The Challenge of Jewish History: The Bible, The Greeks \u0026 The Missing 168 Years by Alexander Hool

The Challenge of Jewish History: The Bible, The Greeks \u0026 The Missing 168 Years Reviews

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  In The Challenge of Jewish History, Alexander Hool attempts to resolve the "missing years" problem, the conflict between the traditional Jewish Talmudic calendar dating and the conventional dating, particularly regarding whether the Second Temple stood for 420 years (as per the Talmud and Seder Olam, written roughly one century after the end of the Second Temple period) or 586 years (which is the duration suggested by externally known historical facts). At the risk of oversimplifying the discrepancies, the biggest reason for the difference in years is that Seder Olam lists fewer Persian kings and a shorter period of time between the building of the Second Temple and when Greece took over the Persian empire. Traditionally, most people address this by saying either the Talmud is simply wrong or by saying the Talmud was right and the Ancient Greek historians that the conventional chronology is based on, along with all the corroborating archeological evidence, are unreliable. But Hool is not satisfied with either of these options.
  
  Hool lays out the extensive evidence that the larger number of Persian kings actually did exist, going well beyond relying on Greek historians. But at the same time, he makes the case that it is theologically important to hold on to the position of the Seder Olam, in part because it is based on interpretations of Biblical texts and prophesies (particularly a vague prophesy in the Book of Daniel), and in part because Seder Olam's dating actually is important for other traditions and beliefs such as the generations of rabbis in the chain of transmission of Jewish law. Thus far, Hool is correct: The larger number of kings did exist as per the historical records, and it is theologically important (though maybe not vital) for the shorter period of time reported in Talmudic literature to be true.
  
  Rabbi Hool, in an attempt to resolve this and defend the Jewish tradition, takes an unusual approach. To get the Seder Olam and the conventional king list to match, Hool both makes small alterations to the conventional king list and allows that there could have been some minor mistakes in Seder Olam (like if it says one king ruled for a certain number of years, Hool can say that it was really multiple kings over those same years). But that's only part of it, as with those tweaks the Persian period is still far too long. Yet the crux of Hool's solution is radical: he says the Greeks carried out a massive conspiracy to rewrite history.
  
  Hool basically proposes that the later Persian kings actually still ruled a smaller area after the Greeks took over a large part of the Persian empire. He suggests that the Greeks, for reasons he can only speculate on, engaged in a massive, thorough, well-coordinated conspiracy to rewrite old records, destroy old records, fabricate accounts of wars, alter centuries of Egyptian astronomical recordings, and so on, to make it look like the Persian period was earlier than it actually was and that even the later Persian kings ruled over the whole of the empire. All this for the sole purpose of making it look as though it was taken over entirely by Alexander the Great (which frankly doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that would have concerned the Ancient Greeks so severely as to warrant such an effort when they had actual administrative responsibilities to contend with). Hool claims that there being relatively more archeological finds describing earlier Persian kings compared to those describing later Persian kings is evidence that the later Persian kings were in some way lesser than the earlier ones. Between that and Seder Olam, Hool throws out the entire mass of evidence for consecutive, not concurrent, empires, jumps to conclude a huge, well-coordinated Greek conspiracy, and cherry-picks and reinterprets archeological finds to suit his needs.
  
  Hool also does similar contortions with both the archeological record and scriptures in his attempt to fit King Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther (as understood by Talmudic literature and Seder Olam) with an actual Persian king, specifically Cambyses. (There is in actuality no known Persian king who can be positively identified with Ahasuerus, but most people say it probably refers to Xerxes I. Of course that identification can't work for Hool as Xerxes I was actually the son of Darius I who allowed the Second Temple to be rebuilt, and Talmudic literature says Ahasuerus's party was celebrating the fact that God had not yet redeemed the Jewish people.) Since the Talmudic account actually makes Darius I the son of Ahasuerus, and Cambyses was a ruler almost immediately prior to Darius I (there was another person briefly in charge prior to Darius I), it's a good fit for Hool, despite the completely different name. But he requires many specious assumptions to get it to actually fit. He says that when Seder Olam says Ahasuerus ruled about 14 years, whereas Cambyses really only ruled for about seven and a half years, Seder Olam was instead counting the last years of the previous king as part of Ahasuerus's reign. That's a tough position to take, especially since the Book of Esther starts in Ahasuerus's third year and continues into his 12th year, again incompatible with an eight year reign. But Hool makes the odd case that Cambyses was only in charge of a small area in Africa during the first five years, nevertheless moving to Susa in the third year where the Book of Esther story begins. He even supports this with the bizarre argument that where it says he ruled the Achaemenid Empire, 127 provinces from India to Africa (in Hebrew, "Hodu" to "Kush") from his throne in Susa, that Hodu and Kush are really referring to two small nearby cities in Africa, despite the obvious status of Ahasuerus as fully throned King over the full territories of the empire. Hool seems to be basing his case on a distortion of a couple historical facts: First, Cambyses did have an ephemeral title of King concurrent with the first year of his father King Cyrus, though in practice it was not until the end of Cyrus's reign that Cambyses ascended to the throne. Second, Persia conquered Egypt in Cambyses's fifth year as emperor which ended the last natively ruled dynasty there and began the 27th Dynasty by titling Cambyses as Pharaoh of Egypt for his last three years as king (until subsequent Persian kings took the throne), and with this Hool is apparently taking Cambyses’s three years as Pharaoh and running with it in to the past. Hool also uses reinterpretations of historical and archeological records with his own special innovations, and it also seems that he is ignoring far more records that don't suit his needs. Another problem for Hool's identification is that the historical records actually show that Cambyses was not related to Darius. To this, Hool says Darius must have just lied about who his parents were (lest people think he was Jewish). The lengths to which Hool has to go to preserve the Talmudic account of Ahasuerus are astronomical, and this strongly indicates to me that he's grasping at straws.
  
  I'm not a historian that I have enough background to make a definitive judgment about the viability of his theories. And I should give him credit since despite being relatively short this book has a good amount of relevant information on the subject matter. But it seems to me that he does far too much work to try and make square pegs fit in to round holes, and his suggestion of such a massive conspiracy comes across as highly implausible. In my view, Hool's attempt to resolve the differences between the Talmudic and conventional chronologies of the time period fails miserably.