The presence of these two ‘residual’ pseudo-Jewish enclaves are loose-ends of history. There has never been a satisfactory, agreed explanation of how either of the settlements came into existence. The sequence of events and the circumstantial evidence (previously related) that connects the priests of Akhenaten to Elephantine Island gives, I believe, a convincing explanation, which is verified by the unusual nature of the Judaism practised by the inhabitants of the settlement.
ELEPHANTINE ISLAND IN THE ANCIENT LAND OF AB
The ancient Island of ‘Yeb’, known to the Greeks as the ‘Island of Elephantine’, encompasses a narrow strip of land measuring 2km by 500m at its widest (see Plate 16). The location is usually on the tourist itinerary to see the best example of an ancient Nilometer. Looking rather like a flight of steps, the structure was rebuilt during the Roman period and still shows the level markings that were used to monitor the height of the Nile’s inundations. There are, however, other curiosities, hidden away, which most tourists do not see or learn about.
Excavations on the Island have revealed an Egyptian presence dating as far back as the First Dynasty, c.3000 BCE, to the time of Pharaoh Naqada II. In the centre of the Island there once stood a Temple of Tutmoses III, and to the north, a Temple of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten’s father. Both these temples were totally destroyed in the civil conflicts that occurred not long after their construction. There is also evidence that a very ancient pseudo-Jewish Community lived on the Island.
This pseudo-Jewish Community at Elephantine Island, near modern Aswan, suddenly disappeared around 400 BCE. Where did it come from? Where did it disappear to? How long had it been there?
Historians and commentators writing about the members of the Community, and trying to answer these questions, fall into three distinct groups:
those who say they are the result of ‘dispersions’ of Jews from Israel
those who ascribe them to be mercenaries, or troops from Israel who came to help defend Egypt’s southern borders sometime after 730 BCE
those who say no-one knows where they came from
These views are patently mutually exclusive and therefore they cannot all be correct.
What then is the explanation for the existence of this strange, anachronistic settlement? I looked first at the idea that it resulted from ‘dispersed’ Jews from Israel.
Dispersion Explanations
The cartophilic official biographer of Winston Churchill, Sir Martin Gilbert, ascribes the colony to the Dispersions of 722 and 586 BCE – the periods of Assyrian and Babylonian conquests of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Israel. However, to make the point he has to place Elephantine 550km further north than it really is!
Sir Martin illustrates the explanation in his Atlas of Jewish History, first published in 1969,1 where a map of the ‘First Dispersions’ of 722 and 586 BCE shows the position of the ‘Jewish’ colony at Elephantine as being some 300km south of Alexandria. Syene, the ancient name for the area of Elephantine Island, is also shown on the same map, but this time some 500km south of Alexandria. The actual positions of Elephantine Island and Syene are some 850km south of Alexandria!2
This explanation of how this strange pseudo-Jewish settlement came into existence, gratefully accepted by most religious observers and, through inertia, by many historians, just cannot be correct.
Consider the background history of Israel that led up to this weird situation, where a ‘Jewish’ settlement is said to have suddenly appeared in one of the remotest parts of ancient Egypt.
According to the Old Testament, when King Solomon died in c.928 BCE, his son Rehoboam, and one of his officials, Jeroboam – ‘the champagne boys’ – didn’t get on too well and squabbled over control of the Kingdom. In the end they decided to divide the Kingdom, so that Jeroboam and ten of the tribes of Israel took control of what became the Northern Kingdom, with their capital at Shechem, whilst Rehoboam, leading the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, set up the Southern Kingdom with its capital at Jerusalem. Whilst we can’t be certain about the historial truth of the so-called United Kingdom*57 period of Israel’s history, as portrayed in the Old Testament, when it comes to the Divided Kingdom period, from about 850 BCE onwards, archaeology and external evidence give credance to the biblical stories.
Serious trouble was not too long in coming for the Divided Kingdoms. In 722 BCE the Northern Kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians, who dragged most of the Jewish population northward to other parts of their empire – the beginning of the mythology surrounding the ten lost tribes of Israel had been enacted. At the same time the Southern Kingdom came under the domination of Assyria but, although Jerusalem was besieged in 701 BCE, it managed to hold out against complete subjugation.
No sooner had Assyrian power started to wane, than the dark shadow of the Babylonians loomed on the horizon. Their forces, under Nebuchadnezzar II, captured Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE. Once again most of the Jewish population was carried off, this time north to locations immortalized in the song ‘By the Rivers of Babylon.’
The problem with the Sir Martin-type scenarios is that in both of these ‘dispersals’ virtually all the Jews were taken northward. Even if some were taken south, the Assyrian conquest of Egypt, at its height, never extended beyond Thebes, some 200km north of Elephantine, and the Babylonians did not even invade Egypt.3
Those Jews that might have fled to Egypt would surely have stayed in the traditional Northern Delta region, just beyond the Egyptian border. In the Old Testament, Jeremiah 43:7 and 44:1 confirms this possibility with his references to reluctant settlers at Tahpanhes, Migdol and Noph (Memphis) – all in northern Egypt; but he does also refer to Pathros in Upper Egypt south of Thebes.
Military Explanations
The military garrison theory is discussed very fully by Bezalel Porten in his Archives from Elephantine.4 From all the historical evidence, if there was a Jewish military establishment made up of troops from Israel, they would need to have arrived at least prior to 700 BCE. The only reasonable scenario for this possibility would be that it occurred during the mid-seventh century BCE, when Israel attempted to throw off the Assyrian yoke by aligning itself with Egypt. Why they would want to send soldiers to the remotest part of Egypt, ostensibly to defend that country’s borders, is difficult to justify logically. Jewish soldiers, or even mercenaries, would not have been good at defending someone else’s country anyway – they would have been reluctant to fight on the Sabbath unless attacked first. Nor was Elephantine the effective military southern limit of Egypt.
The idea that there was a military garrison in the area is attested to by Herodotus, the fourth century Greek historian, but the garrison he was talking about appears to have been at nearby Syene, modern Aswan, and was manned by Aramaen soldiers.
There is no archaeological evidence of any military connection to the pseudo-Jewish Community, and little mention of such activity in their writings.
The Don’t Knows
Other historians, such as Reuven Yaron, Lecturer in Roman Law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and G. W. Anderson, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Studies at the University of Edinburgh, are much more cautious in their opinions and admit that the Jews of Elephantine are an historical loose-end. Professor Anderson states: ‘This settlement [Elephantine] dated from before 525 B.C. but unfortunately we do not know exactly when or how it was founded.’5
This view is endorsed by Reuven Yaron: ‘We do not know whence the original Aramaic-speaking settlers came to Egypt and Elephantine.’6
THE ELEPHANTINE COMMUNITY
A close analysis of the nature of the ‘Judaism’ practised on Elephantine Island shows that it originally bore almost no similarities to the Judaism practised in the Holy Land at any period before 525 BCE: the ‘Jews’ of Elephantine Island cannot conceivably have come from the Holy Land.
After the Babylonians, the Persians became the power in the Middle East, and by 525 BCE their troops had conquered the whole of Egyp
t and reached Elephantine Island. When they arrived they found a priestly colony that followed a very unusual form of Judaism. Their religious practices appear to have comprised a mixture of Judaism with the worship of Yaweh and of the Egyptian goddess Astarte.7 They did not follow and were not aware of the Oral Laws, nor did they appear to celebrate Passover – the great festival of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt.
How do we know all this? Much of our knowledge of the Elephantine settlement comes from Aramaic papyri discovered at the turn of the nineteenth century. Dated to the fifth century BCE these documents are now to be found in the museums of Brooklyn, Turin, Paris and Berlin. Major parts of these amazing texts are in the Staatliche Museum in Berlin and in the New York Brooklyn Museum, and they comprise some thirty almost complete documents and additional fragments written by the Jewish priestly settlement at Elephantine. They are mainly letters and legal documents concerned with court actions, marriage contracts and property law – there were obviously solicitors around even in those days as we have one of the earliest known examples of a conveyancing document, dated to about 470 BCE, and a lease dated 515 BCE!8
The Elephantine papyri paint a colourful picture of the Community’s activities, but they throw up numerous unanswered problems.
Why would a group of devout Hebrews settle, or re-settle, in such an obscure place?
Why did their form of Judaism differ from the mainstream, to the extent that they did not appear to accept, or have knowledge of, the Oral Laws, did not keep the Passover, did not follow the requirements of Deuteronomy and did not know the Pentateuch!
Why would the Elephantine Islanders still encompass Astarte, and other deities, within their monotheistic beliefs?
Why did they practise slavery?
Why did they follow Egyptian legal, fiscal and social precedents – some dating back to 1700 BCE?
Why did the members of the Community not understand Hebrew?
From where did the Community obtain its wealth?
The Community spoke and wrote mainly in Aramaic, with the occasional use of Egyptian demotic writing. Early Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Middle East in the first millennium BCE down to Christian times and was in use in Israel from the eighth century BCE alongside Hebrew. (After the return of ‘the intellectual Jews’ from exile in Babylon, Aramaic dominated in everyday discourse, until the time of the Hasmonean uprising when Hebrew came back into fashion.) Eric Peet notes, in his Egypt and the Old Testament,9 the paradox that any settlers coming from Israel prior to 525 BCE would have written in early Hebrew, whereas the Elephantine Community wrote and communicated in Aramaic.
They used virtually no Aramaic names and used pre-586 BCE pagan-like non-Hebrew names. They organized themselves in degels, or social groupings, along similar lines, significantly, to those employed at Qumran.
Like their ancestors, who first came into Egypt as shepherds, they also were sheep keepers. Many were financially well-endowed property-owning members of the upper classes, able to afford lavish gold, silver and the finest Lebanese cedarwood to adorn their Temple. Services in their Temple included meal and incense offerings, but there did not appear to be holocaust offerings.10
Their Temple itself is a mystery, as its very existence is quite anomalous. In conventional understanding it just should not be there. The Community had built, at great cost, their own magnificent Temple for worship11 – something very unlikely for anyone to do outside Jerusalem at any time, and certainly after King Josiah (c.640–609 BCE) forbade the building of a Temple anywhere but in Jerusalem. The Temple is dated to at least the seventh century BCE,12 precluding any possibility that the priestly-militaristic Community at Elephantine derived from the Babylonian dispersal.
Unfortunately, despite intense archaeological work by German and French teams, which is still ongoing, the exact location of the Temple, somewhere in the Jewish quarter of the Island, has not been discovered. It is known, from descriptions in the Elephantine papyri, that the Temple was a substantial building with stone pillars, and that it had five gateways with bronze-hinged doors. Its size and orientation can roughly be deduced from descriptions of adjacent buildings, and it measured 60 cubits by 20 cubits (approximately 30m by 10m). Bezalel Porten equates the Temple’s proportionality to that of the First Temple in Jerusalem (built c.950 BCE).13 He takes its apparent orientation to be towards Jerusalem. Much of this deduction is conjectural, but in my own analysis of the Temple’s orientation I found the most probable orientation was in fact north-west–south-east, similar to that of the Great Temple at Akhetaten.14
The assumption that the Elephantine Temple was modelled on Solomon’s Temple might, after all, be the other way round! The Elephantine Temple may well have been based on Egyptian designs, as its dimensions are in proportion to the Temple at Akhetaten – 3:1, length to width. However, for any Judaic community that originated in Canaan, after the Exodus, to have built a Temple outside the ‘Holy Land’ after the First Temple was constructed (to the specific and unique instructions of God) would have been unthinkable.
It was only when rivalries, much later in Israel’s history came to the surface, that anyone could contemplate building a Temple anywhere but in Jerusalem. The inevitable implication is that the Temple at Elephantine must have pre-dated Solomon’s Temple of c.950 BCE, and that the original Elephantine religious–militaristic Community must have been established prior to 950 BCE at least.
Michael Chyutin, in his study on the New Jerusalem Scroll from Qumran, published in 1997, confirms my suspicion when he concludes that the town built by the pseudo-Hebrew community at Elephantine Island is a copy of the city plan at Akhetaten. The streets bear similar names, and the structures of the buildings have special characteristics similar to those at Akhetaten. Although there are similarities in the layout at Elephantine to some other orthoganoldesign cities in ancient Egypt, the essential features are uniquely comparable to Akhetaten.15
The inhabitants of the Community followed Egyptian legal, fiscal and social customs – fundamentally different from those in Israel – and their religion was quite different from mainstream Judaism. They had a concept of a personified ‘Maat’, and the principles of religious behaviour reminiscent of the Egyptian ideals discussed in Chapter 5. In legal matters, for example, the marriage contract gave equal status, and in some instances superior rights, to the wife; used Egyptian phrases; and was typical of that existing in Egypt in the twelfth century BCE. Women also had equal dissolution rights. These freedoms were quite contrary to Jewish custom. No written marriage contract is ever mentioned in the Old Testament, and Jewish law gives power of dissolution to the husband only.
There are also examples, in the Elephantine papyri, of the undisguised taking of interest on outstanding debts. This type of practice is strictly against Jewish law.16
The literary style of the legal and other Aramaic papyri is quite different from that of texts from the Holy Land, and far older in derivation than their time of writing. Reuven Yaron cannot find any reasonable explanation for this feature and prefers to leave the matter open:
It is typical of Egyptian formulary style, for many centuries prior to the Aramaic papyri, that deeds of sale are drawn up ex latere venditoris (from the point of view of the seller).17
In 407 BCE the Elephantine Community wrote to the Persian Governor of Jerusalem, Bagoas, relating that their Temple had been destroyed three years earlier by agents of the nearby Egyptian priests of Khnum, whilst the local Persian governor was absent. Their letter maintained that the Temple had been ‘…built in the days of the Kings of Egypt, and when Cymbyses [the Persian King Cyrus II, c.525 BCE] marched into Egypt he found the Temple already built’.18 At the same time they also wrote asking for help to rebuild their Temple, to the sons of Sanballat, Governor of Samaria. This is another puzzle – because Sanballat had been adamantly opposed to the building of a Temple in Jerusalem, let alone in Egypt, and his sons would not have been in any position to influence the High Priest at Jerusalem. T
he answer is simply that the Elephantine Community were not ‘diaspora’ Jews, and they did not know about what had been going on in Israel.
Another text recounts the Persian King Darius II, in 419 BCE, granting the Community permission to hold a feast of ‘Unleavened Bread’ and instructions on what to do. The Festival of Unleavened Bread is the Festival of ‘Passover’ – when the Jewish people remember their miraculous escape from bondage in Egypt. The clear implication of these letters is that the Community at Elephantine had not before celebrated, and did not know how to celebrate, the Exodus from Egypt, because they had never left that country.
A. E. Cowley, who did much of the original translation work on the Aramaic papyri, went as far as to say that, ‘The Pentateuch, both in its historical and legal aspects, was unknown in the fifth century to the Jews of Elephantine.’19
Biblical testimony also corroborates the very early existence of the Community. The prophet Amos, who lived from 783–743 BCE, well before the Assyrian dispersals, recalls:
Are you not as children of the Cushites unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord…’20
Amos 9:7
There are two other firm clues, which tend to indicate a tribal ‘Hebrew’ presence at Elephantine well before 750 BCE, worth mentioning. The so-called ‘Elephantine Stela’, dated to c.1186 BCE, in the time of Pharaoh Sethnakhte, recalls an Egyptian rebel faction who bribed certain ‘Asiatics’ with silver, gold and copper to help them in their plot against the reigning Pharaoh. Were these ‘Asiatics’ some of the inhabitants of the colony at Elephantine? One also has to wonder if, in adopting the name ‘nakht’ into his title, this particular Pharaoh was not harking back to an allegiance with Joseph and his form of monotheism; the Joseph who, as I have suggested earlier, was vizier to Akhenaten and who bore the title ‘nakht’?
The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran Page 31
