The Elephantine Offer of Payment for the Temple (TAD A4.10)
A draft in which five men of the Elephantine community, headed by Jedaniah son of Gemariah, offer a payment to an unnamed lord if their temple is rebuilt, on the terms that only incense and meal-offering will be offered there.
Read the text at elephantine.smb.museum ↗Text and translation in A. Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C. (1923), no. 33, p. 125 (Internet Archive) ↗
The papyrus was excavated at Elephantine under Otto Rubensohn and Friedrich Zucker and was transferred to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 1912. Its lower left half is lost, and holes affect several other words. The Berlin database describes it as a draft and assigns it to 407 BC.
Five men, named with their fathers, call themselves Syenians who hold property in the fortress of Elephantine. They say that if their lord agrees and the temple of YHW is rebuilt as it was, sheep, ox and goat will not be made a burnt-offering there, only incense and meal-offering, and that they will then pay silver and a thousand ardabs of barley to their lord’s house. The “not” and several other words are partly restored; the next line, which begins “but” and names incense and meal-offering, is preserved. See the Judean Temple at Elephantine.
Cited in
- 410 BC to 407 BC, firm date