From Texts to Literature: Demotic Egyptian Papyri and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible (DEMBIB)

The discovery of numerous papyri in Egyptian Demotic script during the last 20 years has offered the research community a considerable new corpus of Egyptian literature. The Demotic literature is comparable to the Hebrew Bible as both emerged from the same historical environment and are rooted in a scribal culture. The EU-funded DEMBIB project will compare the recently accessible Demotic papyri with Biblical literature by investigating the structural parallels between them and identifying the compositional strategies of the two kinds of literature. DEMBIB will also consider these literary features in the socio-historical environment of the 6th to 3rd century BCE, during which Egyptian and Jewish scribal elites faced similar challenges.