Elephantine papyri

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The Elephantine Papyri are a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts dating from the 5th century BC. They come from a Jewish community at Elephantine, then called Yeb, the island in the Nile at the border of Nubia, which was probably founded as a military installation in about 650 BC during Manasseh's reign to assist Pharaoh Psammetichus I in his Nubian campaign. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan). Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri, written in hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Coptic, span a period of 1000 years. Legal documents and a cache of letters survived, turned up on the local 'gray market' of antiquities starting in the late 19th century, and were scattered into several Western collections.

Though some fragments on papyrus are much older, the largest number of papyri are written in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, and document the Jewish community among soldiers stationed at Elephantine under Persian rule, 495-399 BCE. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of slaves, and other business, and are a valuable source of knowledge about law, society, religion, language and onomastics, the sometimes surprisingly revealing study of names.

The 'Passover letter' of 419 BCE (discovered in 1907), which gives detailed instructions for properly keeping the passover is in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin.

Further Elephantine papyri are at the Brooklyn Museum. The discovery of the Brooklyn papyri is a remarkable story itself. The documents were first acquired in 1893 by New York journalist Charles Edwin Wilbour. After lying in a warehouse for more than 50 years, the papyri were shipped to the Egyptian Department of the Brooklyn Museum. It was at this time that scholars finally realized that "Wilbour had acquired the first Elephantine papyri".

Contents

Jewish temple at Elephantine [edit]

A letter from the Elephantine Papyri, requesting the rebuilding of a Jewish temple at Elephantine.

The Jews had their own temple to Yahweh[1] which functioned alongside that of the local ram-headed deity, Khnum.[2] The "Petition to Bagoas" (Sayce-Cowley collection) is a letter written in 407 BCE to Bagoas, the Persian governor of Judea, appealing for assistance in rebuilding the Jewish temple in Elephantine, which had recently been badly damaged by an anti-Semitic rampage on the part of a segment of the Elephantine community.[3]

In the course of this appeal, the Jewish inhabitants of Elephantine speak of the antiquity of the damaged temple:

'Now our forefathers built this temple in the fortress of Elephantine back in the days of the kingdom of Egypt, and when Cambyses came to Egypt he found it built. They (the Persians) knocked down all the temples of the gods of Egypt, but no one did any damage to this temple."

The community also appealed for aid to Sanballat I, a Samaritan potentate, and his sons Delaiah and Shelemiah, as well as Johanan ben Eliashib. Both Sanballat and Johanan are mentioned in the Book of Nehemiah, 2:19, 12:23.[4]

There was a response of both governors (Bagoas and Delaiah) which gave the permission to rebuild the temple written in the form of a memorandum: "1Memorandum of what Bagohi and Delaiah said 2to me, saying: Memorandum: You may say in Egypt ... 8to (re)build it on its site as it was formerly...".[5]

By the middle of the 4th century BCE, the temple at Elephantine had ceased to function. There is evidence from excavations that the rebuilding and enlargement of the Khnum temple under Nectanebo II (360-343) took the place of the former temple of YHWH.

In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum of Art created a display entitled "Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive From the Nile Valley," which featured the interfaith couple of Ananiah, an official at the temple of Yahou (a.k.a. Yahweh), and his wife, Tamut, who was previously an Egyptian slave owned by a Jewish master, Meshullam.[6] [7] Some related exhibition didactics of 2002 included comments about significant structural similarities between Judaism and the ancient Egyptian religion and how they easily coexisted and blended at Elephantine.[8]

Anat-Yahu [edit]

The papyri suggest that, "Even in exile and beyond, the veneration of a female deity endured."[9] The texts were written by a group of Jews living at Elephantine near the Nubian border, whose religion has been described as "nearly identical to Iron Age II Judahite religion".[10] The papyri describe the Jews as worshiping Anat-Yahu (or AnatYahu). Anat-Yahu is described as either the wife[11] (or paredra, sacred consort)[12] of Yahweh or as a hypostatized aspect of Yahweh.[13][14]

References [edit]

  1. ^ The written form of the Tetragrammaton in Elephantine is YHW.
  2. ^ Ibrahim M. Omer, Briefly Investigating the Origin of the Ancient Jewish Community at Elephantine: A Review.
  3. ^ Comment on 'Petition to Bagoas' (Elephantine Papyri), by Jim Reilly in his book Nebuchadnezzar & the Egyptian Exile From website www.kent.net. Retrieved 18 July 2010.
  4. ^ Merrill Unger, Unger's Bible Handbook, p.260
  5. ^ Bezalel Porten; Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt 1. Jerusalem 1986, Letters, 76 (=TADAE A4.9)
  6. ^ New Tales From a Post-Exodus Egypt by Naomi Pfefferman, 2004-04-08
  7. ^ So long ago, so very much like us: A multicultural couple marries, buys a house, raises kids. That's the age-old story of 'Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt' at the Skirball 2004-05-11
  8. ^ Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt See esp. section "Jewish and Egyptian Ritual in Elephantine" and other sections. 2002
  9. ^ Gnuse, Robert Karl (1997). No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel. T&T Clark. p. 185. ISBN 978-1850756576. 
  10. ^ Noll, K.L. Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: An Introduction. 2001: Sheffield Academic Press. p. 248. 
  11. ^ Day, John (2002). Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan. 143: Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 978-0826468307. 
  12. ^ Edelman, Diana Vikander (1996). The triumph of Elohim: from Yahwisms to Judaisms. William B. Eerdmans. p. 58. ISBN 978-0802841612. 
  13. ^ Susan Ackerman (2004). "Goddesses". In Suzanne Richard. Near Eastern archaeology: a reader. Eisenbrauns. p. 394. ISBN 978-1575060835. 
  14. ^ Noll, K.L. Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: An Introduction. 2001: Sheffield Academic Press. p. 248. 

Further reading [edit]

  • Emil G. Kraeling, The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri, 1953, Yale University Press.
  • Bezalel Porten, with J.J. Farber, C.J. Martin, G. Vittman, editors. 1996. The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change, (Brill Academic)
  • Bezalel Porten, Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony, 1968. (Berkeley: University of California Press)
  • Yochanan Muffs (Prolegomenon by Baruch A. Levine), 2003. Studies in the Aramaic Legal Papyri from Elephantine (Brill Academic)
  • A. van Hoonacker, Une Communauté Judéo-Araméenne à Éléphantine, en Égypte aux VIe et Ve siècles av. J.-C., 1915, London, The Schweich Lectures
  • Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, 1995, Jewish Publication Society

External links [edit]

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