Bible Synapse
Elephantine petition to Bagohi
document · 407 BC · Persian period · also called Elephantine temple papyrus, Request to rebuild the temple of Yaho, TAD A4.7, Cowley 30
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- 407 BC (the letter, dated in the 17th year of Darius II)
- Found
- Elephantine Island, Aswan, Egypt, 1907. Found in 1907 in the Berlin museums’ excavations at Elephantine directed by Otto Rubensohn, and entered in the Berlin collection as an excavation find. It was one of three key Aramaic papyri that Eduard Sachau published the same year.
- Now
- Neues Museum (Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung), Berlin (P. 13495)
- Passages
- Nehemiah 2:10, Nehemiah 2:19, Nehemiah 4:1–2, Nehemiah 12:22–23, Nehemiah 13:28
What it is
The Elephantine community’s own copy of a petition in Aramaic from Yedaniah and the priests of the Jewish garrison on the Nile island of Elephantine to Bagohi, the Persian governor of Judah, dated 407 BC. It reports that priests of the Egyptian god Khnum, backed by the Persian commander Vidranga, had destroyed their temple of Yaho (YHW), and asks for support to rebuild it. The writers say they had earlier written to Johanan the high priest in Jerusalem, and that they had sent word to Delaiah and Shelemiah, sons of Sanballat the governor of Samaria.
How it connects to the Bible
The letter names people known from Nehemiah. Sanballat, whom it calls governor of Samaria, is Nehemiah’s chief opponent (Nehemiah 2:10, 19; 4:1–2), and his family is the one into which a grandson of the high priest Eliashib married (Nehemiah 13:28). The high priest Johanan is generally identified with the Johanan of Nehemiah’s list of high priests (Nehemiah 12:22–23). By 407 BC the community wrote to Sanballat’s sons, which fits a man who had been active a generation earlier, in Nehemiah’s time.