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ELEPHANTINE

(Gk. Elephantinê)

PAPYRI

A large number of papyrus documents and fragments, written in Aramaic during the 5th century b.c.e., discovered at Elephantine, an island in the Nile River opposite Aswan (biblical Syene) which became an asylum for Judean refugees after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem (cf. Jer. 43–44). The papyri, which offer a comprehensive glimpse at the religious and social life of the Jewish colonists, include contracts, private letters, historical and literary texts (esp. the Aramaic Book of Ahiqar), and official correspondence with the Egyptian and Persian authorities and the Jerusalem priesthood.

In 525 the Persian king Cambyses captured Egypt, and the Jewish settlement was made a military garrison to secure the southern boundary of the empire. Even before this, the Jewish colony had established its own temple where the national God Yhw (an abbreviation of YHWH) was worshipped in association with a female counterpart (Anat-yhw) and other deities of the Canaanite pantheon. In the temple, meal offering, incense, and animal sacrifices were performed by the local Jewish priesthood. Initially, the mode of worship of the Elephantine Jews (so manifestly opposed to Deuteronomistic rules) was a peculiar development of possibly North-Israelite syncretistic elements in a polytheistic Egyptian environment. A reassessment of the largely polytheistic nature of the Israelite religion before the Babylonian period has led modern scholars to reconsider the Elephantine experience as a vestige of preexilic Yahwism, which the Bible would label in retrospect as Canaanite corruption. The findings at Elephantine are strikingly similar to what was discovered in other preexilic Jewish sanctuaries, notably at 7th-century Kuntillet ʿAjrud. The religious conservatism of Elephantine was not the mere consequence of geographical isolation; it testifies to the historical process through which the Babylonian exiles struggled to impose their authority and their ideal of exclusive monotheism on Jews in and outside Jerusalem during the 5th century. The Elephantine colonists always regarded themselves as Jews and were considered as such by the Persian authorities, as testified by the sending of an official letter at the time of Darius II (419) containing regulations for the feast of Passover. When in 410 the Elephantine temple was destroyed by the Egyptians, possibly in an anti-Persian riot, the Elephantine priests appealed to the political and religious authorities in Jerusalem, the high priest Johanan and the Persian governor Bagoas (Neh. 12:22; Josephus Ant. 11:297-301). Apparently, the Elephantine priests received support for reconstruction of the temple, although they were no longer allowed to offer animal sacrifice. A few years later, at the beginning of the 4th century, with the end of the Persian influence in Egypt, the Jewish garrison at Elephantine was moved and the temple abandoned.

Bibliography. A. E. Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century b.c. (1923, repr. Osnabrück, 1967); E. G. Kraeling, The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri (1953, repr. New York, 1969); B. Porten and A. Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, 1: Letters (Jerusalem, 1986).

Gabriele Boccaccini

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ELEPHANTINE

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)