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The Hebrew Bible views Egypt as the location of both slavery and refuge. The “wandering Aramean” ancestor mentioned in Deuteronomy 26:5 was a slave in Egypt, whereas the prophet Jeremiah and others chose to flee there after the fall of Samaria/Israel and Judah. This presentation offers a look at the evidence for diaspora life in Egypt found in Papyrus Amherst 63, a long and difficult text written in Aramaic but using the Demotic Egyptian script. The many compositions in the papyrus reflect the religious traditions and collective cultural memory of a group of Aramaic speakers in Egypt, including Samarians and...

Containing about 35 literary texts in Aramaic that date to the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., Papyrus Amherst 63 is written in a cursive Egyptian script known as Demotic. This unusual combination of the Aramaic language and the Demotic script was among the main reasons why the decipherment took more than 120 years. Karel van der Toorn (University of Amsterdam), who recently published a new edition and translation of Papyrus Amherst 63, argues that besides the forerunner of Psalm 20, the Egyptian papyrus contains two other Israelite psalms... “The two other psalms of the Amherst papyrus are not in the...