Extract
Persia and the Bible.
The purpose of this book is stated implicitly in the preface: "... to inform readers of the Bible about [the] important Persian background" of "the exilic and postexilic Old Testament books ..." (p. 11), so "that readers of such books as Daniel, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah may better appreciate their historical and cultural backgrounds" (p. 12).
As I shall be criticizing numerous details below, I would like to say first that I am impressed by the clarity of the exposition and the breadth of the author's knowledge of the sources and secondary literature. The book is also well illustrated. It is difficult for Iranian scholars to command the whole field covered in this book, and we should be grateful to Yamauchi for having undertaken the task. I have used the book myself with much profit and shall no doubt return to it again and again. In the introduction the author surveys the demography, geography, history, and archaeology (including an account of the decipherment of the Old Persian inscriptions) of the area inhabited by the Iranian peoples from the earliest appearance of names for Iranian population groups (the Medes and the Persians) through the Islamic period and up to the present day. The fourteen chapters of the book then deal with the history of the Medes and the Achaemenids (from Cyrus to Artaxerxes I), the capitals (Susa, Ecbatana, Pasargadae, Persepolis), Persia and the Greeks, and religions (Zoroastrianism, the Magi, Mithraism, and - in the appendix - the spread of Egyptian religion). Information about the historical and linguistic background of the Iranian tr...See the full content of this document
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