A Fire Altar in a Jewish Temple
What Gad Barnea Found at Elephantine, and Why It Changes the Picture The Jewish military colony at Elephantine, an island in the Nile at the First Cataract, had a temple to YHW — the same god worshipped at Jerusalem — that was older than the Persian conquest of Egypt in 525 BCE and was destroyed around 410. We know this because the destruction provoked a documentary firestorm. The garrison community wrote letters, kept archives, drafted property contracts, copied legal forms, sent appeals up the imperial chain of command.
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What Gad Barnea Found at Elephantine, and Why It Changes the Picture The Jewish military colony at Elephantine, an island in the Nile at the First Cataract, had a temple to YHW — the same god worshipped at Jerusalem — that was older than the Persian conquest of Egypt in 525 BCE and was destroyed around 410. We know this because the destruction provoked a documentary firestorm. The garrison community wrote letters, kept archives, drafted property contracts, copied legal forms, sent appeals up the imperial chain of command. The Egyptian climate preserved the papyri. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavators recovered them. They were edited by Eduard Sachau in 1911, by Arthur Cowley in 1923 , and definitively by Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni in their four-volume Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt (1986-1999).
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Avesta
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Mary Boyce