The Migration of the Elephantine Yahwists under Amasis II

Abstract

103 Introduction Determining the time of the Yahwistic mercenaries’ migration to the island of Elephantine in Upper Egypt has important implications for understanding the history of this community during their time on the island, their identity, and their cultic profile. In this article, I study this question through all available datapoints, deriving from different disciplines: archaeology, onomastics, genealogies, and, of course, written narratives from Elephantine Yahwistic and Egyptian texts, the Hebrew Bible, and Greek/Hellenistic sources. While the dating of each individual datapoint can certainly be debated, the overall picture, when adding up the available information, points to the reign of Amasis II (570–526 bce), and specifically its latter part, as the most likely period in which the migration—or at least its first wave—occurred. I further suggest that the Yahwistic community first settled on the mainland at Syene, during which time the temple on the island was being prepared and built. They (or, at least, a large portion of them) moved to the island at a later stage. Much has been written about the time of arrival of a community of Yahwists (the Yhwdyʾ) on the island of Elephantine1—an island of the Nile’s first cataract, facing Aswan (Syene). But the answer to this question remains notoriously difficult to trace. While the general view today is that they arrived as mercenaries under the 26th dynasty, also known as the Saite period (664– 526 bce), scholars have offered theories that range across a wide range of historical periods and theoretical