Concept

Elephantine Papyri

Intro

Elephantine is an island in the Nile at the far south of Egypt, at the first cataract near modern Aswan. In the fifth century BC the Persian empire kept a military colony there, and part of that garrison was Jewish. Their letters, contracts and lists, written in Aramaic on papyrus and pottery, were found around the turn of the twentieth century.

They are a window into a Jewish community that had its own temple to YHW (their spelling of the divine name) in Egypt. They settle one popular claim outright: there is clear evidence of the God of Israel being worshipped in Egypt long before the Greek Ptolemies ruled there. They also show a community whose religion was mixed, which is exactly what the prophet Jeremiah said about the Jews living in Egypt.

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In full

The Elephantine archive is a corpus of Aramaic documents from a Judean military colony at Elephantine and Syene on Egypt's southern frontier under Achaemenid Persian rule. Its central dated texts fall in the reign of Darius II: the so-called Passover letter of 419 BC, the destruction of the colony's temple of YHW in 410 BC by a local Egyptian priestly faction with the complicity of a Persian official, and the colony's petition of 407 BC to Bagohi (Greek Bagoas), Persian governor of Judah, asking for help to rebuild it. The petition says the temple already stood when Cambyses conquered Egypt (525 BC), and it mentions earlier appeals to Johanan the high priest in Jerusalem and to Delaiah and Shelemiah, sons of Sanballat governor of Samaria, figures who also appear in Nehemiah. A donation list divides its sums between YHW and two other names, Eshembethel and Anathbethel, which makes the archive the classic evidence for Persian-period Judean syncretism in Egypt. Apologetically the archive does three things: it refutes the claim that YHWH worship in Egypt begins under the Ptolemies; it anchors Nehemiah's cast of characters in external documents; and it confirms, rather than embarrasses, the prophetic complaint about mixed worship among Jews in Egypt (Jeremiah 44).

What the documents are

• Setting. A Persian frontier garrison at Elephantine, facing Nubia, staffed partly by Judeans (the texts call them "Jews" and "Arameans"). The documents cover roughly the fifth century BC.
• The temple of YHW. The colony had a temple with an altar where it offered meal offerings, incense and burnt offerings. That a Jewish temple stood outside Jerusalem at all is one of the archive's surprises.
• The Passover letter (419 BC). A letter instructing the colony on the dates and purity rules of the feast of Unleavened Bread, issued in the fifth year of Darius II.
• The destruction (410 BC). Priests of the local ram-god Khnum, whose temple stood on the same island, had the YHW temple destroyed while the Persian satrap was away.
• The petition (407 BC). A letter to Bagohi, governor of Judah, asking for authorization to rebuild. It says the colony's fathers built the temple back in the days of Egypt's own kings, before the Persian conquest, and that Cambyses found it standing. It reports earlier unanswered appeals to Johanan the high priest and his colleagues in Jerusalem, and an appeal to Delaiah and Shelemiah, sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria.
• The reply. A memorandum from Bagohi and Delaiah authorizes rebuilding the temple on its old site. The meal offering and incense are named; the burnt offering is not.
• The donation list. A list of more than a hundred contributors, each giving two shekels "for YHW", whose totals are then divided between YHW, Eshembethel and Anathbethel.

Links with the Bible

• Nehemiah's cast. Sanballat the Horonite is Nehemiah's chief opponent (Nehemiah 2:10), and a grandson of Eliashib the high priest was "son in law to Sanballat" (Nehemiah 13:28). Johanan, son of Eliashib, appears in the priestly lists "to the reign of Darius the Persian" (Nehemiah 12:22-23). The petition's Sanballat, sons and Johanan fit that same generation. The archive does not prove Nehemiah's narrative, but it anchors its named people in documents written by outsiders.
• Jews in Upper Egypt. Jeremiah 44:1 addresses "all the Jews which dwell in the land of Egypt ... at Migdol, and at Tahpanhes, and at Noph, and in the country of Pathros", Pathros being Upper Egypt, the region of Elephantine. The prophet's charge is mixed worship: they "burn incense unto the queen of heaven" and say they will keep doing it (Jeremiah 44:17-18). A donation list that splits its money between YHW and Anathbethel is the kind of community Jeremiah describes.
• "An altar to the LORD in the midst of the land of Egypt." Isaiah 19:19 foresees YHWH worshipped in Egypt. Elephantine is not the fulfilment the prophet describes (his vision is of Egyptians turning to the LORD), but it shows that YHWH's name in Egypt was historical fact centuries before the Ptolemies.

What the archive shows, and what it does not

Shows:

1. YHWH worship in Egypt before the Ptolemies. The Ptolemaic period begins in 305 BC. The Passover letter is 419 BC; the petition says the temple predates 525 BC. The claim "no evidence of the Hebrew God in Egypt until the Ptolemies" is false by more than a century on dated documents, and by more on the petition's own account.
2. A Passover-keeping community. The 419 BC letter shows the festival calendar reaching a frontier colony through official channels.
3. Contact with Jerusalem and Samaria. The colony writes to Jerusalem's high priest and to Judah's and Samaria's governors, the same institutions and families Nehemiah names.

Does not show:

1. The date of the Exodus or of Moses. Elephantine is a Persian-period colony. Earlier Egyptian evidence belongs to other artifacts, above all the Merneptah Stele (Israel in Canaan, c. 1208 BC).
2. That this colony's religion was normative. It was not, and the Bible says so (Jeremiah 44).

The critical use, steel-manned

Critics use Elephantine in two ways.

1. "Early Judaism was polytheistic; monotheism came later." The donation list divides money between YHW and two other named recipients; some personal names and oaths invoke other deities. Therefore, the argument runs, Yahwism in the fifth century was not the strict monotheism of the Torah, and the Bible's monotheism is a later imposition.
2. "The Torah was not yet authoritative." The colony had a temple outside Jerusalem, against the one-sanctuary law of Deuteronomy 12, and no document in the archive quotes a book of Moses. So, the argument runs, the Pentateuch had not yet reached its final authoritative form.

Response.

1. The Bible already reports this community's syncretism, and condemns it. Jeremiah 44 names Jews in Pathros who kept up the worship of the queen of heaven. Evidence that some Jews in Egypt mixed their worship does not show that the norm was polytheistic; it shows that the prophets were describing real people. A deviation the text itself records and condemns confirms the text. The same move answers Asherah inscriptions in Israel; see Yahweh Borrowed From the Canaanites Objection Defeater and Israelite Monotheism.
2. A frontier garrison is not Jerusalem. A military colony at the edge of the empire, possibly descended from settlers who arrived before Josiah's reform, is a poor sample of what Jerusalem's priests taught. Its own letters show it asking Jerusalem and the Persian governor of Judah for permission to rebuild, which is a community that recognized a center of authority beyond itself.
3. The reply is telling. The permission names meal offering and incense but not burnt offering. On one common reading, Jerusalem's authorities were willing to tolerate a place of prayer in Egypt while withholding sacrifice from it, which is what a Deuteronomy 12 conscience would do.
4. Silence about a book is not evidence the book did not exist. Letters about temple repair, property and payroll rarely quote scripture. The archive's silence is the silence of its genre. For the authorship question itself, see Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch and Moses Did Not Write the Torah Objection Defeater.

Names in different languages

A related confusion is the demand that Egyptian texts should contain "Egypt", "Israel" or "YHWH" in their English forms. The Hebrew Bible calls Egypt Mitzrayim; the English "Egypt" comes through Greek Aigyptos; Egyptians themselves called their land Kemet. At Elephantine the divine name appears as YHW. Evidence has to be looked for under the names each language actually used.

See also

• Merneptah Stele, Israel named in Egypt c. 1208 BC
• Biblical Archaeology, the parent hub
• H3068 - YHWH, the divine name the colony wrote as YHW
• Israelite Monotheism, the monotheism question the syncretism evidence is used against
• Yahweh Borrowed From the Canaanites Objection Defeater, the same "syncretism confirms the prophets" move for Canaan
• Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch, the authorship question
• Genesis ANE Myth Borrowing Objection Defeater, where the "no evidence in Egypt" claim often travels