Thursday, June 26, 2025

Karel van der Toorn on the Amherst Papyrus

  

A chapter on diaspora religion would be tendentious by omission if it failed to discuss the Samarian and Judean diaspora in Egypt. This Egyptian diaspora is best known for what used to be referred to as the Jewish military colony of Elephantine. The island of Elephantine, close to the Egyptian border with Nubia, was the findspot of hundreds of papyri and ostraca (potsherds used as writing material) in the early twentieth century. The texts cover the entire fifth century BCE and document the existence on the island of a community of people with Hebrew names and a local temple for Yaho. . . . In recent years, the cultural background of this diaspora, including the Elephantine community, has come into sharper focus owing to the discovery and decipherment of a multicolumn papyrus with Aramaic literary texts. The Amherst papyrus—so called after its collector, Lord Amherst of Hackney—was found in Egypt and is written in Demotic (late-Egyptian) characters, but it uses the Aramaic language. It is a compilation of texts from different diaspora communities in Egypt that, at least in the mind of the compilers, were closely associated. . . . Two sections of the Amherst papyrus have a direct bearing on the identity of the Elephantine community. One contains three religious songs to Yaho, one of which has a striking resemblance to Psalm 20 and two others with clear affinities to a variety of psalms yet without a specific correspondent in the Bible. (Karel van der Toorn, Israelite Religion: From Tribal Beginnings to Scribal Legacy [The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025], 172, 173)

 

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