The Priestly Scribes of Elephantine and Jerusalem in the Fifth Century BCE

Abstract The effects of the Achaemenid dynastic myth can be discerned within Jewish scribal works of the fifth century BCE among the priestly communities at Elephantine and Jerusalem. The Elephantine papyri contain features that presuppose the myth in their conception of architecture, economics, ritual, and even bureaucracy. Two documents in particular—the Aramaic copy of the Behistun Inscription and Jedaniah’s letter to Bagohi regarding the rebuilding of the Yahu temple—possess rhetorical traits that bind local priestly hierarchies to cosmogonic patterns at the highest level of the empire and which express local tensions in mythological terms. Among the priestly scribes of Jerusalem, the imperial myth is most prominently evident in the redaction of the Pentateuch, its linguistic and material format, and its rhetorical topography. In both cases, we encounter a thorough enculturation in the Achaemenid dynastic myth by Jewish scribes of the mid to late fifth century, with implications for how the Jewish literature of the later days of the Persian period approached and utilized this myth.