Female Diplomats in Jewish Elephantine? A New Look at a Papyrus from the Yedaniah Archive *

Abstract

This article reexamines a fragmentary Aramaic letter from the Yedaniah communal archive in Elephantine. The document, TAD A4.4, tells a tale of intrigue involving burglaries, arrests, and failed diplomacy. Many details of the letter escape us because the text is incomplete, but it is clear that five men and six women from Elephantine were seized at the gate in Thebes. Scholarly treatments have tended to discuss the women's presence at Thebes as an ancillary fact, as if they were merely wives and daughters along with their men on a business trip. This article analyzes the internal evidence of TAD A4.4, brings to bear contemporary material from Elephantine, and proposes alternatives for the role of the captured women. I argue that TAD A4.4 provides further insight into the roles of women in Elephantine and discuss how and why their roles might differ from those implied in biblical texts of this period.