The Empire Next Door: Persia

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Yeah.

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.