Achaemenid Aramaic in Hybrid Identity Formation: Elephantine, Bactria, and Ezra-Nehemiah

Abstract

The Biblical books of Ezra-Nehemiah depict a composite view of repatriated golah life in Achaemenid Yehud. This reflection includes negotiation of hybrid colonial identities and their linguistic borders. The broad contours of the books incorporate Imperial Aramaic into the golah community's practice and identity while rejecting other linguistic communities (i.e., those who speak "Ashdodite" in Nehemiah 13). This study proposes that the linguistic phenomena in the Hebrew-Aramaic diglossic construction of Ezra, the covenant renewal ceremony of Nehemiah 8, and the mixed marriage crisis of Nehemiah 13 be read in conversation with the inscriptional evidence for the Achaemenid Empire's administrative deployment of Aramaic as an imperial lingua franca. Postcolonial notions of hybrid linguistic identity (Franz Fanon) and process theory of identity (Stuart Hall) will provide useful frameworks for interpreting the literary and inscriptional data. The inscriptional record demonstrates that the Achaemenid Empire effectively spread Aramaic scribal training from its frontier in Elephantine, Egypt to that in Bactria, where colonized peripheral communities hybridized Imperial Aramaic in the process of integrating it into community practice. Ezra-Nehemiah similarly remembers colonial scribal negotiation of a hybrid linguistic identity at a peripheral location, as literature that adapts the imperial lingua franca for portions of community narrative while maintaining a bulk of the narrative in Hebrew. Postcolonial process theory of identity models identity as a vector in movement, shifted forwards by interweaving the past—in this case, Hebrew—with ongoing present influences—Aramaic. The rejection of other linguistic communities while employing Aramaic for internal purposes illustrates that Imperial Aramaic and colonization have become a part of Ezra-Nehemiah's imagined community identity that unites the golah across colonial locations in Mesopotamia and Yehud. Implicit to hybridity is the notion that colonized linguistic bricolage is weighted with ambivalence toward imperial colonization. Such tension is evident throughout Ezra-Nehemiah's narrative, as it portrays adaptation to Persian rule while frequently referring to the repatriate community as “slaves” to Empire. Ezra-Nehemiah thus constructs a scribal version of a hybrid postcolonial linguistic identity.