The Passover Papyrus Orders a Religious Furlough for Judean Soldiers

There is a scholarly debate as to when the term “Jews” in English fits the Hebrew yehudim or Aramaic yehudaya. Shaye Cohen, however, has criticized the widespread use of “Jews” for yehudim in the pre-Hellenistic era. As he observes, the term yehudim applied generally to those who hailed from Judah. It was an ethnic-geographic term; Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. University of California Press, 1999), 104:

In contrast, ‘Jew’ (at least in English) is a religious term: a Jew is someone who venerates the God of the Judeans, the God whose temple is in Jerusalem.... ‘Jew,’ then denotes culture, a way of life, or ‘religion,’ not ethnic or geographic origin. (Ibid., 105).

It is therefore misleading to use the term “Jew,” Cohen insists, before the 2^nd century B.C.E. (Ibid. 104). Recent scholars therefore alternate between “Judahites,” “Yehudites” or “Judeans” (as here).

Known since 1906, some of these documents were misplaced then re-discovered in the 20^th. Over 100 of them were published in 1923 and since. Hundreds more, some of them small and fragmentary, are now still being transcribed.  A four-volume critical edition of the documents was transcribed and translated by Porten and Yardeni. See below.

For excellent studies of this material, see the many publications by Bezalel Porten, especially Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony. (University of California Press, 1968), 130–133. See also Reinhard G. Kratz, “The Second Temple of Yeb and of Jerusalem,” Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, ed. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 247–264.

Kratz, “The Second Temple of Yeb and of Jerusalem,” 248.

Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt. Newly copied, edited and translated into Hebrew and English, vol. 1–4, The Hebrew University, Department of the History of the Jewish People, Texts and Studies for Students (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1986–1999).

The word “Passover” does not appear in the surviving fragmented letter. It is supposed by the context.

See, e.g., Bezalel Porten, “Aramaic Papyri and Parchments: A New Look,” Biblical Archaeologist 42:2 (1979): 91 and the version TAD 4.1.

‏[אל אחי י]דניה וכנותה ח[ילא י]הודיא אחוכם חננ[יה] שלם אחי אלהיא [ישאלו‎ בכל עדן]

[To my brothers, Je]daniah and his colleagues the [J]ew[ish] ga[rrison,] your brother Hanan[iah]. May God(s) [seek after] the welfare of my brothers [at all times.]

וכעת שנתא זא שנת 5 דריוהוש מלכא מן מלכא שליח על ארש[ם] […]

And now, this year, year 5 of King Darius, it has been sent from the king to Arsa[mes] […]

The numerals in the Aramaic are being rendered in Arabic numerals instead of the original Imperial Aramaic numerals.

The letter ends as it started:

‏[אל] אחי ידניה וכנותה חילא יהודיא אחוכם חנניה ב[ר …]

[To] my brothers Jedaniah and his colleagues the Jewish garrison, your brother Hananiah s[on of …].

This in particular is important. Even though the dates themselves are not preserved, the prohibition of working is evident.

See, for example, how the Matzah festival was added into the Exodus passages about Pesach in Zev Farber, “How Eating Matzot Became Part of the Exodus Story,” TheTorah (2018).

For a redaction-critical look at this chapter, see Bernard M. Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 53-97; Shimon Gesundheit, Three Times a Year: Studies on Festival Legislation in the Pentateuch, FAT 82 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 96–149.

His brief essay on TheTorah.com does not lay out his entire reconstruction, but focuses mostly on this part of it.

Porten, Archives from Elephantine, 132.

A similar phenomenon is preserved in a memo to the Judeans from Judah’s Governor after the Judeans petitioned him to lobby on their behest to rebuild their destroyed temple (TAD A 4.9//Cowley 32). See discussion in Jan Assmann and Zev Farber, “Sacrificing a Lamb in Egypt,” TheTorah (2016); Zev Farber, “The 220-Year History of the Achaemenid Persian Empire,” TheTorah (2017).

See TAD 3.13 lines 1-2.

An advantage of this interpretation is the fact that it does not depend on reconstructing the text, which is always hypothetical to some extent, and that it accounts for all the features that are present in the surviving document.

In 1781–1783, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm set forth a program for “The Civil Improvement of the Jews” (Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden), which was directly inspired by the Jewish Enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn. The proposals confronted the greatest resistance on the issue of permitting Jews to join German armies. The most influential opponent to respond in writing to Dohm’s proposal was Johann David Michaelis (d. 1791). This well-known Christian Bible scholar claimed that Jews would not make good soldiers due to their physical constitution, their strict Sabbath and dietary laws, and, not least, their reluctance to drink beer with other Germans in the taverns. For Michaelis it was clear: If Jews were permitted to serve in the military, they could lay claim to political and civil rights. See Jacob L. Wright, “The Beginnings of Jewish Foreign Military Service: A Study of Practice and Accompanying Ideology,” Judah and the Judeans in the Achaemenid Period - Negotiating Identity in an International Context, ed. by Oded Lipschits, Gary Knoppers and Manfred Oeming (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2010), 505–528.