느헤미야, 술 맡은 관원? 환관? = Nehemiah: Cup-bearer? Eunuch?

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Nehemiah himself said, “I am a cup-bearer of Artaxerxes, the king of Persia, in the palace of Susa” in the book of Nehemiah 1:11. Besides him, the cup-bearer called mašqæ (מַשְׁקֶה) in Hebrew is found in the story of Joseph when he was in an Egyptian prison (Gen 40:1-23; 41:9), and among the servants in Solomon’s palace (1Ki 10:5; 2Ch 9:4). Various artifacts found in Egypt, Canaan, Assyria, and elsewhere depicting scenes of royal banquets show figures standing with the king's cup, suggesting that this position did exist in ancient times. However, some scholars, including J. M. Myers, have argued that Nehemiah was also an eunuch because the person holding the Assyrian king's cup has the appearance of a beardless eunuch. They argue that Nehemiah was a Persian royal eunuch because he mentions his father and brothers by name but not his wife and children; because he served the queen (Neh 2:6); and because the Alexandrian Codex uses the Greek word for the cup-bearer οίνοχóοϛ while the Vatican Codex and Sinai Codex use εύνοũχοϛ meaning eunuch. Some scholars have argued that Nehemiah called himself a cup-bearer because the position of the eunuch in the ancient time was religiously exclusive (Lev 22:24; Deu 23:1). However, E. Yamauchi and some other scholars argued that a cup-bearer is a distinct designation for an officer in charge of drinks because the Hebrew word סָרִיס (sārîs) is used for the eunuch. He presented several literary and archaeological sources from Persia that could prove this. However, he still left a little possibility of Nehemiah being an eunuch.
This paper therefore seeks to build upon and develop Yamauchi’s ambiguously concluded thesis and to clarify Nehemiah's exact position in the royal culture of the ancient Middle East. First, the terms mašqæ and sārîs were compared and their roles looked up, noting that the chief mašqæ was referred to as rabšaqæ and the head eunuch as rabsārîs in 1 Kings 18:17. This suggests that the two terms refer to distinctly different roles. By searching for visual differences between mašqæ and sārîs in scenes of royal banquets, hunting, and warfare in the ancient Middle East, it was found that they had similar but different appearances and roles. In particular, M. Wilson and E. F. Schmidt took closer look at the Persepolis wall reliefs that were the basis for claiming that Nehemiah was a Persian royal eunuch. According to such argument, a Persian royal eunuch wore hoods similar to the Judahite hood worn by Jehu on the Black Obelisk. However, many of the people wearing the same hood could be identified as subjects who were not acting as eunuchs. Furthermore, it is difficult to say that this procession necessarily included a cup-bearer since the king is not shown holding a cup in any of these wall sculptures. If there were, the crown prince behind the king in this scene would have served as the head of the cup-bearers. The failure to find Nehemiah in Persepolis wall reliefs is not to say that he did not serve in the Persian royal court, or that he did not hold a high position as a cup-bearer. We know from ancient historians (e.g., Herodotus, Xenophon, Xerxes, etc.) that Nehemiah the foreigner in the palace of Susa was able to hold the position of the cup-bearer, which was a nobleman's position, and at the same time hold another position as a provincial governor. Despite knowing the word and title of sārîs, Nehemiah therefore introduced himself as mašqæ because it was his position in the Persian royal court.