Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

too did not stand at Sinai among the multitudes of the Exodus! If it is true that we have been erased from Torah, it is because we are victims of falsifying scholars, betrayers who have become our interpreters. They have written of us as servile mercenaries, willing sentries for the haughty Persians who overran Egypt and commanded a fort to fend off yet other invaders—but are they not themselves mercenaries in the pay of the lies of the scholars? We, the Elefantins, hold our own truths. Our traditions and practices are far weightier than the speculations of those ignorant excavators, those papyrologists who pollute our ruined haven with their inventions and prevarications. Of our truth they make legends. Hirelings on behalf of the Persian conquerors of Egypt we never were! With our generations of loam-red hair, Nubians and Egyptians we are not. Rather we are what our memories tell us, lost stragglers, dissenters who became separated in the wilderness from that mixed throng of snivelers after the fleshpots of our persecutors. We alone were unyieldingly faithful to Moshe our Teacher, we alone never succumbed to their foolish obeisance to a gilded bovine of the barnyard. Willingly we parted from them, and blundered our way we knew not where, and in the scalding winds of the desert hardly discerned north from south, or east from west. In the innocent blindness of our flight we turned back to an Egypt ruled now not by pharaohs but by foreign overlords, a green island inhabited by idolators who there had built a temple to Khnum, a fantastical god of the Nile in the ludicrous shape of a ram, and yet another god with the limbs of a man and the head of a stork, and still other gods of the river, red-legged storks that they mummified to preserve their divinity. And for their rites and libations they fashioned slender vessels made in the image of storks. All the gods of the nations are ludicrous, and all are fantastical, all but the Creator of All who created all the suns and their planets, and all the rivers and seas of the earth. And because we had no fear of the imaginings they called their gods, who for lack of existence could not have ordered the fullness and withdrawal of the Nile, we built, very near to their fraudulent shrine, our Temple to the Creator of All. It was in this way that we came as true Israelites to Elephantine.

These were the beliefs and writings and precepts of the heritage I received from my father and my mother, who had received the very same from their predecessors, as they in turn had received them from our distant progenitors who raised up the Temple at Elephantine. Since then, we have been as a people scattered and few, and worse: forgotten, as if we never were. We live on as if in hiding. Even when our Temple stood, how humble it was, and how it disdained grandeur! It was built low to the earth, and constructed of earth, with a modest courtyard and fine tiles on its floor, and never a pillar blooming with crests of stone flora. We were, after all, stragglers. It was not our fate to go up to Jerusalem, or to set eyes on the stream that is called Jordan. Our companionate river was the Nile, once divinely bloodied so that we as a wretched people could escape our condition as slaves. It was through our proximity to the watery site of these memories that the Passover remains precious to us—and still we are expelled from the Books of the Jews!

And then, in a turn of our fortune, it was revealed to us by certain travelers that on a summit in the town of Jerusalem there was still another Temple, this one very grand, and peopled by Priests and Levites, to whom letters were sent, and from whom letters arrived. They too spoke and wrote our language, as who among the nations did not? In their inquiries we saw that though we may have been acknowledged as fellow Israelites, we were also regarded as improbable curiosities: they wished to know how we lived, how our families and neighbors were constituted, what our usages were, what plants and beasts and fowl there were on our island, and much else. We told them of the rich moisture of our reddish clay, how sheep and cattle were few while birds were many, especially the storks that thrived in colonies in the shallows of the Nile; and at first they made no murmurings against our Temple. And little by little, as we informed them of our beginnings and our ways, we learned theirs: the history of how their Temple was ruined, and how they were exiled to Babylon, and how they returned to rebuild it, all under the rule of the very Persians for whom we were supposedly abject hirelings! They told us of their commandments and ordinances, written in the books we stragglers did not possess, they told us of the Book of their teachers Ezra and Nehemiah, and their Book of holy instructions called Dvarim. And according to the wisdom of these books, they believed that only their Temple on the heights of Jerusalem permitted worship of the Creator of All, and that all other sanctums were forbidden, inclined as they were to the ludicrous and fantastical gods of the nations, and to false icons of gold and licentious figurines. And so it was according to the wisdom of these books that our riverine Temple, so contagiously close to the delusionary shrine of Khnum, was soon deemed illicit. But was not our Temple, like theirs, adorned by a seven-branched menorah, and a shulchan for the shewbread, and did not our kohanim, like theirs, honor the rites of sacrifice, were not birds brought by our people as burnt-offerings, all the birds that were pure, and none, like the stork, that were not? And was not our Temple