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)