Exile and Return by Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggers

Author:Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggers
Language: deu
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Both interpretive variations seem to be flawed on the level of logic, each in its own way suffering from positing an assumed priestly necessity that is far from given. Against the larger positive interpretation, it remains unclear how a sacral (or even a priestly!) concern makes a text or its ruling figures necessarily apolitical.804 As we will see in due course, the Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptional corpus is concerned almost entirely with the king in relation to the sacral in the form of his relationship with the great Babylonian temples. It would be veering towards the absurd to claim as a consequence that the texts, the royal position vis-à-vis the temple or the theological underpinnings of this element of royal ideology are apolitical.805 Precisely the same line of reasoning is applicable, in my mind, to the negative interpretation of the sacrally or priestly rendered nāśī’. A world organized according to a priestly hierarchy need not necessarily disadvantage a ruler.806 All is dependent upon the ruler’s standing with respect to the priestly office. If, as in Neo-Assyrian royal theology, the king acted as the priest with the larger institution deriving therefrom,807 the ruler would be at the very top of a priestly hierarchy. The nāśī’ clearly is not in the restoration envisioned by Ezek 40–48, but one cannot explain his status by an appeal to priestly logic or bias. Neither necessitates royal demotion.

Eschewing a more theological explication, the second major approach to the nāśī’ has been to examine him in relation to the presumed historical setting of the text, which is overwhelmingly determined as the (early) restoration period.808 Steven Tuell’s sensitive analysis of Ezek 40–48 is a fine example of this line of thought. For Tuell, the vision reflects in its entirety the historical realities of Judean socio-political hierarchies under the reign of Darius I, making the nāśī’ none other than the governor (pehāh) of Persian-period Yehud.809 Tuell suggests that we should look to Sheshbazzar, himself called both nāśī’ and pehāh (Ezra 1:8; 5:14), as the historical model for the figure found in the Temple Vision.

We have already seen in Sheshbazzar the use of the title ???? [nāsī’] for a Persian governor. Moreover, we know that Sheshbazzar, as leader of the first returnees to the land following the edict of Cyrus, was given a cultic charge: the return of the sacred Temple vessels to Jerusalem. Finally, we know that state support of the cult was Persian policy. These parallels strongly suggest that the ???? of the Law of the Temple was the Judean governor, under Persian hegemony.810

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