Letters from Elephantine

A letter from 419 BCE seems to give instructions for the Festival of Unleavened Bread. It was discovered in 1907, and today it is in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin.

Scripture: When Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the Ammonite, heard of it, it grieved them exceedingly, because a man had come to seek the welfare of the children of Israel.

The verses around that passage mention letters carried to governors. Letters are among what this find contains, alongside contracts.

For decades, such papyri surfaced only through antiquities dealers. Giovanni Belzoni and Bernardino Drovetti bought the first known ones, and by 1824 pieces sat in museums in Padua and Turin. Scholars only later understood they came from Elephantine.

Scholars later traced them to Elephantine, an Egyptian border fortress. Formal digging began in 1904. From 1906 to 1908 Otto Rubensohn and Friedrich Zucker dug at the mound for the Berlin museums.

Hundreds, by some counts thousands, of documents survive, in Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Coptic. Letters, contracts, divorce papers, even the freeing of enslaved people. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved them.

Some of the Aramaic papyri document a Jewish community among soldiers stationed there under Achaemenid, meaning Persian, rule, between 495 and 399 BCE. That letter is the so-called Passover Letter, though Passover itself is not named in the surviving text.

So how does this meet Nehemiah? Only indirectly. The passage has a king, governors and official letters. The papyri show a Jewish community and letters under Persian rule. But the excerpts I read don't mention Sanballat or Tobiah, so I can't say either way.

Today the major collections are in Berlin, Brooklyn, Cairo, London, Munich and Paris. The Passover Letter is in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin.

There are limits. How the documents were buried remains unknown, though they are thought to have been stored lying flat, close together.

What these papyri give us is a window onto ordinary people keeping records and writing letters in that age. May the Lord Jesus Christ be with you today. Follow Bible Evidence to keep exploring what has been found.