Alexander in the Armor of Nebuchadnezzar, Alexandria in the Robes of Tyre

The point of departure of this article is an observation that has been recently promoted by Sylvie Honigman, claiming that storytelling in the Hebrew Bible and Demotic narratives from Late Period Egypt both apply a concept of »topical history,« in which recurring historical circumstances are understood as one and the same event that keeps repeating itself. That way, empires and rulers can be fused into one. Nebuchadnezzar, for example, can step in for any Mesopotamian king in these narratives. The paper argues that the concept of »topical history« is not only detectable in narratives, but also in prophetic literature from ancient Judah and Egypt alike. The article first presents representative examples from the Hebrew Bible and then turns to the Graeco-Egyptian Oracle of the Potter, which shows the same pattern of historical analogy-building. The case study has several implications for the understanding of the general relationship between Egyptian and Judean Prophetic literature, which is discussed in the last section. The broader, structural parallels between these corpora of literature suggest that they participate in a »prophetic koine« in Persian-Hellenistic Egypt and Judah that developed under the conditions of the intensive intercultural connections that marked this period.