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Literary sources that are attested archeologically in the Achaemenid period are only known to us from Elephantine: Here we have the “Words of Ahiqar” and an Aramaic version of the Bisitun inscription (TADAE C1.1 and C2). Otherwise we have to rely entirely on the biblical tradition and on the tradition dependent on it, such as the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus.

In contrast to the literary works from Elephantine that fit well into the picture reflected by the epigraphic material, the biblical tradition contains a series of particularities. On the one hand, it presupposes the situation reflected in the epigraphic material, and the Bible sometimes even contains information – especially names and individual dates or even literary pieces – that can be aligned with the archeological findings. On the other hand, in its vast majority the biblical tradition has little to do with the epigraphic material and should not be harmonized with it hastily (Edelman 2012). Rather, the Bible seems to be highly critical toward the historical situation and even rejects it by creating its own religious counter‐world, a world that centers on the Torah of Moses and/or the biblical prophets (Kratz 2004: pp. 93–119, 2015).

In a way the biblical writings are timeless. Apart from a terminus a quo if it is mentioned in a writing and the terminus ad quem of the biblical manuscripts from Qumran, that begin in the third century BCE, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to offer exact dates for a biblical text or to verify the historicity of the biblical statements and to reconstruct from them the history of Israel during the Persian period (Galling 1964; Williamson 2004). The historical evaluation of the biblical sources has to take all these factors into account and makes a literary‐critical analysis as well as an analysis of the Tendenz of text mandatory. Here, one has to accept that one will hardly ever reach beyond a well (or less well) argued hypothesis.

Within the biblical tradition we have to distinguish between writings that are set in the Persian period but not necessarily written during this period and those texts of which scholarship assumes that they were composed in Persian times even though Persia is not mentioned in them. The historical narratives in (2 Chron. 36) Ezra‐Nehemiah, 1Esdras and Esther as well as the prophecies in Isaiah 44–45, Haggai, Zechariah, and Daniel can be counted to the first group. In these writings the roughly 200 years of Persian rule over Judah and Samaria are condensed to three – if we add Esther, four – events: (i) the end of the Babylonian exile and the rebuilding of the temple under Cyrus and Darius (2Chron. 36; Ezra 1–6 and 1 Esd.; Isa 44:28–45:13; Hag.; Zech. 1–8; Dan. 1;6 and 8–11); (ii) the mission of Ezra under Aratxerxes (Ezra 7–10; Neh. 8; 1 Esd.); (iii) the mission of Nehemiah under Artaxerxes (Neh. 1–13); (iv) the rescue of the Jewish people under Xerxes (Esther).

In two cases the biblical tradition has a point of reference in history: the rebuilding of the second temple and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. Two – possibly authentic – prophetic oracles from the time of the reconstruction of the temple have come down to us and are now incorporated into the book of Haggai: Hag 1:1.4.8 and 1:15–2:1.3.9a. Both oracles are dated according to the ruling king Darius and call for the beginning of the building activity. Scholars generally identify this king with Darius I but there are dissenting voices that place the building of the temple during the time of Darius II (Dequeker 1993) or Artaxerxes I (Edelman 2005). The two oracles were gradually supplemented within the book of Haggai and joined with the visions of Zechariah that are only secondarily connected with the temple. Both prophetic books contain some Persian flavor, but we cannot derive reliable historical information from them. Even the role of Serubbabel and Joshua remains unclear as they both appear only in secondary, i.e. later, passages (Kratz 2004; Hallaschka 2011). The same has to be said of the figure of Sheshbazzar, who is mentioned only in Ezra 1:7–11 and Ezra 5:14–16 (6:5?) and who cannot be placed historically (Kratz 2004: pp. 101–102, 105–106).

The oracles in Isaiah 44–45 (Kratz 1991a), the narrative in Ezra 1–6 and 1 Esdras (Kratz 2000: pp. 56–67), as well as the literary reflexes on the beginnings of Persian rule in the book of Daniel (Kratz 1991b), have to be seen as later literary creations that have little historical value. A comparison of the Aramaic narrative in Ezra 5–6 – which is the literary nucleus of Ezra 1–6 where we find the older variant of the two versions of the famous edict of Cyrus (Ezra 1,1–4; 6,1–5) – with the papyri from Elephantine shows that this narrative appears to work with general historical knowledge and contains quite a bit of the flavor of the time. This, however, does not imply that the material has to be regarded as historical. Rather, Ezra 5–6 are written in the spirit of the biblical tradition and they are indebted to the Chronistic view of history (Kratz 2006).

The mission of Nehemiah, too, has a concrete historical anchor: the building of the walls of Jerusalem (Kratz 2000: pp. 68–74, 2004: pp. 93–106; Wright 2004). The original building report is a short first‐person narrative: Neh. 1:1a.11b; 2:1–6.11–18; 3:38; 6:15. The mission is commonly dated to the year 445 BCE, the 20th year of Artaxerxes I. The reason for this dating is the figure of Sanballat, governor of Samaria, who is mentioned not only in the papyri from Elephantine for the time around 410 BCE but also in the book of Nehemiah. This dating, however, is not certain as Sanballat does not appear in the original building report. On the other hand, the building of the walls fits well with Persian policy of the fifth century (Hoglund 1992; Carter 1999; Lipschits 2006, 2012) as it would transform Jerusalem into a fortified garrison and possibly also into the capital of the Province of Yehud. Nehemiah reminds one of the ambassador Hananiah who is mentioned in the papyri from Elephantine (Kratz 2009). All the other passages of the book of Nehemiah, including those designating Nehemiah as “governor” (Neh. 5:14–19; 12:26), are secondary literary supplements that were added to the building report in order to integrate Nehemiah into the (biblical) sacred history of the people of Israel, i.e. the people of God. Their historical appraisal stands on very shaky ground.

The evaluation of the mission of Ezra, reported in Ezra 7–10 and Neh 8–10, is most difficult (Kratz 2000: pp. 74–90, 2004: pp. 111–118, 2008). His mission too is dated to the reign of a king called Artaxerxes. Scholarship generally identifies this king with Artaxerxes II since Nehemiah does not seem to presuppose Ezra. Such a dating operates on the premise that the Ezra memoir existed independently and is historical. This approach blends the historical and literary levels of the narrative. The historical fiction of the biblical tradition emphasizes that the same Artaxerxes is meant here. Ezra and Nehemiah are supposed to be contemporaries in order to complete the restitution of the people of Israel in the Province of Judah in accordance with the Mosaic law (Willi 1995). Only in literary‐historical terms Ezra is younger than Nehemiah.

Historically, however, we can say little about Ezra. The Aramaic rescript in Ezra 7 forms the literary kernel of the Ezra narrative: Apart from bringing donations to Judah, Ezra is ordered to ensure the execution of the law (dat) of the Jewish God, that is identical to the law (dat) of the king, in the territory of Transeuphrates. The Hebrew narrative in which Ezra executes this order (Ezra 8–10; Neh. 8–10) is dependent on this rescript. The authenticity of the Aramaic rescript that once again is a mixture of Persian period flavor and biblical topoi continues to be disputed since the time of Eduard Meyer and Julius Wellhausen (Kratz 2004: pp. 6–22). Despite the ongoing debate the authenticity is unlikely (Schwiderski 2000; Grätz 2004). The text reads like a foundation legend of the legal status of the Torah of Moses in Judaism and is comparable to the Letter of Aristeas reporting the origin of the Greek translation of the Torah in Alexandria under Ptolemy II. The historical background of the Ezra legend is probably the experience of the growing dissemination of the Torah as binding commitment in Judah and Samaria; this dissemination possibly started during the Persian period but came to full effect only in Hellenistic times. During the same period 1Esdras, an epitome of 2 Chr 35–36 + Ezra‐Nehemiah in Greek was written; here Nehemiah is missing and the mission of Ezra forms – after the rebuilding of the temple – the culmination. This version of the Ezra material is also the basis for Josephus in Ant. 11.1–158. 4Ezra then – written after 70 CE – represents an even later reception of the figure of Ezra (Kratz 2008).

The Book of Esther, too, is a legend that grew over a longer period. It has come down to us in two different versions, a Greek and a Hebrew one (Clines 1984; Fox 1991; Jobes 1996). The book relates the story of a pogrom against the Jewish people and closes with the establishment of the festival of Purim. The king mentioned in Est 1:1 shall be identified with Xerxes I so that the fictitious story line is situated after the building of the temple (Darius I) and before Ezra and Nehemiah (Artaxerxes I). Links to these events, however, are not to be found in Esther. The book of Esther displays an extraordinary familiarity with details of the Persian court – commentaries generally quote the corresponding parallels from Herodotus and Xenophon. This general knowledge is supplemented with all kinds of fantastic details such as the marriage of the Xerxes to the Jewess Esther and woven into a narrative that portraits – in recourse to the biblical tradition – the situation of the Jews in the eastern diaspora (Hagedorn 2011).

Not the events are historical but the general experience that is used as incident and cause for the foundation of a festival tradition. The narrative focuses on the experience of localized hostility against and persecution of members of the Jewish people that sometimes happened in the diaspora and that will serve as the cornerstone for the hatred of the Jews in Antiquity. An authentic example of such an experience is the destruction of the Judean Temple of Yahu on Elephantine – an event that served as the point of departure for the formation of legends about the past under Cambyses (TADAE A4.7–8). The book of Esther is an instructive example that one should not use the flavor of a time to argue for the historicity of the events narrated or to deduce from it a date for the literary origin of the story. The example of Esther should also be used in the interpretation of Ezra‐Nehemiah. In both cases the Greek versions (1Esd. and Greek Esther) show that the legends about Israelites and Judeans during the Persian period – legends on which the self‐understanding of Judaism rests – were still relevant during Hellenistic times and were spun out further.

Next to the biblical sources that are set explicitly in the Persian period, scholarship generally dates several other writings or parts of biblical books to this period (Grabbe 2004: pp. 90–106). From the plethora of the material we will simply look at one (significant) example: the completion of the Jewish law in the form of the Pentateuch, the Torah of Moses, a document of which more than half was written or composed in the post‐monarchial period, i.e. during neo‐Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic times (Kratz 2000, 2015). Especially the multiple‐layered literary stratum, commonly called “Priestly Writing” (Kratz 2000: pp. 102–117, 226–248), is best explained in reference to the second temple period.

The literary development has been interpreted as a compromise (Blum 1990; Nihan 2007) between several rival groups within Israel (Deuteronomy/Priestly Writing; Golah/Land; Samaria/Judah) – a compromise prompted by an initiative of the Persian authorities or as part of the Persian legal practice called imperial authorization (Frei 1996; on Frei's thesis see Watts 2001; Knoppers and Levinson 2007). The historical hypothesis lacks any evidence and cannot be supported by the texts themselves. The literary development is undeniable but it can be shown only in a relative chronology of the literary strata. It is further undeniable that we have Pentateuchal manuscripts amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, which attest for the period around the middle of the third century BCE several different versions of the texts, including the proto‐Samaritan version (Dušek 2012b: pp. 85–96). To this evidence we have to add the Septuagint that attests the dissemination of the Pentateuch amongst the Greek‐speaking Jews in Alexandria, and Ben Sira, who canvasses the biblical tradition around 200 BCE in Judah. However, which circles were responsible for the production and tradition of the Hebrew Pentateuchal manuscripts or for the Greek translation of the Torah remains – apart from the ancient legends (Ezra 7; Neh. 8; Letter of Aristeas Judaeus; Joseph) – unclear. It is equally unclear in which circles these documents were copied, studied, and adhered to and what status the Torah had in Samaria (Mt. Gerizim), Judah (Jerusalem), and Alexandria during the Persian and early Hellenistic period (Kratz 2007, 2010, 2013, 2015).

We have to admit that we know far less about the history and status of the Pentateuch as Torah during the Persian period than we would like to and we are forced to rely on speculation. The Maccabean revolt during the reign of Antiochus IV during the middle of the second century BCE may provide a historical starting point. Here the Torah is no longer a document of marginalized groups such as the religious community from Qumran but has started to play a significant role in the quarrel over political and economic influence between rival groups within Judaism. During the reign of the Hasmoneans it became (for the first time?) a political and legally binding document for entire Judaism. This is, however, a different story for which we would have to assess the sources for the Hellenistic period.