Fields of Blood (24 page)

In 559 BCE Cyrus, a minor member of the
Persian
Achaemenid family, became king of
Anshan in southern
Iran.
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Twenty years later, after a series of spectacular victories in Media,
Anatolia, and Asia Minor, he invaded the Babylonian
empire and astonishingly, without fighting a single battle, was greeted by the population as a liberator. Cyrus was now the master of the largest empire the world had yet seen. At its fullest extent, it would control the whole of the eastern Mediterranean, from what is now
Libya and
Turkey in the west to
Afghanistan in the east. For centuries to come, any ruler who aspired to world rule would try to replicate Cyrus’s achievement.
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But he was not only a pivotal figure in the politics of the region: he also modeled a more benign form of empire.

Cyrus’s victory proclamation claimed that when he arrived in Babylonia, “all the people … of Sumer and Akkad, nobles and governors, bowed down before him and kissed his feet, rejoicing over his kingship, and their faces shone.”
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Why such enthusiasm for a foreign invader? Ten years earlier, shortly after Cyrus had conquered Media, the Babylonian author of the poem “The Dream of
Nabonidus” had given him a divine role.
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Media had been a threat to Babylon, and
Marduk, the poet said, had appeared in a dream to Nabonidus (r. 556–539), the last Babylonian king, to assure him that he was still controlling events and had chosen Cyrus to solve the Median problem. But ten years later the Babylonian Empire was in decline. Nabonidus, engaged in conquests abroad, had been absent from Babylon for several years and had incurred the wrath of the priesthood by failing to perform the
Akitu ritual. During this ceremony all Babylonian kings had to swear not “to rain blows on the cheeks of the protected citizen,” but Nabonidus had imposed forced labor on the freemen of the empire. Disaffected priests announced that the gods had abrogated his rule and abandoned the city. When Cyrus marched on Babylonia, these priests almost certainly helped him to write his victory speech, which explained that when the people of Babylon
had cried out in anguish to Marduk, the god had chosen Cyrus as their champion:

Ritual and mythology, crucial as they were to kingship, did not always endorse state tyranny. Nabonidus was in effect deposed by the priestly establishment for his excessive violence and oppression.

Cyrus’s vast multilingual and multicultural empire needed a different mode of government, one that respected the traditional rights of the conquered peoples and their religious and cultural traditions. Instead of humiliating and deporting his new subjects, and tearing down their temples and desecrating the effigies of their gods as the
Assyrians and Babylonians had done, Cyrus announced a wholly new policy, preserved in the Cyrus Cylinder, now in the
British Museum. Cyrus, it claimed, had arrived in Babylonia as the harbinger of peace rather than of war; he had abolished the corvée, repatriated all the peoples who had been deported by
Nebuchadnezzar, and promised to rebuild their national temples. An anonymous Judean exile in Babylonia therefore hailed Cyrus as the
messhiah,
the man “anointed” by Yahweh to end Israel’s exile.
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This prophet, of course, was convinced that it was not Marduk but Yahweh who had taken Cyrus by the hand and shattered the bronze gates of Babylon. “It is for the sake of my servant
Jacob, of Israel, my chosen one, that I have called you by your name, conferring a title, though you do not know me,” Yahweh had told Cyrus.
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A new era was at hand, in which the earth would be restored to its primal perfection. “Let every valley be filled in, every mountain laid low,” cried the prophet, clearly influenced by the
Zoroastrian traditions of his Persian messiah, “let every cliff become a plain, and the ridges a valley.”
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Most of the Judean exiles chose to stay in Babylonia, and many acculturated successfully.
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According to the Bible, more than forty thousand
of them chose to return to Judea with the liturgical utensils confiscated by
Nebuchadnezzar, determined to rebuild Yahweh’s
temple in the devastated city of Jerusalem. The Persians’ decision to allow the deportees to return home and rebuild their temples was enlightened and sensible: they believed it would strengthen their empire, since gods ought to be worshipped in their own countries, and it would win the gratitude of the subject peoples. As a result of this benign policy, the
Middle East enjoyed a period of relative stability for some two hundred years.

But the Pax Persiana still depended on military force and taxes extorted from the subject races. Cyrus made a point of mentioning the unparalleled might of his army; as he and Marduk marched on Babylon, “his vast troops whose number, like the water in the river, could not be counted, were marching fully armed at his side.”
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His victory proclamation also noted the tributary system that Cyrus had enforced: at Marduk’s “exalted command, all kings who sit on thrones, from every quarter, from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea, those who inhabit remote districts and the kings of the land of
Amurru who live in tents, all of them, brought their weighty tribute into
Shuanna and kissed my feet.”
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Even the most peaceable empire required sustained military aggression and massive expropriation of resources from the populations it conquered. If imperial officials and soldiers felt any moral qualms about this, it would sap the empire’s energy; but if they could be convinced that these policies would ultimately benefit everyone, they would find them more palatable.
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In the inscriptions of Darius I, who came to the Persian throne after the death of Cyrus’s son
Cambyses in 522 BCE, we find a combination of three themes that would recur in the ideology of all successful empires: a dualistic worldview that pits the good of empire against evildoers who oppose it; a doctrine of election that sees the ruler as a divine agent; and a mission to save the world.
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Darius’s political philosophy was strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism, skillfully adapted to sacralize the imperial project.
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A large number of the royal inscriptions that have survived in the Persian heartland of the empire referred to the Zoroastrian creation myth.
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They describe
Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord who had appeared to Zoroaster, ordering the cosmos in four stages, creating successively earth, sky, humanity, and finally “happiness” (
shiyati
), which consisted of peace, security, truth, and abundant food.
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At first there had been
only one ruler, one people, and one language.
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But after the assault of the Hostile Spirit (“the Lie”), humanity split into competing groups, governed by people who called themselves kings. There was war, bloodshed, and disorder for centuries. Then, on September 29, 522, Darius ascended the throne, and the Wise Lord inaugurated the fifth and final stage of creation: Darius would unite the world and restore the original happiness of mankind by creating a worldwide empire.
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Here we see the difficulty of adapting a predominantly peaceful tradition to the realities of imperial rule. Darius shared Zoroaster’s horror of lawless violence. After Cambyses’s death, he had had to suppress rebellions all over the empire. Like any emperor, he had to quash ambitious aristocrats who sought to unseat him. In his inscriptions Darius associated these rebels with the illegitimate kings who had brought war and suffering to the world after the Lie’s assault. But to restore peace and happiness, the “fighting men” whom Zoroaster had wanted to exclude from society were indispensable. The apocalyptic restoration of the world that Zoroaster had predicted at the end of time had been transposed to the present, and Zoroastrian dualism was employed to divide the political world into warring camps. The empire’s structural and martial violence had become the final, absolute good, while everything beyond its borders was barbaric, chaotic, and immoral.
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Darius’s mission was to subdue the rest of the world and purloin its resources in order to make other people “good.” Once all lands had been subjugated, there would be universal peace and an era of
frasha,
“wonder.”
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Darius’s inscriptions remind us that a religious tradition is never a single, unchanging essence that impels people to act in a uniform way. It is a template that can be modified and altered radically to serve a variety of ends. For Darius, frasha was no longer spiritual harmony but material wealth; he described his palace in
Susa as frasha, a foretaste of the redeemed, reunited world.
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Inscriptions listed the gold, silver, precious woods, ivory, and marble brought in tribute from every region of the empire, explaining that after the Lie’s assault, these riches had been scattered all over the world but had now been reassembled in one place, as the Wise Lord had originally intended. The magnificent
Apadama relief in
Persepolis depicted a procession of the delegates of conquered peoples from far-flung lands duly bringing their tribute to Susa. The ethical vision of Zoroaster, victim of violence and theft on the Caucasian
steppes, had been originally inspired by the shocking aggression of the Sanskrit raiders; now that vision had been used to sacralize organized martial violence and
imperial extortion.

The Judeans who returned from Babylon in 539 BCE found their homeland a desolate place and had to contend with the hostility of the foreigners who had been drafted into the country by the
Babylonians. They also faced the resentment of those Judeans who had not been deported and were now strangers to the returnees who had been born into an entirely different culture. When they finally rebuilt their temple,
Persian Judea became a temple state governed by a Jewish priestly
aristocracy in the name of Persia. The writings of these priestly aristocrats have been preserved in parts of the
Pentateuch and the two books of
Chronicles, which rewrote the strident history of the
Deuteronomists and attempted to adapt ancient Israelite traditions to these new circumstances.
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These scriptures reflect the exiles’ concern that everything stay in its proper place. In Babylon the Judeans had preserved their national identity by living apart from the local people; now the priests insisted that to be “holy” (
qaddosh
) was to be “separate; other.”

Yet unlike the Deuteronomist scriptures, which had demonized the foreigner and yearned to eliminate him, these priestly texts, drawing on exactly the same stories and legends, had developed a remarkably inclusive vision. Again, we see the impossibility of describing any religious tradition as a single unchanging essence that will always inspire violence. The priests insisted that the “otherness” of every single creature was sacred and must be respected and honored. In the priestly
Law of Freedom, therefore, nothing could be enslaved or owned, not even the land.
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Instead of seeking to exterminate the
ger,
the “resident alien,” as the Deuteronomists had insisted, the true Israelite must learn to love him: “If a stranger lives with you in your land do not molest him. You must treat him as one of your own people and love him as yourselves. For you were strangers in
Egypt.”
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These priests had arrived at the
Golden Rule: the experience of living as a minority in Egypt and Babylonia should teach
Israelites to appreciate the pain that these uprooted foreigners might be feeling in
Judah. The command to “love” was not about sentiment:
hesed
meant “loyalty” and was used in
Middle Eastern treaties when former enemies agreed to be helpful and trustworthy and give each other
practical support.
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This was not an unrealistically utopian ideal but an ethic within
everybody’s reach.