Becoming Diaspora Jews: Behind the Story of Elephantine.

• Author: Fried, Lisbeth S.

Becoming Diaspora Jews: Behind the Story of Elephantine. By K.AREL VAN DER TOORN. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. xi + 270. $65.

Van der Toorn's goal in writing this book is to understand the "emerging Jewish identity" of a group of Judeans who lived on the Nile Island of Elephantine around 450 BCE. His main source is a document, Papyrus Amherst 63, which was written in Aramaic using a Demotic script (p. x). (The author provides his translation of the papyrus in a forty-page appendix.) The papyrus, dating to the mid-fifth century, was found as part of a "stash of papyri" in Thebes (p. 2). Based on this papyrus, van der Toorn sets out to demonstrate that the Jews of Elephantine were in reality Samarians who had previously lived "at close quarters" in a caravan city with two groups of Arameans, one from Babylon and another from Hamath in Syria. To van der Toorn, this explains the Elephantine Jews' use of Aramaic, rather than Judean, and the inclusion of Aramean gods in their worship. Van der Toorn's interest is to understand how at Elephantine these Samarians came to be called Jews (p. 20).

Van der Toorn admits that there were Judeans on Elephantine--these Jews were those who had Yahwistic names and whose temple was devoted to the Judean god, Yhw. Yet he argues that because all their papyri and ostraca are in Aramaic they were not originally Judean but Samarian. He states that "if the bulk of the Jewish colony in Elephantine had come from Judah ... we should expect them to speak Hebrew... But the Elephantine Jews did not" (p. 22). Yet, how does van der Toorn know what language they spoke? He has no recordings. He bases this conclusion only on the fact that it is not just the official letters, deeds, and court documents that are in Aramaic, but also the ostraca. To van der Toorn. this fact proves that the people on Elephantine who worshiped Yhw and who had Yahwistic names spoke Aramaic among themselves, not Hebrew, and were therefore actually Samarian (p. 23).

The language of the ostraca cannot prove what language the people actually spoke, however. Not only the court documents, deeds, and letters, but also the ostraca were written by scribes, and these scribes, whatever language(s) they spoke, were only trained to write in Aramaic (see Lemaire 2014). They were not trained to read and write Hebrew. To participate in public life, everyone had to speak Aramaic. This cannot and does not...