The Jewish Temple(s) In Egypt. (Circa 5th Century BCE)

by fulltimestudent 11 Replies latest jw friends

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  fulltimestudent

  

  The web address on the above sketch is misleading as the sketch (it seems) was included originally, in a article in a peer reviewed archaeological journal by a Stephen Rosenberg.

  There is little doubt that the temple was genuine and it demonstrates that the OT stories about the role of Egypt in the formation of Judaism do not tell the truth about the complete relationship between Israel and the Egyptian Empire.

  We know that this temple on Elephantine Island was genuine. Some papyrus correspondence has survived

  There is also another (claimed) Jewish temple that an archaelogical team explored last century, but the precise location has been lost.

  More on the above temple tomorrow.
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  Crazyguy

  In that temple they also found writings about yah and his wife Asherah so yes the Jews thought jah had a wife. They have found Asherah figurines all over Israel as well.

  Another thought about the temples to Jah. The temple of Solomon if real looked very similar to many built in Egypt as well as the one up in Syria at Arn Dara. Go to google earth and check out the ancient city of Avaris also called Tanis. There is still an outline in the earth that looks like it could of been a temple and it looks like it's dimensions could measure out to be Solomon's . The old city was called Zoan, very close to Zion if you ask me.

  One other thing, the Solomon temple was supposed to be made of a tons of gold and Solomon was supposed to be so rich. Well when they discovered Tanis back in the 1800s they found old burial tombs and more gold and riches then anywhere in Egypt except maybe the valley of the kings.
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  Half banana

  It is possible that the Jews in Egypt had a greater chance of making a temple there in wealthy Egypt than they would in the impoverished land of Canaan.

  So much of the OT content is about Israel's political aspirations and not reality.
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  Crazyguy

  Could it be that many of the stories of the Jews in the Old Testament could be a throw back to a people called the Hyksos who conquered Egypt but were then pushed out by the Egyptians to settle in Jerusalem?
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  fulltimestudent

  Crazyguy : Could it be that many of the stories of the Jews in the Old Testament could be a throw back to a people called the Hyksos who conquered Egypt but were then pushed out by the Egyptians to settle in Jerusalem?

  That's the understanding presented by Josephus, but its a view disputed by some/many modern historians.

  Wikipedia has an entry on the hyksos, part of which states:

  Origin hypotheses[edit]
  Manetho and Josephus[edit]
  In his Against Apion, the 1st-century AD historian Josephus Flavius debates the synchronism between the Biblical account of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, and two Exodus-like events that the Egyptian historian Manetho apparently mentions. It is difficult to distinguish between what Manetho himself recounted, and how Josephus or Apion interpret him.
  Josephus identifies the Israelite Exodus with the first exodus mentioned by Manetho, when some 480,000 Hyksos, wrongly interpreted as "shepherd kings" by Josephus (also referred to as just as shepherds, as kings and as captive shepherds in his discussion of Manetho), left Egypt for Jerusalem.[8] The mention of Hyksos identifies this first exodus with the Hyksos period (16th century BC).
  Apion identifies a second exodus mentioned by Manetho when a renegade Egyptian priest called Osarseph led 80,000 "lepers" to rebel against Egypt. Apparently, Manetho conflates events of the Amarna period (in the 14th century) and the events at the end of the 19th Dynasty (12th century).[citation needed] Then, Apion additionally conflates these with the Biblical Exodus, and contrary to Manetho, even alleges that this heretic priest changed his name to Moses.[9] Many scholars[10][11] do not interpret lepers and leprous priests as literally referring to a disease, but rather to a strange and unwelcome new belief system.
  Josephus records the earliest account of the false but understandable etymology that the Greek phrase Hyksos stood for the Egyptian phrase Hekw Shasu meaning the Bedouin-like "Shepherd Kings", which scholars have only recently shown means "rulers of foreign lands".[12]
  

  
  Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Hyksos

  Lots of references in that entry to check out at your leisure.

  In any case, the Hyksos only ruled a northern section of Egypt, and native (however you want to understand that term) kings ruled the remainder.
  

  In other periods of history, various Egyptian Empires ruled over the land of Israel.

  By the time, that this thread deals with, the Hyksos were long gone.
  
  
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  fulltimestudent

  So back to the Jewish temple at Elephantine....

  Who were these Jews? from the surviving documentation it appears that they were a group of Jewish mercenaries. At first, it is thought, they were in the employ of the Egyptians and were absorbed by the Iranians (Persians) when Cambyses II of Persia conquered Egypt in 525 BCE.

  The discovery of papyri from that site has provided us with a lot of information about these Jewish worshippers of YHWH:

  Quote (from Rosenberg's article):

  "The papyri, written in Aramaic, are judicial and family documents that list property and marriage contracts and describe the colony's temple, where sacrifices were offered to YHW (Yahweh). One well-known document, known as the Passover Papyrus (dated to 419 BCE), sets out instructions to the colony in the name of Darius II to celebrate the feast of Unleavened Bread on the 14th of Nissan (the first month of Spring) and to drink no beer for seven days. Another papyrus records the destruction of the temple by the Egyptian priests of the nearby temple of Khnum in 410 BCE and the subsequent permission given for it to be rebuilt four years later (Porten 1968: 295)."

  Perhaps the most important thought we can learn from this temple's existence is that temple worship need not have been confined to the Jerusalem temple.

  In Marty E. Stevens exhaustive study of temple worship in west Asia (Temples,Tithes and Taxes: The Temple and the Economic Life of Ancient Israel, Publisher: Hendrickson, 2006, pp. 59-63) she lists five temples outside of Jerusalem.

  In the Palestine area, there is one at Mt Gerizim, that Josephus described as being modelled on the Jerusalem temple.

  Another at Arad in the Negev resembles the layout of the Jerusalem Temple. records recovered from the site indicate a connection with the Jerusalem Temple.

  There are two more in the northern kingdom at Dan and Bethel.

  And finally, the two in Egypt, the building at Elephantine, and the second mentioned in my first post but not discussed. It was built at Leontopolis in northern Egypt by High Priest Onias IV, circa 150BCE and also modelled on the Jerusalem temple and likely served Jews who lived in Egypt.

  -------------------------

  Reference for Rosenberg's article:

  The Jewish Temple at Elephantine Author(s): Stephen G. Rosenberg Source: Near Eastern Archaeology, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 4-13

  Published by: The American Schools of Oriental Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4149987 .
  
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  Mephis

  One of the interesting suggestions Rosenberg has made is that this Jewish community may have come from Israel rather than Judah, although that would depend on date of the Jewish mercenaries heading into Egypt if one accepts Josiah 'reformed' the religious practices around 522 BC.

  The idea that this could be aping the shape of a tabernacle rather than the temple at Jerusalem (which, from its written description, itself seems to copy even earlier Caananite temple forms) is also a fascinating one. Much of the Old Testament's 'history' has to be analysed through the filter of not only the postexilic community but also by the attempts to hammer the various stories/histories into a narrative which fitted a 'reformed' Judaism.
  
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  kepler

  It should be noted that the Aramaic documents found on Elephantine Island are connected to the Persian occupation of Egypt. To quote the Wikipedia
  

  "Though some fragments on papyrus are much older, the largest number of papyri are written in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, and document the Jewish community among soldiers stationed at Elephantine under Persian rule, 495–399 BCE"

  Egypt came under Persian rule during the reign of Cambyses,starting around 530 BC and Darius I, who reigned until 486 BC, expanded the frontiers west into Libya and up the Nile river. Since the Persian garrison did not show up until after 500 BC, what Jewish community preceded them is a matter of conjecture..
  

  I'd say that there is as much or more of a story in how the Persian Empire affected Judean beilefs versus the Egyptian influence.
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  Cold Steel

  https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hjx1c3NAVTQ
  

  https://youtube.com/watch?v=_CYqCti5rQM

  https://youtube.com/watch?v=f6OTD7plobA
  

  https://youtube.com/watch?v=CUCUvu2l64I
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  Mephis

  Since the Persian garrison did not show up until after 500 BC, what Jewish community preceded them is a matter of conjecture..

  Only if you're sure that the request to rebuild the temple (dated to 407 BC) was telling lies about the temple existing prior to Cambyses arriving in Egypt in 525 BC. The burden of proof rests on someone wishing to prove the temple did not exist at the time. The archaeology is silent on it, but the (admittedly limited) documentary evidence pushes this prior to the Persians being in Egypt.