Yehud under Persia

Ezra and Nehemiah · c. 538–430 BC

Yehud is the Aramaic name the Persian administration used for the province. Its border is generalized from the district towns of Nehemiah 3 and the settlement lists of Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 and 11; no boundary map of the province survives. It is small on purpose: Mizpah and Bethel are its northern edge, Beth-zur its southern, and Edomites had already moved up into the Negev and the southern hill country the map calls Idumea. Lod, Hadid and Ono are a separate block of the same province because Nehemiah 11:35 settles Benjaminites out there on the plain. The neighbors are the opposition the book names: Sanballat of Samaria, Tobiah the Ammonite, Geshem the Arab and the men of Ashdod (Nehemiah 2:19, 4:7, 6:1). The districts are drawn edge to edge, with the Jordan and the Salt Sea standing as the border between Yehud and Ammon; where one district ended and the next began is nowhere recorded, so every shared line is the plate’s judgment. En-gedi is drawn inside Yehud with the same caution: the settlement lists do not name it, but its Persian-period remains are Judean. Beth-haccherem and Zanoah are placed at the sites most often proposed and should be read as approximate. Netophah is left off because at this scale its dot and Bethlehem’s cannot be told apart, and Senaah, whose men built the Fish Gate (Nehemiah 3:3), has never been located. Joppa and Dor are drawn but lie outside every province shown: the Persian kings had given that coast to Sidon, which is why the province of the returned exiles had no seaport.

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