An Ancient Curse from a Lost Jewish Community

Sometime in the 5th or early 6th century BCE—that is, after the destruction of the First Temple—a group of Jews settled on the Island of Elephantine, located on the Upper Nile in southern Egypt. They seem to have had their own temple, and, although they remained faithful to the God of the Hebrew Bible, revered a number of pagan deities alongside Him. (Their story also inspired Cynthia Ozick’s latest novel.) A curse inscribed on a clay tablet by these Jews helps shed light on a period of Jewish history about which very little is known. Nathan Steinmeyer writes: