Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Demotic Egyptian Papyri and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible

Meike Röhrig is researching Prophetic Texts from the Hebrew Bible and comparing them to Late Egyptian Prophetic texts. Two recent articles (in HeBAI and JAEI, see list of publications) deal with the Late-Egyptian “Apology of the Potter”, a Greek text that claims to be the translation of a Demotic original. This text shows strong allusions to and even direct citations of other Egyptian prophecies (most prominently, the “Oracle of the Lamb”), but also Ezek 26. The comparison of these texts serves as the starting point for a broader treatment of Judean and Late-Egyptian Prophecy in the context of the Persian-Hellenistic world. Under the conditions of intensified cultural contacts that were facilitated by large Empires, a “prophetic koine” developed in both cultures. The literati that were the agents of this prophetic koine increasingly had access to a vast corpus of texts, not only from their own, but also from foreign cultures. The authors of the Apology of the Potter, for example, apparently had access to the Septuagint version of the Book of Ezekiel. In ironic contrast to the “international” nimbus of their work, prophecies about foreign nations (in the Apology of the Potter: the Greek elite in Alexandria and other, e.g. Asiatic foreigners; in the Book of Ezekiel: primarily Tyre and Egypt) include highly xenophobic ideas. This dissonance between xenophobic utterings and a high degree of familiarity with the foreign cultural and literary traditions is remarkable and in itself a similarity between both literary corpora.
Further articles that are under preparation focus on Ezek 40–48 and Isaiah 14 under a comparative perspective.