Place · Egypt
Elephantine
A Nile island with a Judahite community and a temple destroyed at the end of the fifth century BCE. The book cautions that calling it a community 'in exile' is almost certainly misleading.
24.0900°N 32.8890°E · representative coordinate · Pleiades 786021 ↗
Statements linked to this place
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The Jewish temple at Elephantine was destroyed in the late fifth century BCE, and the Jews there apparently were unable to rebuild it. The Hebrew term galut ('exile') presupposes that living outside the land is an imposed punishment. Many Jews, however, moved voluntarily; Philo of Alexandria describes the communities outside Palestine as colonies rather than exiles. For this reason many scholars prefer diaspora, from the Greek for 'dispersion'. The appropriate term depends on each community's history.
Community: The Judahites of Elephantine
During the nineteenth century a set of documents surfaced that revealed a Judahite (or Jewish?) community of the fifth century BCE in an unlikely spot: Elephantine, a small island in the middle of the Nile in what is now southern Egypt.
Egypt was then ruled by Persia, and these people served there as imperial troops, living with their families to help guard the border zone between southern Egypt and Nubia.
These people called themselves 'yehudiyin', a term many scholars translate as 'Jews', and there are good reasons for doing so: they worshiped Yahweh (Yaho in the Elephantine texts), bore names with a Yahwistic element and observed holy days such as the Sabbath and Passover.
But they differ from the Jews known from other sources: they did not treat Jerusalem as the only legitimate place of sacrifice (they offered to Yaho at a temple on the island itself, destroyed in 410 BCE) and seem to have acknowledged other gods beside him.
The papyri contain no texts that cite or interpret the Bible, let alone biblical manuscripts, and there is no sign that Abraham, Moses, Joshua or David belonged to the community's collective memory. They may have learned something of biblical law through contacts with Jerusalem authorities.
Community: Judahites of Elephantine
The Jewish temple at Elephantine was destroyed in the late fifth century BCE, and the Jews there apparently were unable to rebuild it. The Hebrew term galut ('exile') presupposes that living outside the land is an imposed punishment. Many Jews, however, moved voluntarily; Philo of Alexandria describes the communities outside Palestine as colonies rather than exiles. For this reason many scholars prefer diaspora, from the Greek for 'dispersion'. The appropriate term depends on each community's history.