ABSTRACT
Note that the text mentions returnees who come back after the temple has already been rebuilt, and describes their financial support as a form of cultic offering. Moreover, the text apparently lays this burden (with ambiguous wording) on the population in general, and not only Judeans. These changes to the edict are ideologically important, and have been made in order to preserve the global character of the return. But, most important of all, the return did not take place in a single move, but in different phases over the course of a century at least. Some groups may have come back already in the Babylonian age, after the amnesty of Awil-Marduk. Others returned after 538, after the advent of Cyrus, thanks to the tolerant policy that the Achaemenid monarchy immediately adopted. Amongst these was probably a group led by Sheshbazzar, a member of the Judean royal family and uncle of Zerubbabel, with whom he becomes confused in later tradition (with the tendency to compress all the returnees into a single movement). The most coherent and determined group probably went back in 521, in the second year of Darius, because these initiated the energetic rebuilding of the Second Temple (the first Passover was celebrated there in 515; Ezra 6.19). This group was under a mixed leadership of high rank: Zerubbabel, remaining heir of ‘David’s house’, representing the monarchy, and Joshua, high priest of the Zadokite line, representing the priesthood. Other groups arrived in the time of Artaxerxes (his 20th year = 446), according to the accounts of Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s activities. And other groups arrived even later, drawn by the success in the rebuilding of the temple, the fortification of Jerusalem and the autonomy granted to the province of Judah (Yehud) by the Persian administration. This portrait of partial return in small groups over a long period of time shows that the ‘strong’ model of a single, violent conquest of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua must have been applied at a time when the return was already underway. It was probably the manifesto of a group of particularly determined returnees, perhaps the group leaded by Zerubbabel – in which case it belongs to a quite late strand of Deuteronomist historiography. But above all, it is not intended as a ‘foundation model’, reflecting the
return that really had occurred, but rather as a blueprint of the character that the return should have. The story narrated in Joshua is not only unreliable in its reconstruction of a mythical ‘conquest’ in the twelfth century, but also unrealistic for reconstructing the return in the sixth-fifth centuries. It is a utopian manifesto, intended to support a project of return that never took place in such terms.
