Sometime in the 5th or early 6th century BCE—that is, after the destruction of the First Temple—a group of Jews settled on the Island of Elephantine, located on the Upper Nile in southern Egypt. They seem to have had their own temple, and, although they remained faithful to the God of the Hebrew Bible, revered a number of pagan deities alongside Him. (Their story also inspired Cynthia Ozick’s latest novel.) A curse inscribed on a clay tablet by these Jews helps shed light on a period of Jewish history about which very little is known. Nathan Steinmeyer writes:
Dated by its script to the 5th century BCE, the tablet consists of twelve words, including a reference to the God’s temple and one of the common epithets of Israel’s God, “the lion.” . . . It was a curse tablet, very similar to curse texts that would become common a few centuries later in the Hellenistic period. These texts, which were typically written as curses against thieves, were left inside temples as a way of transferring the stolen property to the deity and thus turning the thief into a temple robber and liable to the wrath of the deity.
The curse text also reveals new details of how the Jewish God was worshiped differently on Elephantine.
Read more on Bible History Daily: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-egypt/a-jewish-curse-text-from-elephantine/