The Elephantine Papyri in English
The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change (2nd edition) by Bezalel Porten.
“This important volume contains 175 documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan), which yielded hundreds of papyri in hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Coptic, spanning a period of 2000 years. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives, and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language and onomastics. The volume includes seven sections, each containing carefully translated and extensively annotated documents of one language group. Excellent cross-referencing allows the user to trace forerunners and successors. Each section is preceded by an introduction. The Aramaic, Demotic and Greek sections are concluded with a prospography. The book closes with a select topical index.”
“Bezalel Porten received his PhD from Columbia University in 1964 and since 1999 has been Prof. Emeritus in the Department of Jewish History of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Author and co-author of numerous studies on the Elephantine papyri, and, with Ada Yardeni, author of Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt (4 volumes).”
Reader’s note: This is a fine translation of the 175 documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan) dating to the 5th and 4th centuries BC.
The historical context is that after the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians (also known as Solomon’s Temple) under King Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BC (6th century BC) during the Siege of Jerusalem, a garrison of Israelites settled on Elephantine Island in Egypt and built a temple for the worship of YWH (i.e. Yahweh). These papyri illustrate the types of documents cited in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah while also filling in certain details described in those books.
However, they also continued worshipping false gods with their socioreligious depravity which had led to Yahweh removing his hand of protection over Israel and Judah resulting in Assyrian invasions followed by the Babylonian invasion, the destruction of the First Temple, and the first diaspora.
Some secular academics have attempted to use this as proof that the Israelite religion began as polytheistic; however, that is a false assertion. Clearly the original Israelite population that Moses led out of Egypt long before the Israelites ignored the prophets of Yahweh and fell away from exclusive monotheism to follow after neighboring country’s false pagan gods (resulting in Yahweh’s hand of protection being removed and the subsequent destruction of the First Temple and the first dysphoria) was originally exclusively monotheistic to Yahweh.
In fact, one can trace YHWH (i.e. Yahweh) back to Noah in Genesis (which contains pre-extant information predating Moses though there are excellent reasons to believe Moses was the primary compiler of Genesis). Models such as the RTB scientifically testable local flood model for the ancient flood in the cradle of civilization, recorded in various ancient accounts, asserts it occurred 50,000 +/- 40,000 years ago. That is a very long time before even a pagan prototype to Baal existed [see reader’s note 1 below].
Such secularists also ignore or misrepresent the evidence for original monotheism (see Winifred Corduan’s “In the Beginning God” as a starting point for that discussion) in wrongly asserting that Yahweh is but a later mythological construct of an earlier pagan god such as Baal or an alleged Baal prototype such as Hadad extending to the 3rd millennium BC (2,500-2,250 BC). Note that the creation of pagan gods resulted from the decay of original monotheism (see figure 1.4 below).
Reader’s note 1: Such models identify the Persian Gulf Oasis. During the last ice age, sea levels were significantly lower. The Persian Gulf was not a sea, but a lush, fertile basin fed by the four rivers mentioned in Genesis (the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates). As the glaciers melted and the Indian Ocean breached the Strait of Hormuz, the “filling” of the Gulf would have been a catastrophic, regional event that essentially wiped out the “cradle of civilization.”
This timing aligns with early modern human migration (especially along the older northern route) and the subsequent explosion of human symbolic behavior found everywhere modern humans migrated to. And those early populations to even modern pagan worldviews evidence cultural “ghosts” of an original monotheism. This is what modern researchers exploring the topic of original monotheism documented.
Moses as primary covenant historiographer wasn’t retooling a preexisting pagan god (or creating a new god) like today’s academic atheists whose minds tether solely to scientism1 assert, but rather acting as another link in a long chain connected to the only God.
Reader’s note 2: If you’d like, you can view examples of how bloggers and podcasters incorporate the Persian Gulf Oasis into their readings of ancient flood narratives:
The author of this video is Rob Rowe of Sentinel Apologetics
The author of this video is Michael Jones of InspiringPhilosophy
Here are examples of scholarly sources on the Persian Gulf Oasis:
Rose, J. I. (2010). New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo‑Persian Gulf Oasis. Current Anthropology, 51(6), 849–886. DOI: 10.1086/657397.
Multidisciplinary review arguing for a Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene demographic refugium in the exposed Gulf basin; synthesizes palaeoshoreline reconstructions, river systems, palaeoecology, archaeological distributions, and genetic inferences.
Lambeck, K., Esat, T. M., & Potter, E. K. (1996). Links between climate and sea levels for the past three million years. Nature, 378, 715–718. (See region‑specific shoreline reconstructions cited by Rose and later works.)
Provides sea‑level and isostatic modelling foundational to reconstructions of the exposed Gulf basin that underpins the oasis model. ResearchGate
Field, J., Petraglia, M. D., Alsharekh, A. M., et al. (2009). The archaeology of Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula: Palaeolithic landscapes and human dispersals. Quaternary International, 258, 7–28.
Presents palaeoenvironmental and modelling evidence for habitable coastal corridors and refugia in Arabia, complementing the Gulf‑oasis idea. Academia
Foster, G., et al. (2016). A multi‑proxy analysis of the Holocene humid phase from the United Arab Emirates and its implications for southeast Arabia’s Neolithic populations. Quaternary International, 382, 14–32.
Multiproxy palaeoenvironmental data showing expanded wetlands and freshwater sources in the Gulf margin during humid phases. dntb.gov.ua
Giosan, L., et al. (2012). Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(26), E1686–E1694.
While focused on the Indus, this work on palaeoriver dynamics demonstrates how reconstructed ancient river systems (applied in Gulf studies) can sustain human populations during arid intervals. Useful methodological precedent. ResearchGate
Peripheral genetic/phylogeographic support — examples:
Ferreira, J. C., et al. (2021). Projecting Ancient Ancestry in Modern‑Day Arabians and Iranians: A Key Role of the Past Exposed Arabo‑Persian Gulf on Human Migrations. Genome Biology and Evolution, evab194.
Population genomics finding continuity signals consistent with long‑term occupation or refugia in eastern Arabia.
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Scientism is the epistemological claim that only knowledge derived through methodological naturalism and the scientific method is valid. It rejects any and all objective reality and truth that cannot be quantified or tested within the constraints of methodological naturalism using the scientific method.
It effectively treats the current scientific model as the absolute boundary of reality while failing to account for the fact that scientific ‘truth’ is inherently provisional with knowledge changing, and even being overturned in cases, as new discoveries and new evidences arise (however and wherever they arise).
Where science offers a justified confidence rooted in its own provisionality, scientism demands an unearned certainty that imposes an ontological ceiling on reality, rendering the position internally inconsistent.
The Incarnation of the Second Person of the Triune and only God—the entry of the Divine Logos into the spatio-temporal order—functions as an ontological disruption. When the Creator enters His own creation, the closed-system presuppositions of scientism are exposed as insufficient. By manifesting the transcendent within the contingent, the person of Christ invalidates the 'ontological ceiling' of scientism, demonstrating that methodological naturalism is a subset of a broader, supernatural reality rather than its absolute boundary. And that is the reason for the enmity of the Scientismist.