographical interests, using methodological approaches of great diversity; these interests and approaches derive basically from problems and pressures belonging to the society of the historian, to his political leanings, to his moral sense.

Professional politicians, whether in the ancient Graeco-Roman or in the contemporary context, are quantitatively a negligible minority of the citizen-body. For them politics are a way of life, even though they believe, or at least persuade themselves, that their role is to advance the good of the society in which they operate; that, in other words, politics are a second-order activity designed to achieve objectives that are in themselves not political. For everyone else politics are wholly instrumental: the objectives themselves are what matter in the end. In saying that, I do not imply that there is no satisfaction, or anyway fun, in the excitement of an election campaign or a close legislative contest; or that Roman-style elections, with their massive games and handouts, did not offer immediate, tangible gains unconnected with policies or programmes. Nor do I suggest that the mass of citizens had clearly formulated goals in their minds or that they were less apt than their present-day counterparts to hold mutually contradictory views. I am saying no more than the commonplace that men who voted in elections or assemblies did not divorce personalities from issues, that they believed that in one way or another the issues mattered enough to them to warrant their participation in politics at some level.

Yet, obvious though it seems, this assessment has been challenged by ancient historians from two opposing directions.