The Place of Achaemenid Tradition in Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge for Jewish Studies

Abstract

During a Fall 2021 seminar at the University of Michigan, a series of scholars addressed fellows at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies on the topic of Second Temple Judaism. Much discussion focused on Jewishness and Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but the Persian period received very little attention, and in some cases was ignored altogether. This was despite the fact that it was under the Achaemenid dynasty that the aforementioned Second Temple was constructed and much of its liturgy became stabilized or even, in some cases, fixed. The Persian period in general occupies an uncertain and even uncomfortable position in Second Temple studies and Jewish studies overall, traversing both temporal and conceptual areas that do not fit neatly into scholarly categories. A re-examination of those categories and the contemporary social and cultural assumptions informing them, will help to situate the impact of Achaemenid tradition upon the formation of Judaism in the Second Temple period. This, in turn, carries implications for how scholars of Second Temple Judaism should reckon with this important and even axial era in the history of Judaism and Jewishness.