The Aramaic Ahiqar and the Book of Job: Wisdom Texts in the Persian Period
The Aramaic Ahiqar and the Book of Job: Wisdom Texts in the Persian Period

Summary/Abstract: The Aramaic Ahiqar was found in Elephantine (Yeb) at a Persian military garrison and does not contain the notion of Yahwism found in the Hebrew Bible. Neither does it refer to Moses or the Torah, although the Egyptian diaspora would probably have had contact with a religious group from Jerusalem. Yet Ahiqar is similar in interesting ways to the Book of Job, which belongs to the Israelite wisdom corpus if we assume that the final form is approximately dated to the late Persian period. These two wisdom materials in the Achaemenid period have similar literary elements and, even more significantly, reflect common scribal views on humans and God(s), even though they were written in different places and in distinctive religious settings. Notably, Ahiqar interweaves Achaemenid imperial ideology with its story and proverbs and has a polytheistic view. This paper will present an intertextual study of Ahiqar and Job and argue that the diaspora scribes of Ahiqar in ancient Egypt broadly share more commonalities with the Jewish scribes of Job than any other biblical books.

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