The Story of the Jews Read online

  Somehow, in the fortress world of the high-walled lanes, the slave owner, the one-time slave girl, the Temple official and their children all became an extended family. In 427, when Jehoishima was just seven, her legal owner, the hard-bargaining Meshullam, perhaps with some prodding, gave the little girl and her mother Tamet their manumission, a not-quite unconditional portion of freedom – ‘released’, in the lovely Egyptian formula, ‘from the shade to the sun’. There was, of course, a catch. The girl would become part of Meshullam’s family, and if they so wished, his children could still demand her service. All the signs, though, were that at least one of her adopted siblings, Meshullam’s son Zaccur, became a true brother to his little adoptive sister. Seven years later, when she was fourteen and marrying a man with the same first name as her father Ananiah, it was Zaccur who made sure she wedded in grander style than her mother. For a start, there was what every teen bride needed: a proper wardrobe – a brand-new striped wool dress, a long shawl, linen robe, a ‘fringed garment’, a ‘palm-leaf chest’ to store all these clothes in as well as another chest of papyrus reeds, a third for her jewels, bronze cups and utensils, fancy Persian sandals, and along with the usual oils, one described as scented. Thanks to her big brother the teen bride was well endowed. And she had a place to live, since before the wedding, her father had given her the legal right to reside in the half of the house not occupied by her older brother Pilti.

  Sixteen years later, in 404, forty-five years after the slave girl and the lechen had married, Ananiah deeded the property, now very much a family home, to his daughter, on his death, partly at least in consideration of ‘the support’ she had shown her father in his old age. A good girl, Jehoishima. At the end of the carefully delineated property description, the dry document says, ‘This is the measurement of the house I gave Jehoishima my daughter in love.’ But she didn’t have to wait around for the funeral. A year and half later Ananiah changed the title to take effect forthwith. ‘You, Jehoishima, my daughter, have a right to it from this day forever and your children have the right after you.’8 Perhaps by this time old Meshullam had gone to the island cemetery and the slave woman and her daughter were at last truly ‘released from the shade to the sun’.

  Elephantine may have been a soldier town, but its women were far more powerful presences, both legally and socially, than their counterparts back in Jerusalem and Judaea. ‘Lady’ Mibtahiah, daughter of Mahseiah bar Jezaniah, hailed from the opposite end of the social scale from Tamet.9 Mibtahiah’s family was among the leaders of the community, the notables of the Temple. This did not, however, preclude her from taking two of her three husbands from the local Egyptian population, both of them master builders. One, Eshor (renamed Nathan), was described as ‘builder to the king’. Over the course of her long life Mibtahiah – as confident and glamorous as Tamet had been modest and unassuming – would end up with three houses as well as three spouses, beginning by joining herself to a neighbour, Jezaniah. Her bridal gifts were lavish – as well as jewellery and chests, a papyrus reed bed. But she also came to the marriage as a householder, the gift of her well-to-do father, who gave her the property in her own right. ‘To whomever you love, you may give it, and so may your children after you,’ as the deed of transfer put it. Her husband, on the other hand, in case he didn’t know his place, just had the use of the house for as long as their marriage lasted. Which turned out to be not that long, due to Jedaniah’s early death.

  Husband number two, an Egyptian called Peu, wouldn’t do, and the documents dealing with the divorce settlement make it clear that in Jewish Egypt, unlike anything sanctioned by the Torah (then and now), women were entitled to initiate the separation. Deuteronomy 24:1–4 gave husbands a unilateral right of divorce by mere delivery of a statement that they had ‘found some uncleanness’. Should a man decide he ‘hated’ his wife, the same bill of divorce would end the marriage and ‘send her out of the house’. But that was not how it was done at Elephantine, certainly not for Lady Mibtahiah anyway, whose substantial dowry had to be returned. She and Peu went to court over division of goods, but it was Mibtahiah who won the case – after taking an oath on the name of the local Egyptian goddess Sati, something that would have appalled the guardians of the Torah in Jerusalem but was a matter of form for the Jews of the Nile.

  So, in this first Jewish society we know anything much about, the families of the troop could be Jews after their own style – open to the practices of Egyptians without surrendering their own beliefs, much less their names or identity. Hananiah’s mission to impose conformity – since he couldn’t or wouldn’t exhort them to depart Egypt altogether as the prophets wanted – ran up against generations of practices documented by the Elephantine papyri that resisted such instruction. After all, theirs was a community that had been shaped before Torah law had hardened; and there was sufficient distance to allow for its own customs and laws to become a shared inheritance.

  In other words, notwithstanding the fact that a garrison town on the Nile frontier of Upper Egypt doesn’t sound like an exemplary case for the subsequent unfolding of Jewish history, it actually was. Like so many other Jewish societies, planted among the Gentiles, the Jewishness of Elephantine was worldly, cosmopolitan, vernacular (Aramaic) not Hebrew, obsessed with law and property, money-minded, fashion-conscious, much concerned with the making and breaking of marriages, providing for the children, the niceties of the social pecking order and both the delights and the burdens of the Jewish ritual calendar. And it doesn’t seem to have been especially bookish. The only literature found in the archive was the ‘Book of Wisdom’, the Words of Ahiqar. And at the core of their community, rising monumentally above the crowded streets they shared with Aramean, Caspian and Egyptian neighbours, was their temple, a little ostentatiously done up, but very much their own.

  It is the suburban ordinariness of all this that seems, for a moment, absolutely wonderful, a somewhat Jewish history with no martyrs, no sages, no philosophical torment, the grumpy Almighty not much in evidence; a place of happy banality; much stuck into property disputes, dressing up, weddings and festivals; tough army boys living next door to the even tougher goyishe boatmen of the rough waters; a place of unguents and alleys, throwing stones in the river and lingering under the palms; a time and a world altogether innocent of the romance of suffering. But, wouldn’t you know it, trouble came, all the same.

  Like so many similar Jewish communities that would take root outside Palestine in the centuries and millennia that followed, the Elephantines were perhaps a little complacent in their easy-going assumption that relations between themselves and their neighbours were as good as if not better than could be expected and would stay undisturbed, as long as the benign Persian power was there to safeguard against ugly local jealousies. But that was precisely the problem. When imperial powers fray at the edges, ethnic groups perceived to be the beneficiaries of their trust suddenly start to look like aliens not natives, however long they may have been settled. This was exactly what happened at the end of the fifth century BCE, when Egypt, which had gone into outright rebellion in 486 and 464–454 BCE, and towards the end of the century, began once more to be aggressively restive against their overstretched Persian overlords. Suddenly (as would happen again 2,500 years later in twentieth-century Egypt) the Elephantine Jews were stigmatised as colonists, tools of the Persian occupiers, their social practices an anomaly, their religion a desecrating intrusion. If Persian toleration had allowed them to flourish as their imperial stooges, the mark of native Egyptian rebellion would be to stigmatise them as occupiers, marginalise and intimidate them, to unpick and tear them out of the body of local culture.

  The papyri report riots and looting – ancient forms of proto-pogrom. Six women who had been waiting for their husbands at the gate of Thebes – all of them married to Jews but some of them, as was often the case in Elephantine, with Egyptian names like Isireshwet – were arrested without explanation. Mauziah wrote to Jedaniah that he had been framed for fenc
ing a stolen jewel that had been found in the hands of merchants and thrown into prison, until a commotion at the injustice became so serious he was finally released. But his tone is edgy and nervous. Frantic with gratitude for the help he has had in getting out of jail, he tells Jedaniah to look after his saviours – ‘Give them whatever they desire!’

  In the last decade of the fifth century BCE, things that had seemed secure suddenly turned shaky. The Yahudim of Egypt pointed fingers at interfering outsiders from Judaea who didn’t understand their way of life. Mauziah blamed the presence of Hananiah, the Passover envoy from Jerusalem, for provoking the priests of Khnum to become aggressive, even against the Jewish garrison itself. The well used to supply drinking water when the troop was mobilised and called to the fort was stopped up. A wall dividing the garrison compound abruptly and mysteriously appeared. But these were merely provocations. True calamity followed.

  Three years after the disaster, Jedaniah, the communal leader, together with ‘the priests who are in Elephantine’ reported to the Persian governor of Judaea, Bagavahya, the sad history of the destruction of the Temple of YHWH in the year 410 BCE. The tone is exactly that of scripture: a chronicle steeped in anger and lament. The community was still in shock, still wearing sackcloth in mourning. ‘We fast, our wives are made as widows. [That is, they have forsworn conjugal sex.] We neither anoint ourselves with oil nor do we drink wine.’

  The trouble which brought down the Temple of Yahu was perhaps unavoidable. It specialised, after all, in sacrificing animals, most of which were undoubtedly sheep, exactly the creatures venerated by their next-door neighbours at the Temple of Khnum; handsome rams’ head profiles carved on its gates. It was not as if the Jewish rites were easily ignored. There would have been constant activity from within the walls of its compound: smoke, blood, chants. And as if angrily elbowing their irreverent neighbours, the priests of Khnum were expanding their own premises, pressing against the narrow boundary separating the two ritual houses. Indeed in places they seem to have shared abutting walls. At some point, the priests of Khnum mobilised resentment against the Jewish troop as the hirelings of the Persians to be rid of their temple if not of their soldiers and families. They persuaded the commandant of the island, ‘the wicked Vidranga’ (as the Jewish petition of complaint and lament called him) to act. A letter had been sent to Vidranga’s son Naphaina, the commanding officer of the Egyptian-Aramean garrison at Syene, encouraging the soldiers there to attack and demolish the Temple of YHWH.

  ‘They forced their way into the temple, razed it to the ground, smashing the stone pillars . . . the five gateways of hewn stone were wrecked; everything else burned: the doors and their bronze hinges, the cedar roof. The gold and silver basins and anything else they could find they looted for themselves.’

  With an eye to Persian susceptibilities, Jedaniah spoke feelingly of the antiquity of the Temple, built in the days of the Egyptian kings and respected by King Cambyses when he conquered the country. He reminded the Persian governor that he had already sent one letter to Jerusalem, addressed to the Lord Bagavahya, to the high priest Jehohanan and to ‘the nobles of Judah’ in the city, but they had not deigned to reply! (Could it be that the Jerusalemites, increasingly insistent on their monopoly of temple worship, were not altogether unhappy about the destruction of the unauthorised unorthodox Elephantine building?) Neither had the elders at Elephantine received any satisfaction from a letter sent to the sons of the governor of Samaria, Sanballat.

  The prayers had not gone entirely unanswered. The guilty, from ‘Vidranga the dog’ down, had indeed been punished, Vidranga’s loot taken from him, ‘and all those who did evil to the Temple killed and we gazed upon them’. But now the only true satisfaction was not revenge but the restoration of the Temple of YHWH the God. Should it be granted then ‘the meal offering, the incense and the burnt sacrifice will be offered on the altar of YHWH the God in your name and we shall pray for you at all times; us, our wives and our children’.

  Eventually there came a reply. Permission granted, more or less. The authorisation was for the Temple to be rebuilt ‘as it was formerly and on its site’. Pointedly, the permission was on the strict condition that henceforth offerings were to be only of grain and incense, not animal sacrifices. Someone in Jerusalem had got to the governor; or perhaps the Elephantine Jews wanted to reconcile the Jerusalemites to their cause. At any rate, they accepted the principle that burnt offerings were to be made only within the sacred precincts of the Jerusalem Temple. Accepting their secondary status, perhaps relieved that they were allowed to build a temple at all, which was still in violation of the monopoly of worship, a final letter from ‘The Board’ – Mauzi, Shemaiah, two Hoseas and Jedaniah himself – solemnly promised that sacrifices of ‘sheep and ox and goat’ would no longer be made. Just to make sure, they offered a sweetener of silver and shipments of barley.

  The Second Temple of Elephantine was indeed rebuilt, but it lasted only as long as Persian power over Egypt. It was shaken to the core by another all-out Egyptian revolt in 400 BCE, and had collapsed completely by the middle of the fourth century BCE before the oncoming power of Alexander the Great and his generals. With the demolition of Persian Egypt went the Jewish troop and its world of soldiers, slave girls, oils and incense, property disputes and marriage alliances; vendors, Temple notables and bargemen all disappeared back into documentary darkness, beneath the stones of the island in the Nile.

  Outside of a circle of scholars, this first, rich, Jewish story has had virtually no purchase on the common memory of Jewish tradition. Perhaps this is not surprising. For if that story is set up from the very beginning as one of clear-cut separation, then the mishmash Jewish– Egyptian–Persian–Aramean world of Elephantine is bound to seem an anomaly, a marginal curiosity, nothing to do with the creation of a pure and distinctive Jewish culture. Around the time of Elephantine’s flourishing, it is thought, two formative books of the Hebrew scripture – Ezra and Nehemiah – were being written in Jerusalem with the express aim of purging Jewish society of ‘foreign’ elements: a winnowing out of foreign women, foreign cults, foreign habits – even when they had long been mixed into the daily life of Judaean society. The writers of those books and their successors may have looked back at the Egyptian episode – its heretically unauthorised temple; the audacity with which it presumed to offer sacrifices; perhaps to call itself a society of Yahudim at all – with horror, and told themselves that the fate which eventually overtook it was YHWH’s will, another punishment for those who strayed from the narrow path.

  But suppose there is another Jewish story altogether, one in which the line between the alien and the pure is much less hard and fast; in which being Jewish did not carry with it the requirement of shutting out neighbouring cultures but, to some degree at least, living in their company; where it was possible to be Jewish and Egyptian, just as later it would be possible to be Jewish and Dutch or Jewish and American, possible (not necessarily easy or simple) to live the one life in balance with the other, to be none the less Jewish for being the more Egyptian, Dutch, British, American.

  This second kind of story is not meant to displace the first. The two ways – exclusive and inclusive, Jerusalem and Elephantine – have coexisted as long as there have been Jews at all. If both are legitimate ways of thinking about Jewish history, of telling its story, Elephantine could be seen not as an anomaly but as a forerunner. And, of course, it was not the end of a truly Jewish history in Egypt, but just another beginning.

  2

  The Words

  Nehemiah, so his book says, rides by moonlight.1 He can’t sleep. The broken walls of Jerusalem, to which he has returned, make a desolation in his heart.

  It is 445 BCE, nearly a century and a half since the Nebuchadnezzar catastrophe and the captivity of the Israelites in Babylonia. Although the Babylonians have long gone from Jerusalem, their soot is rubbed into the city’s honey-coloured limestone. Beyond the walls, the Persian province of Yahud is still bar
ely peopled; village after village has been abandoned or reduced to primitive subsistence.2 The city is filthy, poor, twenty times less populous than in the last years of the Judaean kings, its remaining inhabitants withdrawn into huddled dwellings beside the half-demolished walls.

  Decades have passed since the Persian king Cyrus, in keeping with the Persian policy of returning deportees and restoring local cults (hoping to bind their allegiance with that favour), authorised the Israelite return to Yahud in a decree ‘in the first year of his reign’, according to the Book of Ezra.3 The princeling Zerubbabel, with a claim to kinship with the ancient Davidian line of royalty, had been appointed to lead a few thousand back to Jerusalem, together with Yeshua the high priest. A start had been made on a second temple at the razed site of Solomon’s House of YHWH. ‘When the builders set the foundation . . . they set the priests in their apparel with trumpets and the Levites . . . with cymbals and they sang together . . . and all the people shouted with a great shout.’4 After it had been completed in 515 BCE, it was seen to be a modest rebuild, but enough for there to be the sprinkling of blood and the roasted sacrifices that the Holiness Code of Leviticus required, enough to command the reverence of pilgrims on days of harvest festivals.

  The Cyrus decree remained a precious authorisation, so much so that the Book of Ezra goes to the length of dramatising an archival search for the text, as a response to malicious objectors, generations later in the reign of Darius.5 Sure enough a copy is found in Babylon specifying the size and height of the rebuilt Temple, that its costs were to be paid for from the royal treasury, and the gold and silver vessels plundered by Nebuchadnezzar returned. Even more gratifyingly, the decree threatens anyone attempting to alter it by so much as a word with having the timber pulled down from their house, with hanging from a gallows erected on the debris, and that house ‘be made a dunghill’. As fragments of the Cyrus Cylinder text have been identified on a different cuneiform tablet (found on a dig in 1881), it is entirely possible that Ezra and his contemporaries were in possession of a copy that gave them the details of the authorising decree.6