UCLA

Jewish identity in the Second Temple period was formed within a succession of imperial contexts. From the Babylonian conquest through the Persian and Hellenistic periods, Jewish communities lived under foreign regimes that shaped the conditions under which Jewishness was maintained, adapted, and expressed. Yet scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and Judaism of the Second Temple period has not always accounted for the role of empire in the formation of Jewish identity, often reducing Jewish engagement with empire to models of either resistance to imperial rule or passive accommodation to it.This dissertation uses the Jewish military colony at Elephantine as its central case study for understanding how Jewish communities negotiated imperial rule. The Aramaic papyri and ostraca from Elephantine provide rare documentary evidence for a Jewish diaspora community living within the structures of the Achaemenid Empire. This study argues that Jewishness was not simply preserved under empire but was maintained and articulated through strategic participation in imperial structures. At Elephantine, Jewishness was maintained through communal labels, naming practices, devotion to YHW, ritual traditions, and ongoing relationships with leaders in Yehud and Samaria. At the same time, the community selectively adopted and redeployed imperial norms of loyalty, administration, and hierarchy, especially in its petitions for the rebuilding of the temple of YHW. From this evidence, the dissertation develops a three-part model of Jewish interaction with empire: maintained Jewish distinctiveness, selective mirroring of imperial ideology, and appeal to imperial hierarchy in moments of crisis. The reconstruction of imperial dynamics at Elephantine provides a historically grounded framework for reassessing literary portrayals of Jewish identity under empire, specifically within the Book of Esther, where the same tensions are reframed to articulate a particular vision of Jewish life within imperial systems. Ultimately, by centering the practical ways Jewish communities operated within imperial structures, this study demonstrates that participation in those structures was not necessarily opposed to Jewish distinctiveness but became one of the means through which Jewishness was maintained and articulated in the Second Temple period.