Daniel Nessim PhD

Incredible find! A Jewish person living in Egypt around 475 BCE wrote about Passover on a piece of pottery. The inscription, written in Imperial Aramaic, is now housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It was discovered on the island of Elephantine in Egypt, home to a Jewish community during the Persian period. In paraphrase, the letter conveys a message along these lines: “To Hoshaya. Greetings! Take care of the children until Ahutab arrives. If the flour has already been ground, prepare a small amount of dough until their mother returns. Let me know when you will celebrate Passover, and tell me how the baby is doing.” Although brief, this inscription contains one of the oldest surviving non-biblical references to the festival of Passover, demonstrating that Jews were celebrating it nearly 2,500 years ago. Consider the historical context. It was written approximately 700 years after the Exodus from Egypt (according to the traditional biblical chronology), about 110 years after the destruction of the First Temple, and roughly 60 years after the return to Zion from the Babylonian exile. The Nation of Israel Lives