ABSTRACT
Introduction Our analysis of the relevant literary evidence concerning the rebuilding of the Persian-era temple is now complete. Genealogical information contained in the book of Nehemiah has indicated that Zerubbabel and Nehemiah were either contemporaries or a generation apart in age, not some sixty-five years apart. Thus, either Zerubabbel and the temple-rebuilding needs to be moved to the reign of Artaxerxes I, or Nehemiah and the rebuilding of the city walls of Jerusalem needs to be moved to the reign of Darius I. A fresh analysis of Haggai-Zechariah 8 and Ezra 1-6 has led to the conclusion that the dating of the rebuilding process in years 2, 4, and 6 of Darius I is not historically accurate. As a consequence, the logical deduction to be drawn is that the reconstruction of the temple is to be placed alongside the rebuilding of the city walls in the reign of Artaxerxes I. This date under Artaxerxes I is corroborated by the extra-biblical reference to the adult sons of Sinuballit, governor of Samerina, the ‘adversary’ of Nehemiah, in Elephantine papyrus AP 30, dated 408 BCE. The father must have been active as governor in the 450-420s or 410s, during the reign of Artaxerxes I and his successor, Darius II. Before this hypothesis can be explored further, however, we need to turn our attention to what we can learn from texts and artifacts about the physical layout of the province of Yehud at the time of Artaxerxes I (465-433 BCE). We need to understand what the approximate boundaries of the province were, and whether the people tended to live in walled cities and towns, or in unwalled cities, towns, villages, and farmsteads. We need also to establish where forts, birot (walled sites with a fort and a civilian population), and relay stations were located. The latter three types of sites are crucial for our understanding of Persian policy within Yehud and why Artaxerxes would have decided to rebuild Jerusalem as the new provincial seat and bring in new settlers from Babylonia to increase the provincial population. The current chapter will focus on defining the territory that was included within Yehud at the time of Artaxerxes. Specifically, we need to determine if the Negev was an integral part of Yehud under Artaxerxes that subsequently was reassigned to the province of Idumea when the latter was created, or whether it had lain outside the territory of Yehud since the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE. In addition, we need to determine if Lod and Ono in the coastal plain were within Yehud at this time. Once these two issues are investigated, we can move on in Chapter 5 to examine the distribution and sizes of sites in Yehud during the fifth century BCE. The critically evaluated archaeological findings can then be used in conjunction to the conclusions drawn in Chapters 1-3 to propose a new recreation of Persian imperial policy for the development of Yehud under Artaxerxes I, which will be presented in the final chapter.
