) minted in the Persian province of Yehud, dated BCE. Obv: Bearded head wearing crown, possibly representing the Persian Great King. Rev: Falcon facing, head right, with wings spread; Paleo-Hebrew YHD'' to right. (top) may show the god
Yahweh. The coin at bottom right has an image of the owl of
Athena (Athenian coinage was the standard for Mediterranean trade).
Administration and demographics Yehud was one of twenty provinces or administrative subunits in the large
satrapy of
Eber-nari, along with Idumea,
Samerina (Samaria),
Moab,
Ammon,
Gilead,
Ashdod and
Gaza, among others. It was smaller than the former Iron-Age kingdom of Judah, stretching from around Bethel in the north to near Hebron in the south, which at the time belonged to Idumaea, and from the
Jordan River and the
Dead Sea in the east to, but not including, the
Shephelah, the slopes between the Judean highlands and the coastal plains in the west. After the destruction of Jerusalem the centre of gravity shifted northward to
Benjamin; this region, once a part of the
kingdom of Israel, was far more densely populated than Judah itself, and now held both the administrative capital, Mizpah, and the major religious centre of Bethel. Mizpah continued as the provincial capital for over a century. The position of Jerusalem before the administration moved back from Mizpah is unclear. From 445 BCE onwards, it was once more the main city of Yehud, with walls, the Temple, and other facilities needed to function as a provincial capital, including, from 420 BCE, a local mint striking silver coins. Nevertheless, Persian-era Jerusalem was modest: about 1,500 inhabitants. It was the only true urban site in Yehud, as the bulk of the province's population lived in small unwalled villages. This picture did not much change throughout the entire Persian period. The entire population of the province remained around 30,000. There is no sign in the archaeological record of massive inwards migration from Babylon, in contradiction to the biblical account where Zerubbabel's band of returning Israelite exiles alone numbered 42,360. Sheshbazzar, the governor of Yehud appointed by Cyrus in 538, was of Davidic origin, as was his successor (and nephew) Zerubbabel; Zerubbabel in turn was succeeded by his second son and then by his son-in-law, all of them hereditary Davidic governors of Yehud, a state of affairs that ended only around 500 BCE. The governor of Yehud would have been charged primarily with keeping order and seeing that tribute was paid. He would have been assisted by various officials and a body of scribes, but there is no evidence that a popular "assembly" existed, and he would have had little discretion over his core duties. Evidence from seals and coins suggests that most, if not all, of the governors of Persian Yehud were Jewish, a situation which conforms with the general Persian practice of governing through local leaders. The succession order and dates of most of the governors of the Achaemenid province of Yehud cannot be recreated with any degree of certainty. Coins, jar-stamp impressions, and seals from the period provide the names of
Elnathan,
Hananiah (?),
Jehoezer,
Ahzai and
Urio, all of them Jewish names. He is mentioned in the 5th-century
Elephantine papyri, and must therefore have served after Nehemiah. The inscription is also rendered in English as "the governor Hezekiah".
Community and religion There is a consensus among biblical scholars that ancient Judah during the 9th and 8th centuries BCE was basically
henotheistic or
monolatrous, with
Yahweh as a
national god in the same way that surrounding nations each had their national gods. Monotheistic themes arose as early as the 8th century, in opposition to Assyrian royal propaganda, which depicted the Assyrian king as "Lord of the Four Quarters" (the world), but the Exile broke the competing fertility, ancestor and other cults and allowed it to emerge as the dominant theology of Yehud. The minor gods or "
sons of God" of the old pantheon now turned into a hierarchy of
angels and
demons in a process that continued to evolve throughout the time of Yehud and into the Hellenistic age. Possibly the single most important development in the post-Exilic period was the promotion and eventual dominance of the idea and practice of Jewish exclusivity, the idea that the
Jews (meaning descendants of
Jacob, followers of the God of Israel and the
law of Moses) were or should be an ethnic group apart from all others. According to Levine, that was a new idea originating from the party of the
golah, those who returned from the Babylonian exile. Despite Ezra's and Nehemiah's intolerance of gentiles and Samaritans, Jewish relations with the Samaritans and other neighbours were otherwise close and cordial. Despite Yehud being consistently monotheistic, some pockets of
polytheistic Yahwism still appeared to exist in the Persian period: the
Elephantine papyri and ostraca (usually dated to the 5th century BCE) shows that a small community of Jews living on the Egyptian island of
Elephantine, while being devout supporters of Yahweh, also venerated the Egyptian goddess
Anat and even had their temple on the island. This community had probably been founded before the Babylonian exile and had, therefore, remained cut off from religious reforms on the mainland. While it appears that the Elephantine community had some contact with the Second Temple (as evidenced by the fact that they had written a letter to the High Priest
Johanan of Jerusalem), the exact relationship between the two is currently unclear. Following the expulsion of the Persians from Egypt by Pharaoh
Amyrtaeus (404 BCE), the Jewish temple in Elephantine was abandoned. One of the more important cultural shifts in the Persian period was the rise of
Imperial Aramaic as the predominant language of Yehud and the
Jewish diaspora. Originally spoken by
Aramaeans, the Persians adopted it and became the
lingua franca of the empire, and already in the time of
Ezra, it was necessary to have the Torah readings translated into Aramaic for them to be understood by Jews. ==Biblical narrative==