Approaching Yehud: New Approaches to the Study of the Persian Period.

• Author: Fried, Lisbeth S.
• Position: Book review

Approaching Yehud: New Approaches to the Study of the Persian Period. Edited by JON L. BERQUIST. Semeia Studies, vol. 50. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2007. Pp. is + 249. $29.95 (paper).

I had very much looked forward to receiving this 2007 book edited by Jon Berquist, but I am greatly disappointed to see that of the thirteen articles included, two have already appeared elsewhere. The book is unfortunately quite dated, and whereas perhaps it would have been fresh and interesting in 2001 or 2002, it is no longer so. Melody Knowles' article previously appeared both in the Journal of Biblical Literature ("Pilgrimage Imagery in the Returns in Ezra," JBL 123 [2004]: 57-74) and as a chapter in her book Centrality Practiced: Jerusalem in the Religious Practice of Yehud and the Diaspora in the Persian Period (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006). She still labels the return of the exiles from Babylon to Judea a pilgrimage, even though pilgrimages are trips taken with the intention of going back home again.

Another repeat is Janzen's article on witches. Although Berquist describes it as "new," the same discussion appears in his book of 2002. Janzen was not able to react to Yonina Dor's important 2003 discussion of the composition history of Ezra 9-10, which led her to deny the historicity of these chapters in Ezra. Besides Janzen's overriding assumption of their historicity, which he does not defend, he seems not to recognize that the author of Ezra was condemning both types of intermarriage, not just those with foreign women. Unfortunately, his use of anthropological theories of the social creation of witches requires that only women be the target. Janzen quotes Fenn (1997), who argues that the uncertainly that right behavior leads to reward causes a search for "witches" to blame for the discrepancy between expectation and occurrence. The difficulty with anthropological theories in general, however, is that there is no way to test them. How is this uncertainty to be measured and compared across societies, particularly societies that no longer exist? Rather, societal uncertainty is here assumed simply from the existence of witches.

However, recent discoveries have shown that erratic and strange behavior which throughout history has led to accusations of witchcraft was often caused by the ingestion of LSD from ergot fungus in rye. (See M. K. Matossian, Poisons of the Past [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989]: Amy Stewart, Briony...