The Priest and the Great King: Temple-Palace Relations in the Persian Empire.

• Author: Jigoulov, Vadim
• Position: Book review

The Priest and the Great King: Temple-Palace Relations in the Persian Empire. By LISBETH S. FRIED. Biblical and Judaic Studies from the University of California, San Diego, vol. 10. Winona Lake, Indiana: EISENBRAUNS, 2004. Pp. xv + 266. $39.

In this thorough revision of her dissertation, L. Fried sets the goal of finding out whether the Jewish priesthood accrued secular political power in the Persian period and if it did, how it related to the Persian imperial administration of Judah/Yehud (p. 2). Fried sets out to explain the traditionally accepted transition from monarchy to theocracy in Judah toward the beginning of Alexander's time by testing three theories of imperial administration which she briefly discusses in chapter one. These three theories are the hypothesis of self-governance (Danda-mayev, Knoppers, et al.), that of imperial authorization (Frei and Koch), and that of foreign or central control (S. Eisenstadt).

In chapters two through four, Fried examines archival and epigraphic data from the temples in the western satrapies of Babylonia, Egypt, and Asia Minor, in order to establish whether temple elites lost, preserved, or gained power in the Achaemenid period. At the same time, she tests the applicability of the three hypotheses of imperial administration to the Achaemenid administration in each of the satrapies. In chapter five, she examines textual, archaeological, and numismatic findings from Judah in order to determine whether her conclusions for the western satrapies are congruent with the situation there. As she did for the western satrapies, Fried reasserts the applicability of Eisenstadt's model of tight central imperial control to the situation in Yehud and its superiority over the models of self-governance and imperial authorization (p. 233).

Fried argues that the Achaemenid empire adopted for its own purposes mechanisms of power developed by Nabonidus (p. 47). In terms of the Persian treatment of religious institutions, there emerged a clear tendency to interfere heavy-handedly in temple affairs...