Achaemenid Imperial Administration in Syria-Palestine and the Missions of Ezra and Nehemiah.

• Author: Zadok, Ran

The complicated issue of the Achaemenid administration of Syria-Palestine (538-332 B.C.E.) deserves a fresh examination, which is what the author tries to do in this monograph.

The decision to devote forty percent of the text of the monograph to the introduction and history of research (chapters one and two, pp. 1-96) is justified in view of the ever-increasing literature on this formative period, which has for generations attracted the interest of theologians, historians, and archaeologists. On this introductory section, which is generally cautious and tries to be comprehensive (it starts with Tiglath-Pileser III's conquests in the Levant), I would like to expand on certain points.

The paucity of data on Syria-Palestine in Neo- and Late-Babylonian sources is due to the fact that most of this abundant documentation does not belong to royal archives, but to temple and private ones. This is in sharp contrast to the statistically more restricted Neo-Assyrian corpus which contains much more information on the Levant, probably because a significant component of it belongs to royal archives.

The appointment of the indigenous notable, Gedaliah, by the Babylonians may not be an isolated phenomenon. Mil-ki-i-di-ri, the governor of Kedesh near Riblah (565/4 B.C.E.; see T. G. Pinches, "from World-Dominion to Subjection," JTVI 49 [1917]: 3f., 129f.), was presumably of local Syrian extraction since his Aramaic name contains an originally Canaanite theophorus element.

Hoglund does not deal with the fate of the Transjordanian politics under Babylonian rule. The city-gate of URUSin-ti-ni (A. K. Grayson, Assyro-Babylonian Chronicles [Locust Valley, N.Y.: Augustin, 1975], 106, i, 19) is mentioned in a broken context after Edom ([A]-du-um-mu) in the section on Nabonidus' campaign against the West (Amurru). Could Sin-ti-ni (with dissimilation and Moab -in) refer to biblical (bl h)stym in the steppes of Moab? bl hstym is the forerunner of Hellenistic-Roman Abila (Hirbet il-Kafren?; see M. Avi-Yonah, Gazetteer of Roman Palestine [Jerusalem: Carta, 1976], 25b) on a strategic point. Prof. N. Na aman (lecture in the Conference on Neo-Assyrian Geography, Rome, November 1993) suggests that bl hstym is identical with Neo-Assyrian A-bi-il-[. . .] (Rost, Tiglath-Pileser, 78, 6; cf. H. Tadmor, "The Southern Border of...