Demotic Egyptian Papyri and Biblical Literature

With the rediscovery of numerous papyri in Egyptian Demotic script over the last three decades, a whole new corpus of Egyptian literature has become available. This thematic issue of HeBAI presents the approach and first results of a research project that correlates the newly accessible Demotic papyri with Hebrew Bible literature. Since Demotic literature comes from the exact historical period when many books of the Hebrew Bible received their final form - the Persian and Hellenistic periods - the Egyptian papyri provide important comparative evidence for the study of biblical literature. Demotic literature, too, is rooted in a scribal culture in which groups of literati composed complex narrative, poetic, and prophetic literature. The main goal of the research project is to compare the compositional strategies of Demotic and biblical literature and to contextualize these literary characteristics in the socio-historical situation of the sixth to third centuries BCE, when the scribal elite in Egypt and »Israel« faced similar challenges.