Literature and history

history come.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 22, fatalism.

This is the eighth of ten shows on the Old Testament, and this program is about one of the most

memorable and complex books in the Bible, the book of Ecclesiasties.

Ecclesiasties, a fair amount of evidence shows, was likely a product of the Persian

period of ancient Israel's history, a period in which the largest empire the world had yet

known extended its reaches across the Central Eurasian

landmass at its greatest extent stretching to Egypt and Thrace in the west all the way to

the Indus Valley in the east.

Persian rule brought stability, trade, religious diversity, and people from all over the world to Jerusalem, and the Israelites who rebuilt their civilization after the Babylonian captivity benefited from all of these.

I think that in order to understand the Book of Ecclesiasties, and moreover the Second Temple

period of Judaism, it's useful to know a bit of ancient history and a bit about the vast,

administratively complex and religiously tolerant expanse of the

akeminid Persian Empire.

The three world empires that were seated in modern day Iran. These were the

akeminid, Parthian, and Sasanian empires, stretched from the rule of

Cyrus the Great in 550 B.C. E. all the way down to the fall of the Sasanians in 651 CE, following the Rashidun

Caliphate's invasion of Persian territory.

Thus, a gigantic empire persisted in the ancient near east and central Asia for 1,200 years, practicing

variations of the same religion, Zoroastrianism, and having significant cultural continuity from century to century.

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