The
Elephantine Colony
The documents (letters) from the archive at Elephantine,
located in Upper Egypt at the level of the first cataract of the Nile, are very
important for understanding the historical development of exilic Judaism. A
military colony of Jews had been established there, probably by Cambyses,
though perhaps even earlier, in order to protect Egypt's southern border. The
colony had built its own temple and was in correspondence with Jerusalem over
problems concerning worship, which demonstrates that union of worship, the idea
that worship could only take place in Jerusalem, was an ideal which spread only
in the postexilic period. The civil war between Judah and Jerusalem leading to
the end of the Davidic dynasty seems the most likely cause for the unification
of worship. The documents from Elephantine cover nearly the entire fifth
century; the oldest dates from 495 BCE and the most recent from the beginning
of the following century.
The temple at Elephantine was destroyed around 410 BCE at
the instigation of the priests of the local god Khnum. One possible hypothesis
explaining the Egyptian aversion to the temple of Yhwh is that the Jews made
sacrifices of sheep there while the god Khnum was represented with a goat's
head.
The inhabitants of Elephantine then turned to the
authorities in Jerusalem, the governor and the priest, lor the reconstruction
of the temple. Their first letter did not receive a reply. They wrote a second
letter and it would seem that their efforts paid off; the temple was rebuilt.
As we can .see, the ideal of a unique place of worship did allow some
exceptions in practice.
The Jews of Elephantine were still polytheists. Alongside
the name of Yhwh (written normally in the form yhw) we find the names of
the divinities ‘Anat Betel and Asham Bethel These gods must have still existed
in the homeland too, since mention h made of offerings for them sent to
Palestine. Even the forms of the laws that appear in the correspondence are
different from those that we know from the Bible. Over time, though, they
evolve in the same direction as those present in the Bible, showing that
contacts with the home country were quite close. In any case the Elephantine
letters bear witness to an extreme fluidity in Israel's religious and civil
traditions. The history of Israel written from the literary documents does not
correspond to the history of Israel written from day-to-day administrative
documents. Perhaps, however, this is not only true of Jewish history. I
remember a statement that Ugo Enrico Paoli once made during a course on the
Gortyn law code: the habits and customs of a people cannot be reconstructed
from their laws. It would be like reconstructing the life of the Christian
peoples from the Gospels. (Paolo Sacchi, The History of the Second Temple
Period [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, Press, 2000], 150-51)
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