The Judaism that conquered the ancient world and survives today bears little resemblance to the temple cult of Josiah's reform. It is instead the child of exile – brilliant, adaptive, and endlessly creative. Those forgotten Babylonian innovators, not Shaphan in Jerusalem's temple, were the true inventors of Judaism. The weekly Sabbath stands as their most enduring monument – not merely a day of rest, but a complete reimagining of how humans mark sacred time. Through their genius, catastrophe became creativity, loss became law, and exile became the birthplace of a faith that could thrive anywhere. They gave us the supreme irony of religious history: the most radical revolution ever achieved by presenting itself as the recovery of ancient tradition.For more on the Shaphan ostracon from Lachish, see here. And follow the links from there for more on Shaphan himself.
For more on the Elephantine "Passover Papyrus," which does not actually have the word Passover in the surviving text, see here and links.
The Sabbath is mentioned in the Elephantine texts. See here. If Papyrus Amherst 63 came from the Elephantine Judean community, they had access to Babylonian traditions. See here. Whether they knew about Babylonian ideas that turned into exilic innovations is not clear, at least to me.
For more on the reconstructed origins of the Sabbath, see here.
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