Page 99 - Advanced Biblical Backgrounds Revised

Darius and Xerxes exalted Ahuramazda, the god Zoroaster preached, but they do not mention Zoroaster.
In his inscriptions, Darius mentions Ahuramazda dozens of times and claims to be under that god’s
protection. Though Darius calls him the “greatest of gods,” he did not describe Ahuramazda as the only
god. In Darius’ tomb, the king is pictured facing a fire altar—a Zoroastrian symbol. It appears, then, that
Darius may have been a Zoroastrian, but he was not an intolerant worshiper of the god. Likewise,
Xerxes, in his inscriptions, claimed to be in the favor of Ahuramazda and in opposition to the demons.
Presumably, Zoroaster’s preaching about the god influenced the worship of Ahuramazda in the days of
Darius and Xerxes.

Some have claimed that Zoroastrianism influenced Judaism. They see this connection in judgments by
fire found in numerous Old Testament passages. But this assertion is founded on extremely late Persian
texts, and if there was any Zoroastrian influence on Judaism, it came during the late intertestamental
period, not at this time. 144

Social life

Traditional Hebrew custom empowered parents, specifically fathers, to arrange marriages of their
children. In isolated incidences, brides and grooms pushed their parents to arrange a marriage for them
with a person they desired to marry (Judges 14:1-10).

At the time of the restoration, most young people did not have parents to negotiate and arrange
marriages for them. Hence they took matters into their own hands. We can get a general picture from
scripture that those who settled in the land while the Jews were away showed a dislike tendency or a
level of hatred toward them as they settled back in their land. Many of the returning Jews did not own
property and were poor. These, among other circumstances, led to high levels of intermarriages, a
violation of the Torah.

Many Jews married themselves to well-established non-Jewish locals for the sake of a better social or
economic standing. Ezra dealt with this problem of marriage to heathen women when he returned to
Jerusalem in 458 BCE (Ezra 9–10), and Nehemiah faced it some thirteen years later (Nehemiah 10) and
again about fifteen years after that (Nehemiah 13:23–28). 145 It should be noted that the forbidding of
intermarriages had to do with the preservation of the Jewish faith and religion and not tribalism or
racism.

Either for other reasons or those already discussed, intermarriages mainly involved Jewish men marrying
foreign women (Ezra 10:2, 14, 17 Nehemiah 13:24). This could perhaps add some context to Malachi
2:10–17, where the contemporary prophet condemns divorce.

Jews returning to Judah during the Restoration farmed and ate much as their ancestors had in the days
of the southern kingdom before the Exile (see chapter 10). Terracing the hills of Judea continued to be
important agriculturally. For Jews still living in Babylonia, life continued much the same as in previous
decades there. 146 One notable change is that at this time, beekeeping emerged as a main source of

144 Ibid., p. 334.

145 Ibid., p. 342.
146 Ibid., p. 341.

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