Toto

It's on JSTOR

www.jstor.org/stable/543003

You should be able to view it for free if you sign up for their program

DCHindley

I also found it on Scribd, but as usual, it takes forever to make available to read online. What I hate about Scribd is the fact that while you wait for the file to display to complete it pretty much slows your computer to a crawl as well.

Still waiten'.

DCH

Seeker2000

If I understand the various comments regarding Horn and Wood correctly, they do indeed support the intercalary month of Addaru II (in accordance with Parker & Dubberstein), but they argue for a later dating of Xerxes' death.

Hoehner seems to disagree with the former (the intercalary month), but agrees with the latter (Xerxes' death on 12/17/464 BC).

Yes, Hoehner uses the so-called "prophetic year" which only consists of 360 days. This seems to be based on certain parts of the Book of Revelation which suggest that 3 1/2 years (expressed using a formulation from Daniel) are equal to 42 months and are also equal to 1260 days. To arrive at 1260 days you have to use a 360-day year: 3 1/2 * 360 = 1260.

This logic is of course an additional point to be debated.

You mention the use of a 360-day year in Egypt. I don't know though if one can draw the conclusion to use this way of calculation for an Old Testament prophecy because loan and lease contracts in Egypt were calculated this way.

Seeker2000

Thanks, I've read the paper online at JSTOR now.

In it Horn and Wood talk about three points that relate to the topic discussed here:

• Intercalary months:
  Horn and Wood conclude that they are not yet in a position to prove that the Jews used only a second Adar but never a second Ulul. This seems plausible to them, but they don't see it as proven.
  
  They provide a table which relates the dates found in the papyri to Julian dates. No date from 445 BC or 444 BC is available, but Kislev 2 446 BC is dated to Nov. 17/18 or Nov. 18/19 which is in line with the table from Parker & Dubberstein's Babylonian Chronology. Ab 14 440 BC is dated to Aug. 25/26 or Aug. 26/27 which is also (roughly, off by 2 to 4 days) in line with Parker & Dubberstein's table.
  
  I think that from the available dates it cannot be definitely proven that an intercalary month of a second Adar had been added by the Jews of Elephantine in 445 BC, because the papyri don't contain any date from 445 BC, but this shows that the Jews of Elephantine must have added three intercalary months in the period from Ab 440 to Kislev 446, because otherwise their calendar would not be in line with the calendar tables shown in the Babylonian Chronicles which have a second Adar in 445 BC, 443 BC and 440 BC.
• Use of a fall epoch:
  Horn and Wood argue for the existance of a civil fall-to-fall (Tishri to Thishri) calendar among the fifth-century Jews at Elephantine, based on the papyrus Kraeling 6. They make mention of Neh. 1:1 and Neh 2:1, which they use to further support this theory.
• Death date of Xerxes:
  Horn and Wood argue for a death date of December 17, 465 BC (not 464, as I wrote in the last posting - that was a mistake). I am not yet sure what to make of their argument and how it should be seen in combination with other evidence that has been used to date the death of Xerxes. This is mainly because I don't know what other evidence has been used to date Xerxes' death.

DCHindley

I broke down and paid $14 for the download. They assume that the colony of Jewish soldiers at Elephantine held to a "Jewish" calendar not necessarily the same as that used by Persians (the Babylonian one). However, Egypt was a satrapy of Persia in the era of those Aramaic papyri.

The papyri are often double-dated, and when they do one of those dates is always of the Egyptian calendar (fixed at 365 days with the beginning, 1 Thoth, falling back from the solar year 1 day every 4 years). The other one appears to be the Persian date. All dates are related to the year if reign of the Persian king.

They point to discrepancies between the Persian/Babylonian dates and the tables of P&D, and reason that at least in some cases the "Persian" calendar dates may have actually been "Jewish" (Judean) ones.

One issue I take with this conclusion is that the Jews of Elephantine were not necessarily Judeans who returned from the exile, but perhaps the people of the land who had been left behind at the time of the captivity, and the colony may have been established at Elephantine before the return under Nehemiah started.

They happily paired their god "YAHO" with one or more of the pagan gods of the Egyptians, not as the only God. They had just won permission to rebuild a temple to YAHO that had previously been destroyed by angry Egyptians. They were also aware that Judean returnees had been erecting a temple in Jerusalem, and even wrote to them asking if they could get some advice about how to run their own temple and observe festivals. There is no evidence that the Judean high priest ever replied, as the returnee Judeans did not recognize any other temple than the one at Jerusalem.

The other issue I have with Horn & Wood is that they were comparing these "Persian" dates of the papyri to dates as found in the tables of P&D's 1946 2nd edition (which took things to 45 CE). In 1954, this is all they had available for comparison. These tables gave educated guesses for intercalations and 1st visibility of the moon.

When P&D's 3rd edition came out in 1956, they had taken into consideration a large number of datable tablets not available to the earlier researchers they based their tables upon. From the intercalated months and other dates of these scores of tablets, they worked out the intercalation scheme to agree with most all of the known tablets. One would have to compare dates from the Aramaic papyri to the dates in the P&D edition of 1956 to see how many and what type of "discrepancies" remain.

The Egyptians, following their own custom, counted accession years as the first year of the Persian king's reign, not as the last year of his predecessor as the Persians did. As a result, the number of an Egyptian regnal year of the king was always 1 year higher than the regnal years in the Persian/Babylonian system. For example, if the Egyptian date from the tablet said 20th year of Artaxerxes, the Persian date would be the 19th year of Artaxerxes. Perhaps this explains some of the discrepancies between H&W's years of reign and P&D's.

I do not think that anyone can know for sure what epoch the returnee Judeans used in that time. There is not enough data to draw any firm conclusions.

I think they base their date on Cowley's Elephantine "A[ramaic] P[apyrus] 6. Kislev 18 = Thoth [17], year 21 [of Xerxes], the beginning of the reign of Artaxerxes I (464 B.C.).—The Egyptian day number is broken. Cowley suggested restoring it to 7 or to 14; Gutesmann and Hontheim restored it to 17. No other restorations are paleographically possible." Kislev 18 corresponds to Jan 3rd of 465 BC. I really don't know where they get 464 BC. Kislev 18 is 12/24 in 464 BC. But they speak of the 1st day of Kislev being 12/17 Julian, which occurs in 465. They imply the text says the 21st year (of Xerxes) is also "the beginning of the reign of Artaxerxes," and interpret this to mean 12/17/464 BC (sic) is the latest date possible for Artaxerxes accession.

P&D offer an earlier tablet (unpub eclipse text BM 32243) dated either August 4th or Aug 8th 465 as indicating Xerxes's death and Artaxerxes' accession. I tracked a description of what it says here:

"In addition the tablets apparently gave details, at the appropriate points, of the death of the reigning king. Such details are a useful supplement to the deductions which one can make from changes in the dating of contemporary economic texts. Only one such reference is preserved in this series of lunar eclipse tables …, but curiously, apart from a single brief citation (A. Sachs quoted in Parker and Dubberstein 1956: 17), it remains unpublished. It concerns the death of Xerxes, shortly after a partial lunar eclipse which can be dated to 5 June 465 BC (corresponding to the third month of Xerxes’ year 21): BM 32234 (Sachs et al 1955: no. 1419) … 'in 18° [...]; 40° (duration) of onset, to[tality and clearing up], the “garment of the sky” was present; (the moon) was eclipsed in the area of the rear group of four stars of Sagittarius. (There was an) intercalary month Ulul. On the fourteenth(?) day of the month Ab, Xerxes - his son murdered him’." (Christopher Walker, British Museum, "Achaemenid Chronology and the Babylonian Sources" in Mesopotamia and Iran in the Persian Period, seminar proceedings, 1997)

P&D indicate that the date of the murder could be either the 14th or 17th of Ab due to damage to the tablet, but only those two dates are possible. That translates to 8/4 or 8/7 465 BC per P&D. So, we know exactly when he died.

H&W thinks that it Xerxes' death occurred in Kislimu of 465, making Artaxerxes' accession year span a "Jewish" year between 10/8/464 and 9/26/463 BC.

The scholars of the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., Horn & Wood, talk fast and confuse with a lot of details, assuming things that have not been proved, to convince themselves that Daniel's prophecy of 70 weeks exactly predicts the date of the execution of Jesus.

DCH

Seeker2000

Intercalary months:

That's a good point. We don't know what conclusions drawn from Elephantine can be carried over to the Jews in Jerusalem at the time.

However that also means that if the intercalary month of a second Adar was added at Elephantine in 445 BC (as seems probable to me as I outlined in my previous post) that doesn't necessarily mean that it was also added in Jerusalem. Of course it neither means that it wasn't added in Jerusalem.

All in all it only seems to be certain that the intercalary month was added in the Babylonian calendar in 445 BC, which can be seen in Parker and Dubberstein's tables. One can speculate that the Jews in Jerusalem didn't add the intercalary month in 445 BC (as Hoehner seems to do). That might even be true, but we don't know this and so it seems hard to prove either this or the opposite.

That really explains why I couldn't comprehend one specific referenc to Parker & Dubberstein that Horn and Wood make in their paper: I was looking at the 1956 edition! When they talk about papyrus AP 13 they mention that "Parker and Dubberstein have in their tables an unattested second Ululu in the Babylonian calendar for the year 446/5 BC". I couldn't find a second Ululu in the table for 446/5, which confused me. But now I think it must have been there in the 1946 edition. In the 1956 edition which I was looking at, it is gone.

Death date of Xerxes:

I've read their argumentation regarding Xerxes's death a couple of times since Sunday and think I understand their reasoning now. If I got it right, it is as follows:

Kislev 18 actually corresponds to Jan 3rd of 464 BC. Kislev 1 is Dec 17 of 465 BC, according to the table of Parker and Dubberstein. However Kislev 18 is in January, in the following Julian year, which is 464 BC. The next Kislev 1 after that is on Dec 6 of 464 BC and the next Kislev 18 after that is on Dec 24 of 464 BC.

But they are talking about the Kisley 18 on Jan 3rd of 464 BC. That is the date they give to papyrus AP 6.

Then they go on to mention another document, "a cuneiform tablet found in the excavation campaign of 1930-31 in Ur, dealing with the rearrangement of land parcels among four brothers. The agreement [...] states that the original arrangement had been signed in the month Kislimu of the 21st year of Xerxes." Kislimu 1 in the 21st year of Xerxes is Dec 17 of 465 BC, as one can see in the tables of Parker and Dubberstein, making this the earliest date on which this document could have been written. They argue that the people in Ur must have regarded King Xerxes as still alive on that date, Dec 17 of 465 BC, because otherwise they would have mentioned the accession year of Artaxerxes I in the document's date.

However, the papyrus AP 6 is dated to Jan 3rd of 464 BC and in that papyrus Artaxerxes I is already mentioned as the successor of Xerxes. Because of this it follows that Xerxes must have died between those two dates, at some point between Dec 17 of 465 BC and Jan 3rd of 464 BC. Horn and Wood (and Hoehner who quotes them) don't actually say that it must have been exactly on Dec 17, but that it must have been shortly before the end of 465 BC.

Of course the other tablet that you mentioned clearly dates Xerxes' death to 8/4 or 8/7 465 BC. So there are two conflicting dates in existence: August 465 BC and December 465 BC.

DCHindley

Some places would hear about Xerxes' death before others, I suppose. Perhaps the scribe who wrote the tablet I had mentioned was in an area that heard about it relatively early.

The simple fact that that tablet mentions the accession of Artaxerxes means that the scribe believed Xerxes was dead and Artaxerxes had been formally recognized as the new king, at least in his general area. Assuming he was correct, that becomes the terminus ante quem (latest date for the death of Xerxes.

If a scribe did not know of the death of Xerxes or the accession of Artaxerxes, he would simply say "year 21 [of Xerxes]." Some regions recognized an accession year as year 1 of the new king, or used a fall epoch in their regional calendar making their accession year start 5 months earlier than in Babylon.

Of course this can all be much ado about nothing as Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III also reigned at least 20 years, and both Artaxerxes I & II reigned 32 or more years. Since Artaxerxes II is just as viable a prospect as Artaxerxes I, there is no particular reason to assume that the king was Artaxerxes I unless it was required to fit a prophetical interpretation.

DCH

semiopen

Not sure if this is applicable to the discussion, but

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN,
PERSIAN PERIOD JERUSALEM AND YEHUD: A
REJOINDER

From the Introduction

I should study the posts in this thread in more depth, but Finkelstein may be implying that there was no "rebuilding."

Personally, I love the size and population estimates, 2 hectares is about 5 acres.

semiopen

FWIW, here is the article by Lipschitz that Finkelstein mentions.

PERSIAN PERIOD FINDS FROM
JERUSALEM: FACTS AND
INTERPRETATIONS

Seeker2000

I think the reasoning in the case of Horn and Wood is that the cuneiform tablet from Ur is located in a region where one would expect people to know of the King's death rather earlier than later, because it is not so far off, while the papyrus AP 6 from Elephantine which mentions the King's death in January 464 BC is in a very distant location where such news would need some time to travel to.