Judeans and Goddesses at Elephantine

With few exceptions, scholarship on the religion of Elephantine Judeans has forgotten about these female figurines. In concert with other, more recent discoveries, however, these objects offer a fresh vantage point into the matter of the Judean goddess. Archaeologists have found numerous other examples of terracotta plaques embossed with the motif of a woman standing between pillars. These pillars are usually understood as columns at the entrance of a temple. Indeed, one such plaque was recovered from the interior of a Philistine temple in Gaza — the very same temple, apparently, that the bas-relief pillars and architrave on the plaque represent in miniature. Many more plaques with similar design originated in Egypt during the same time period when Judeans staffed the island fortress. Egyptologists commonly interpret the woman on such plaques, sometimes with a child beside her as on the Elephantine exemplar, as a goddess. The temple façade within which she stands may evoke an actual, real-life shrine in her honor. 

These findings are suggestive with regard to the Judeans of Elephantine. A shrine plaque unearthed from their living quarters on the island images a woman, likely intended to call upon a goddess, inside of a temple, which may recollect an identifiable, local temple. But this evidence is circumstantial at best; no definite connection can be drawn between this terracotta artifact and the Judeans in particular, since they made their home in a multicultural mercenary community. Perhaps this plaque belonged to a Phoenician merchant who took up temporary residence on the island, or to an Aramean comrade-in-arms.  

But another line of inquiry reshapes the issue of the object’s proprietorship. In several Aramaic legal texts, the Dutch scholar Bob Becking observes that inhabitants of the fortress accept oaths taken in the name of someone else’s god. For example: one document, a divorce proceeding, splits assets between the ex-wife, a Judean woman, and her ex-husband, an Egyptian. The Judean ex-wife takes an oath that some of their properties are hers—but, notably, she swears by her ex-husband’s deity, the local goddess named Sati. Some have taken this as an indication that she has “converted” to her husband’s religion, or that her religious practice is “syncretistic.”  

But Becking denies these categories. Instead, the Judean woman respects that the name of the Egyptian goddess taps into real divine power, which could threaten her if she reneges on her oath. Similarly, another court proceeding addresses a property dispute between two men, one a Judean and the other a central Asian. The Judean takes an oath in the name of YHW — and the central Asian accepts it as binding. Although YHW was not his god, he believed that this name actually invoked the divine realm. Similarly, even if a Phoenician or an Aramean made or used the shrine plaque, Becking’s argument would mean that their Judean neighbors would likely have recognized this object — and other figurines — as a true point of access to divine power and blessing.  

In the end, then, the forgotten figurines do not resolve the question of goddess worship among the Judeans of Elephantine, let alone in early Judaism more broadly. But they do show that Judeans lived cheek-by-jowl with clay images of a goddess. Taken together with the textual data—allusions to Anat by Judeans, not to mention a biblical text like Jeremiah 44, which condemns Judeans resident in Egypt for venerating the Queen of Heaven—this fact increases the probability that Judeans revered a goddess. But even if they did not, their colleagues on the island did—and the Judeans likely believed in her divine power.