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Rex Mason, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, i: Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah. By Lester L. Grabbe. Pp. 480. (Library of Second Temple Series, 47.) London: T & T Clark International, 2004. isbn 0 567 08998 3. £55, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 57, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 219–221, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flj073
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Extract
This is the first of a projected four-volume work covering the history of the Jews and Judaism throughout the Second Temple period. In many ways it must be the most difficult to have written since, in spite of so many advances, still so little is known of the Persian period. The documentary evidence available is scanty, while that which has been preserved is often ideologically slanted. Indeed, Grabbe is honest enough to confess, ‘One of the things that strikes me after many years of studying the Persian period is how little I know about it … There is a great deal not known and much still to learn for all of us’ (p. xiii). For all his modesty, however, there are few scholars in whose company one could more wish to set out on this first systematic study of the Persian period for a long time. Indeed, his knowledge of the material which is available is formidable, and is splendidly and judiciously presented in this welcome book. Our appetite is whetted by his early statement, ‘My view is that the Persian period is the single most important period of the development of Jewish thought and practice from antiquity to the present’ (p. 2).
