The ‘Persian period’ – roughly, the two centuries from Cyrus ‘capture of Babylon in 539 to Alexander’s capture of Tyre in 332 b.c.e. – presents us with such variety in what may loosely be called ‘Jewish religious life’ that it raises the question, what is meant by ‘Jewish’? The adjective derives from the noun ‘Jews’, Yehudim in Hebrew, Yehudin in Aramaic. For these terms there is on the one hand the territorial definition, ‘residents of Judea’, implied, for example, by the reference to the Persian ‘governor of Judea’ as ‘governor of the Jews’ (Ezra 6: 7, purportedly quoting a letter of Darius I); on the other hand, the ethnic ‘descendants of Judeans’, the members of the Persian garrison in Elephantine, settled there for well over a century, still called themselves Yehudin although they had intermarried with Egyptians and worshipped a number of deities besides Yahweh. A third definition is implied by the uses in Ezra 4: 12; 5: 4–5, which equate ‘the Jews’ with the exiles returned from Babylonia, excluding the population left in Palestine. These Jews worship only ‘the God of heaven and earth’ (that is, Yahweh), and explain their history in terms reminiscent of Deuteronomy (Ezra 5:11). Other documents suggest other definitions – for example, Nehemiah's apology (notably 5: 1, 17) refers to ‘the Jews’ as if they were a privileged class in Jerusalem. If more texts were preserved we should probably have yet more variety.

Jewish religious life in the Persian period

Wisdom literature in the Persian period

Hebrew and Aramaic in the Persian period

When Theodor Noldeke, working on a retrograde calculation from the well-known date of the beginning of the era of Yazdijerd (16th June, 632), made his table of Persian new year's days during the Sasanian period from A.D. 220 to 652 (Appendix B, p. 436, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden ), Dulaurier ( L'histoire universelle par Etienne de Daron , 1883, p. 195) criticized it, saying that this depends on admitting the base as granted. In other words, the table would be correct only if we assumed that the Persian year was a vague one without intercalation, which fact, he asserted, is not proved.

Some Chronological Data relating to the Sasanian Period

As a result of the gradual attrition of final syllables, which caused the Old Iranian nominal plural endings to become insufficiently distinct from those of the singular, the plural was extensively remodelled in almost all Middle and New Iranian languages. Such renovation could come about in two ways. Either the more distinctive pl. inflexions, such as the gen. *-ānām or the instr. and dat. forms containing *b, could be extended or adapted to supply other cases, as happened in Parthian, Šuγnī, etc., or the old pl. could be replaced by a surrogate pl. derived from a sg. collective noun. The latter process is well illustrated by Sogdian, where the usual pi. suffix is -t (oblique -ty) after heavy stems, -t– (obl. -ty') after light stems. As is indicated by the inflexion, which is that of an old ā-stem, and by the fact that f. sg. forms of the articles and demonstratives are used with pl. nouns, this suffix derives from that of the OIr. f. abstract-collective nouns in *-tā-.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/7F0EA392F74F5F213BBFF87F0A117104/S0041977X00145896a.pdf/div-class-title-on-the-plural-and-dual-in-sogdian-a-href-fn01-ref-type-fn-span-class-sup-1-span-a-div.pdf

On the plural and dual in Sogdian

Grundriss der iranischen Philologie

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Grundriss der iranischen Philologie

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Jewish religious life in the Persian period

Wisdom literature in the Persian period

Hebrew and Aramaic in the Persian period

Some Chronological Data relating to the Sasanian Period

On the plural and dual in Sogdian