From Haaretz (November 4th):
It's fascinating, as is the Elephantine diaspora in general. The article begins:
It also advises:
The article is well worth reading. Particularly noteworthy is:
It's fascinating, as is the Elephantine diaspora in general. The article begins:
The so-called 'Passover Letter' is a tattered papyrus written in Aramaic during the Persian period. It is thought by scholars to contain the first extrabiblical reference to the rituals of Pesach, thus proving that this festival was already well established more than 2,400 years ago.
Not so, says a new study by an Israeli researcher, which calls into question a century of scholarship on the seminal document and claims the text has little or nothing to do with Passover as we know it. Instead, the letter was most likely discussing Zoroastrian-inspired rituals that were commonly observed by Jews in the Persian Empire, says Dr. Gad Barnea, a lecturer in Jewish history and biblical studies at Haifa University.
If correct, Barnea's hypothesis would have broad implications not just for the nebulous history of this central Jewish holiday but also for what we understand about the origins of Judaism as we know it.
It also advises:
the Judaism of the Persian period was still very different from the religion we know today, and we have no evidence that by the fifth century B.C.E. Jews had any knowledge or observance of basic precepts of the Torah, such as monotheism or kosher laws, or the keeping of Passover, Barnea says.
We do know instead that there was a lot of Zoroastrian-inspired syncretism across the Jewish world, with Yahweh taking on attributes and forms of veneration typical of Ahura Mazda, he adds. Zoroastrian priests, known as magi, and faithful were present at Elephantine and nearby Aswan, and had close ties with the Jewish Yahwists. More importantly, another papyrus in the Elephantine cache mentions that in their temple, the Jews maintained a "fire altar," something alien to later Jewish tradition, but a central form of veneration in Zoroastrianism.
The article is well worth reading. Particularly noteworthy is:
"The long-lived scholarly consensus which has linked this papyrus with Passover or the Festival of Unleavened Bread is based entirely on highly speculative reconstructions of the missing portions of the document," comments Prof. Yonatan Adler, an archaeologist from Ariel University who was not involved in this study. "It is also rooted in the faulty assumption that the laws of the Torah were well-known and widely observed among Jews as early as the fifth century B.C.E. It is high time that this idea is finally laid to rest and Barnea's work provides an important contribution toward dispelling the myth that Torah-observant Judaism existed so early."