Wednesday, August 7, 2024

Paolo Sacchi on the Elephantine Community

  

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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