Wisdom Actors, part 1
Ezra’s shuttle diplomacy
Many other government offices held by soperim appear in biblical narratives. With a little help just from one or two good word study aids – I’m nudging you, here – these narratives can come alive in fresh ways. One aspect that has captured my imagination is the diplomatic service of some soperim. Here is some of my own homework for you on this, surrounding an era of tense regional, multilateral relations during the reigns of several Persian kings.
The Israelites were in Babylonia, which was now under Persian rule and the Persian king Cyrus the Great had favored the exiles by issuing a royal decree authorizing the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and freeing any Jews in exile who wished to return to Jerusalem to help in that project. Foreign policies, however, can be resisted by powerful domestic constituencies and lobbies, and such was the case after the exiles returned to Jerusalem and began implementing Cyrus’s policy. Strong, and sometimes violent, political opposition from Persian nationals and others in Jerusalem frequently arose against the exiles’ reconstruction efforts, which would then have to halt until a Persian administration would intervene.
It is not clear from the biblical narrative itself what political motives Cyrus and subsequent Persian administrations had for setting up the Jews back in Palestine, but it may have been in some way beneficial to Persia’s ever-changing relations with Egypt. At any rate, after Cyrus’s death resistance in Jerusalem to the Persian policy created political, religious, and racial turmoil in Jerusalem that demanded continual shuttle diplomacy between the three key actors: the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, the opposition groups, and the Persian kings’ administrations headquartered in Babylon.
Much remains unknown about these diplomatic efforts. But we do know what has come down to us about some of them in the form of royal edicts and official letters that explain things such as desires and interests of the Persian rulers, the policies themselves, and issues and interests of Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and the opposition groups. We also know that these diplomatic efforts had varying effects in Jerusalem, including temporary reversals of policy. The texts of several of these diplomatic letters and edicts are included in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. They describe the policies, and the creation of these letters would have fallen within the purview of the soperim. Beyond the creation of the letters, however, the particular narrative I want us to look at provides rare insight into the shuttle diplomacy that took place through a prominent Jewish official typically known as “Ezra the priest,” but whose career as a scribe takes us inside the world of the soperim to reveal much about their political functions in international politics.
Ezra rose to become a key political actor in the Persian government at the end of a long period of Israelite change and reorganization under Persian rule. Despite his religious nationalism, which in another context it might be appropriate to deconstruct, but which does not concern us here, Ezra offers a good case study surrounding a political function possible for a soper who is also an ecclesiastical figure. Ezra makes a good case study of a respected and trusted ecclesiastical figure participating in successful high-level diplomatic initiatives. When we meet him in the biblical book that bears his name, he is an Israelite national serving in Artaxerxes government in Babylon, where he holds a high-profile position as a distinguished soper, having been given the rather cumbersome title “scribe of the law of the God of heaven” (Ezra 7:12, 21, King James Bible), which could perhaps be paraphrased as “secretary of state for Jewish affairs.” This would have been a crucial and sensitive political post at the time, for Artaxerxes and his cabinet (the seven counselors of the realm in Ezra 7:14-15) had inherited an imperial Persia that, having conquered and ruled many lands over many generations, was now experiencing political destabilization in many parts of the realm.
Artaxerxes sent Ezra to Jerusalem with a letter explaining the policy and Ezra’s royal commission to implement it. He was to begin with an inquiry into life of the Israelite community in Jerusalem, with emphasis on its religious health. Artaxerxes and his cabinet (the seven counselors of the realm; Ezra 7:14-15) were already dealing with weaknesses in imperial Persian rule in other territories of the realm, and they may have feared further political destabilization between Jerusalem and its Persian rulers in Babylon. The Persian king no doubt had a huge amount of trust in Ezra, relying both on Ezra’s integrity and on his reputation in Israel as a respected priest.
Ezra’s commission suited his religious calling and apparently Artaxerxes policy arose because he was convinced that Ezra could guide the religious Jerusalem community into more cooperative relations with the many non-Jews who now called the city home. The commission also included organizing a huge religious celebration in Jerusalem, and Ezra was given carte blanche to raise whatever finances and help were needed to make that happen. “Whatever the God of heaven has prescribed,” Ezra’s commission read (see: 7:23), “let it be done with diligence for the temple of the God of heaven. Why should there be wrath against the realm of the king and his sons?”
It was good political wisdom, and to ensure the peaceableness of the wider Jewish community, Ezra is empowered to go beyond Jerusalem to appoint officials who lived in that part of the realm known as Trans-Euphrates. “And you, Ezra, in accordance with the wisdom of your God, which you possess, appoint magistrates and judges to administer justice to all [the Israelites] of Trans-Euphrates – all who know the laws of your God. And you are to teach any who do not know them” (Ezra 7: 25). As an aside, the letter concludes with an imprimatur from Artaxerses that would be politically and religiously heretical to the regime of modern day Persia, for it affirms that Israelite obedience to Jewish religious law is sanctioned by “the [political] law of the [Persian] king.”
One may learn many things from the narrative. Here I just want to not that although Ezra as a priest seems to have made the entire Pentateuch into a kind of constitution for the basis of law for the whole of Jewish society in Jerusalem and for the surrounding diaspora (Nehemiah 8), we have no indication that he found his religious beliefs a hindrance to holding a responsible position as a diplomat in what the Israelites of the day would have called a pagan court. Nor do we have any indication that Ezra ever sought the religious conversion of anyone in the Persian royal court. Both of these features are also found in Daniel’s political career in Babylon (see Wisdom Actors, part 2 article). Foreign ministers, diplomats, and other professionals in the field of international relations and foreign policy can benefit from studying such narratives this way, through the lens of the wisdom tradition. Ezra makes a good case study of a respected and trusted ecclesiastical figure participating in successful high-level diplomatic initiatives.
“Negotiations” at the upper pool
More than 200 years before the Ezra narrative, another soper, his name is Shebna, sees negotiations break down, big time, during war. Jerusalem, at the time of King Hezekiah’s government, is under imminent militarily takeover by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, and Shebna, along with two other high officials in Hezekiah’s government, Eliakim (the palace administrator) and Joah (the recorder), rush from a tense, hastily called cabinet meeting to try to negotiate a settlement with Sennacherib’s field commander, who is waiting impatiently with his army outside the city’s walls. But negotiations are not part of the field commander’s brief. Sennacherib’s demands are. (2 Kings 18-19; Isaiah 36-37.)
Hezekiah had been paying tribute to Sennacherib but also rebelling against Assyrian rule, and Sennacherib’s army has been on a campaign throughout Judah to end the rebellion. Fourteen of Judah’s fortified cites had already fallen, and the Assyrian army is now encamped near Jerusalem. Sennacherib’s field commander and Hezekiah’s negotiating team meet not far from the palace, probably just outside the city’s walls, where they are about to get an ear full. The speech is a virtual seminar on the diplomacy of subversion, deploying powerful rhetoric, political and religious arguments, and sound bites meant to undermine what remains of a capital whose diminished military strength has left its citizens, politicians, and king frantic before an invading army –an army historians claim was by far the cruelest of the old-world Middle East. And it is not just Hezekiah’s embassy outside the wall who are getting an earful, but the stunning speech rises to intimidate the city elders, its ecclesiastical figures, and others who are listening from the wall.
After asserting his authority to speak for his king, Sennacherib’s field commander immediately reminds Hezekiah’s officials of their clear military inferiority and he ridicules them for their foolishness in relying for help on international alliances or even on their God. To top it off, the field commander trots out a piece of intelligence, apparently gathered previously from spies, meant to rock the city’s religious sensibilities: we have divine sanction from your God to conquer Jerusalem. (This piece of intelligence, misinterpreted though it may have been, may refer to information Sennacherib may have learned from informers with knowledge of words of the prophet Isaiah; see Isaiah 10:5-11, espec. vv 5-6.)
Now the field commander has been speaking in Hebrew, but when Shebna, Eliakim, and Joah twig to what that means, they suddenly interrupt. Stop talking in Hebrew, they complain, because your message is being understood by everyone listening on the wall. Speak in Aramaic. Come on, use the diplomatic language of the day. According to scholar Alec Motyer, this would “enable negotiations to be carried out with a degree of secrecy.” (Alec Moyter, The Prophecy of Isaiah, 1994, p. 278.) You must be joking, the commander replies. Immediately ignoring Hezekiah’s officials, he speaks in Hebrew directly to the people lining the top of the wall. He frightens them with hard facts about siege warfare, taunts them about the impotence of their king, and warns them that it is a no-brainer: surrender now and make peace with Assyria. (The entire speech is found in Isaiah 36:4-10, 12-20, and the response and outcome in Isaiah 37.)
We do not know the role Shebna the scribe played in these negotiations. The literature does explain that when the three officials reported the outcome to Hezekiah, the king went into mourning and sent them to see Isaiah the prophet, who gave them a message of hope. And in Isaiah 22:15-25, some indication is given that at one point in his career Shebna held the highest post in the palace, whether before of after the incident at the upper pool is unclear. But the verses in Isaiah do make clear that some day in the future Eliakim would replace Shebna as the one who was “in charge of the palace.”
Other soperim
There are many scriptural references to or events involving various kinds of soperim and the kind of office each held in political and religious situations. Here I note just several other addresses, along with a few prompts, for anyone wishing to pursue further research.
During Jeremiah’s time, under the reign of Judah’s king Jehoiakim, who had been persecuting the prophet, a political soper named Elishama is entrusted to store an important scroll that had been dictated by the prophet to his master scribe, Baruch. The scroll’s message concerned the imminent fate of the kingdom of Judah, and when it was read to the king of Judah at an impromptu cabinet meeting at his winter house, his highest officials (sarim; see below) watch horrified as their defiant king burn the scroll strip by strip as he lounges by the fire (Jeremiah 36:12-26).
In two official lists of ecclesiastical figures and leading civil and military members of king David’s government during different periods of his forty-year rule, Seraiah and Sheva are called scribes (secretaries; 2 Samuel 8:16-18; 20:23-25). In 1 Chronicles 27:32, a soper named Jonathan (see below) is named in an official list of government notables.both classes of civil and political officials, hakamim and soperim, were indispensable for advising rulers, running government bureaucracies, fostering foreign relations, and negotiating geopolitical arrangements and settlements
In King Joash’s time, an unnamed soper (royal secretary) runs the finance department, along with the high priest, to raise funds for the vast reconstruction project of the Jerusalem temple. McKane believes that this royal secretary “should probably be equated with the soper of 2 Samuel 8:17 and 20:25 and so is Joash’s Secretary of State… The role of the ‘Secretary’ here may be an illustration of the overlapping of the functions of the civil and ecclesiastical establishments.” (Prophets and Wise Men, pp. 19-20.)
During the Babylonian pillage of Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar, “soper” is used as a title in Jeremiah 52:25 to cite a high Israelite official who held a military commission that included drafting men into the army. This official is seen as commanding at least sixty men and is mentioned in the same breath as an “officer in charge of the fighting men, and seven royal advisors.” Thus his full title could be something like “secretary of the field marshal.” When commenting on 2 Kings 25:19, however, which describes the same incident, McKane finds a language for this official which he concludes must be translated as “The Secretary, Commander of the Army, which could be paraphrased as ‘Secretary of State for War’” (Prophets and Wise Men, p. 22). In any case, this high military official was considered sufficiently important enough to be deported by Nebuchadnezzar, and then executed.
In summary, both classes of civil and political officials, hakamim and soperim, were indispensable for advising rulers, running government bureaucracies, fostering foreign relations, and negotiating geopolitical arrangements and settlements, as were their counterparts in neighbor nations. McKane concludes that there is “a particular mental climate which is congenial to these soperim and hakamim; there are well-defined intellectual attitudes which they cherish in connection with the maintenance of high professional standards.” (Prophets and Wise Men, p. 46.)
I have now said a lot about elite political figures in the two classes of officials and advisors known in old-world Israel and elsewhere as the hakamim and the soperim, and I have noted that we should not draw too great a dividing line between their purposes and functions. But just before we move on I want to say that we must not think of these two classes as constituting only political officials or that the ones I have referenced or discussed were the only political ones in these two classes. I have merely introduced some of those who were relevant to my research for The Wisdom Project, and I have only discussed these two classes mainly politically.
There were many other kinds of professionals numbered among these two prominent classes of officials and administrators, who served king, nation, and people in a variety of capacities outside of politics and government, as I show in the two part summary review of the tradition. Also, as McKane points out, there is every indication that other officials serving at the highest levels of government who are not specifically identified in the biblical text as being numbered among the hakamim and the soperim were nevertheless elite figures within these classes. MacKane (pp. 40-42) cites Ahithophel (King’s Councilor) and Hushai (King’s Friend) as cases in point, and we will explore their policy differences and the consequence of that, below.
The mazkir, yoes, and sarim
Other Hebrew words in the Bible also convey a range of meanings to describe political officials and royal advisors who held key government positions alongside the soperim and the hakamim. Here I note just a few.
Mazkir. The word mazkir is variously translated as clerk, secretary, or recorder and denotes an office most likely held by a professional writer or skilled communicator among the ruling elite who served in a political advisory capacity. (Mazkir is from the Hebrew root word zkr, whose meanings include: remember, reflect on, commemorate, give evidence.) Joah the recorder, one of Hezekiah’s three officials in the negotiations with an Assyrian field commander at Jerusalem’s upper pool, is a mazkir, but it is not clear from the story whether he was a writer or verbal communicator. The title was also held by an advisor named Jehoshaphat, who may have been exceptional political figure, for his term ran for decades, through David’s reign into Solomon’s (2 Samuel 8:16; 1 Chronicles 18:15; 1 Kings 4:3.)
Yoes. This is an interesting word, one with significant implications for those who were classed by it. The word comes from ys, meaning: plan, counsel, advise, and is often translated as “counselor,” as we see it is twice, for Ahithophel and Jonathon, in a list of king David’s close advisors (1 Chronicles 27:32-34). There is much more going on, here, however, with this title as it is being used to describe these two officials, but you have to dig to find it.
Briefly, the Jonathon named here is David’s uncle (not the Jonathan who was David’s close friend), and he is a soper. But the title he is given, yoes, to denote the kind of counselor he is known to be, means that he is a soper with exceptional insight, or wisdom, but this is not clear in the common English translation: “a counselor, a man of insight”; or in, “a counselor, a wise man” (KJB). The same may be said of the exceptional but tragic figure of Ahithophel, the king’s councilor, though he was not also a soper. I have devoted an entire subheading to Ahithophel, below, along with Absalom and Hushai, whose name and title, “the king’s friend,” also appears in the above list. Ahithophel and Hushai were leading policymakers during David’s reign whose policies diverge and collide in the end.
According to McKane, political usage of yoes depicts a high-ranking member within the decision-making body that surrounds the king. Jonathan, for instance, “is credited with one of the fundamental virtues of the professional political advisor in that he is perspicacious or ‘a man of insight’.” (Prophets and Wise Men, p. 18). Moyter occasionally sees yoes as describing someone whose counsel seems to be “more-than-humanly gifted,” (Moyter, Prophecy of Isaiah, p. 102), such as some of Solomon’s early wisdom seems to be, as well as Ahithophel’s counsel, which appears to be about as close to divine as one can get without calling it prophetic. It was, indeed, exceptional political wisdom (2 Samuel 16:23). A sense of a heightened wisdom implicit in someone know as a yoes may also be seen also in the phrase “Wonderful Counselor” (pele yoes; Isaiah 9:6) to denote a quality of Israel’s future messiah-king establishing his governmental order.
All of the persons who held the political and other offices that we are considering were not elected but appointed by the kings and, though they served at the pleasure of kings, they were indispensable for well-functioning administrations. In formal lists in the Bible, some of the highest such officials are shorthanded simply as “the wise” in English translation of the Bible when referring to a group of prominent hakamim during a certain period.
Sarim. The formal lists also use the word sarim (princes; nobles; chief officials) when classifying a king’s appointed officials, who are usually named according to their offices, and in 1 Kings 4:1-6 civil, political, military, and ecclesiastical figures are among the sarim. (Sarîm is the plural of sar, meaning: official, leader, chieftain, prince, and is from the root srr, for: rule, direct, superintend.) In general, sarim “does not refer to the Israelite king himself, but to the advisors of the king, namely, city officials, military officials, and royal officials and functionaries.” (New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis {NID}, Zondervan, 1997, vol. 3, p. 1295.) They held the kind of authority necessary to rule areas of the realm for a king, and McKane goes so far as to call them “statesmen” (Prophets and Wise Men, p. 21).
In biblical literature they appear as key functionaries in various governing bodies of the old-world Middle East, such as in Egypt, Israel, and Persia (e.g., Genesis 12:15; 1 Chronicles 22:17; Esther 1:18), where they hold positions of political power, exercised wisely or unwisely. King Jehoiachin’s sarim were among his officials who surrendered to Nebuchadnezzar and were exiled to Babylonia (2 Kings 24:10-14; Jeremiah 24:1). Sarim is the overarching title given to numerous key functionaries listed during the Davidic kingdom (1 Chronicles 28:1), and as he approached the end of his kingship David required his sarim to assist his son Solomon, heir to the throne, in the governance of Israel (1 Chronicles 22:17; see also: Ezra 7:28; 10:8; 2 Samuel 8:16-18; 20:23-25; 2 Chronicles 22:4; 25:16.)
Outside of Israel, sarim denotes various kinds of high officials, such as the advisors of a pharaoh who, enamored by the beauty of Abram’s wife, Sarai, instigate a near calamitous event. The sarim of Balak, king of Moab, are crucial in negotiations meant to hire the mysterious soothsayer Balaam. Sarim of the Philistines called military commanders wisely advise Achish, ruler of the Philistine province of Gath, not to permit David (not yet king) and his fighting men to remain in the Philistine army. (Respectively: Genesis12:15; Numbers 22-23; 1 Samuel 29.)
When the father of Hanun, king of the Ammonites, dies during David’s reign, David sends a delegation from Jerusalem to express his sympathy, but the nobles (sarim) of king Hanun misread David’s gesture. They explain to King Hanun why it’s all a shrewd deception. These are merely spies, they conclude. King Hunan falls for it and follows their counsel to treat David’s ambassadors in the most insulting manner, a decision that lead to tragic consequences for the Ammonite nation (2 Samuel 10). “In matters of law and justice,” the seven closest counselors to the Persian king Xerxes are called both “wise men” (hakamim) and “nobles” (sarim) who “had special access to the king and were highest in the kingdom” (Esther 1:13-22). The soper Elishama is among the sarim listed in Jeremiah 36:12, and t he Babylonian chief official responsible for educating Daniel and his three Hebrew friends in political wisdom is a ?ar (Daniel 1:7-18; see Wisdom Actors, part 2). And we might look a bit more highly at Sarah, Abraham’s wife, by calling attention to her name, which stems from ?rr and denote that she was a princess or noble lady.
