Yedoniah fils de Gemariah

Origins and early life

Yedoniah son of Gemariah was the head and priest of the Jewish garrison community on the island of Elephantine, at the first cataract of the Nile in Persian Egypt, and he is known not from later chronicles but from his own letters, written on papyrus in Aramaic and physically preserved, which makes him one of the earliest individually named Jews outside the Bible attested in his own words.

Work and career

The community were soldiers in Persian service, descended from Judeans who had come to Egypt generations earlier, and they had built a temple to Yahu, the God of Israel, on the island. In 419 before the common era Yedoniah received and circulated the letter known as the Passover Letter, instructing his community on the dates of unleavened bread, the earliest surviving document about the observance of Passover outside the Bible.

In 410 the Egyptian priests of the ram-god Khnum, with the connivance of the local Persian governor, destroyed the temple. Yedoniah and his colleagues wrote to Bagoas, the Persian governor of Judah, and to the sons of Sanballat of Samaria, describing the destruction, the fasting and mourning of the community, and asking for authorisation to rebuild; a draft memorandum records the permission finally granted. Those papyri, found at Elephantine at the turn of the twentieth century, are the fullest picture we have of a Jewish community of the fifth century before the common era living outside the land of Israel.