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Richard Nowitz

A JEWISH TEMPLE IN EGYPT. On the Nile River island of Elephantine in the fifth-century B.C. a Jewish community founded a “temple of Yaho” (a form of the name Yahweh) that functioned like the temple in Jerusalem. The temple’s discovery roughly a century ago came as a surprise to Biblical scholars, who presumed that Jerusalem alone hosted a temple at which Jews performed their sacrificial service. The Elephantine temple disappeared in about 398 B.C. The recent discovery of a reference to a temple of Yaho at Maqqedah raises the number of known temples to the Israelite god to three.