In the 400s BCE, a temple to Israel's God stood on an island in the Nile

Elephantine is a small island in the Nile at Aswan, on Egypt's southern border. In the 400s BCE it held a garrison of Judean soldiers and their families, serving the Persian empire, and they had their own temple to the God of Israel, whose name their documents spell YHW. The temple had stone gateways, a cedar roof, and an altar for sacrifice. By the community's own account, it was already standing when the Persian king Cambyses conquered Egypt in 525 BCE.

In 410 BCE, priests of the local Egyptian god Khnum, backed by a Persian commander, destroyed it. Three years later the community's leader, Jedaniah, and his fellow priests wrote to Bagohi, the Persian governor of Judah, asking for help to rebuild. Their letter says they had already written to Johanan the high priest in Jerusalem and received no answer, and that they had fasted and worn sackcloth since the day the temple fell. Most scholars identify this Johanan with the high priest listed in Nehemiah 12:22.

An answer did come, preserved as a short memo. Bagohi and Delaiah, a son of Samaria's governor Sanballat, approved rebuilding the "altar-house of the God of Heaven" and offering grain and incense there. Animal sacrifice goes unmentioned, and many historians read that silence as a compromise with Jerusalem's temple. The papyri show, in close detail, the kind of community Jeremiah 44 addresses: Judeans living across Egypt, as far south as Pathros, the Bible's name for Upper Egypt. When the Elephantine colony was founded is debated; it may be older than Jerusalem's fall in 587 BCE.