From Texts to Literature: Demotic Egyptian Papyri and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible

Project Information

DEMBIB

Grant agreement ID: 101020304

DOI

10.3030/101020304

EC signature date 20 June 2021

Start date 1 January 2022

End date 30 September 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 2 500 000,00

Coordinated by

HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITAET ZU BERLIN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DEMBIB (From Texts to Literature: Demotic Egyptian Papyri and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

DEMBIB’s primary objective is to identify and study parallel phenomena in the Demotic and biblical literature produced in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Project researchers carefully targeted a set of texts in each already showing manifest similarities (and telling differences) with their compositional techniques. The genres of texts under study are narrative (both fiction and historiography), wisdom, and prophecy. Researchers identify the transformation of texts into subsequent, often larger compositions, the strategies evident in this process, and the different, sometimes mutually exclusive perspectives resultant in the new literary creations. Results of this analysis are connected to their wider socio-cultural context.
The promise of DEMBIB’s research may be evident in the contemporaneity of the biblical and Egyptian literature under study, but it is fueled by their shared cultural and historical basis. Culturally, Judean and Egyptian literature was composed by scribal elites who transformed, revised, and composed local textual traditions. Historically, this literary and cultural production took place during an era of foreign rule, with the indigenous scribal elites in Egypt and Yehud/Judea interacting with similar foreign hegemonic powers, in both administration and in cosmopolitan culture more broadly. For these reasons, the comparative study of biblical and Demotic literature will not only create innovative models for the history of biblical literature in its final phases of composition, but will, more generally, contribute to a cultural history of indigenous literature in an increasingly global Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Demotic literature is characterized by fluidity, not fixity. Multiple copies of the same composition show significant variation, creativity, and discursivity, both in narrative and wisdom, which is significant given the entirely different organizational principles of these genres. Such creativity, therefore, characterizes scribal activity in this period in general. By synthesizing and furthering this picture with new readings and comparisons, the project is making crucial evidence available for biblical scholars interested in textual history, who are often forced to speculate with single texts. Since contemporary biblical compositions also show similar tendencies of growth and variation identified in the Demotic papyri, the comparative approach of the project (focused on scribal techniques rather than individual motifs) has already now proven a fruitful enterprise.
The project’s rigorous application of methodologies long developed and employed in biblical exegesis has, in turn, shed new light on the composition and transmission of Demotic literature, and strengthened the case for comparison. In particular, the methodologies of form and redaction criticism have brought new insight into Demotic compositions that either show similar tendencies of growth by editing, or which are extant in recognizably distinct literary layers. Some of these phenomena went completely unnoticed for over a century, while others were intimated but never fully worked out, until now. Such insights could only result from the close cooperation of biblical scholars and Egyptologists which at this moment takes place uniquely within DEMBIB.
Finally, the similar contexts of Demotic and Judean literature yielded a thematically coherent array of literature. Since the scribes in question worked under the horizon of foreign domination and looked back onto a past of native rule, the return of native sovereignty is an important theme, especially in prophecy. Putting new, overlooked, and newly reanalyzed Demotic and Judean prophecies in dialogue has yielded a rich and complex picture. These prophecies envision earthly rule spanning a wide horizon of possibilities, ranging from personal, kingly rule to messianic figures and theocracy. Based on this thematic range attested across contemporary Demotic texts, the project has demonstrated the value of nuancing existing models of literary growth in biblical research to allow for simultaneous, contradicting developments.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

While already-known papyri have provided ample material for DEMBIB’s research, a felicitous result of its cutting-edge work is the identification of new Demotic papyri in libraries across Europe containing texts and traditions associated with compositions already under close study. These give an additional window into a living tradition and a growing literature, confirming arguments already advanced by project researchers, and expanding knowledge in Demotic studies in previously unexpected ways. Important compositions are now attested centuries earlier than previously known, and some textual traditions are now known to be more extensive, and fluid, than believed.
In a conference held in Berlin in May 2024, DEMBIB brought together for the first time ever a group of world-leading Demotists and Dead Sea Scrolls specialists, organized into thematic tandems. While the potential of comparison with the Dead Sea Scrolls was known by the project and was part of the grant application, this conference broke ground in numerous and unexpected ways. Individual texts were placed in a comparative light for the first time (such as the Egyptian Book of the Temple and the Temple Scroll from Qumran), techniques of knowledge creation shared by both communities of scribes were discovered, and the realities of the institutional basis of scribalism and the composition of literature, namely the ancient library, was investigated. This latter point is especially important for the second funding period of DEMBIB, which focuses on the larger questions of the socio-cultural and -historical background to the formation of the Hebrew Bible and Demotic texts as literature, stemming from scribal milieus active in Persian and Hellenistic Period Judea and Egypt.
As a result of the third project workshop in September 2024, the focus for the last and fourth project workshop was modified. The discussion with the members of the Advisory Board and the invited scholars led to the general question of cultural contacts between Egypt and “Israel” from the Late Persian to the Ptolemaic periods. These questions will therefore be addressed in the final workshop of the ERC project. Since the second international conference of the project will take place in 2025, this workshop is scheduled for the spring of 2026.
The second international conference of the project is planned for August 2025 in cooperation with the 25th congress of the “International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament” (IOSOT). The reason for combining the project conference with the IOSOT congress is to achieve the highest possible number of participants for our DEMBIB project. In addition to a keynote lecture by the PI on the Demotic literature and the Hebrew Bible, four panels are planned. 1) a panel in which the members of the ERC team will present the results of their research. 2) a panel on concepts of rule in various biblical and extra-biblical sources from Egypt and the Ancient Near East. 3) a panel evaluating the so-called “scroll approach” developed by David Carr in cooperation with the ERC team during his research stay in Berlin in 2023. 4) a panel on the historical and cultural contacts between Egypt and the southern Levant during the Persian period.

Example of a Demotic Papyrus from the Carlsberg Collection, Copenhagen