What was Judaean religion in the Persian period like? Is it necessary to use the Bible to give
an answer to the question? Among other things the study argues that ¿ the religion practiced in
the 5th c. BCE Elephantine community and which is reflected in the so-called Elephantine
documents represent a well-attested manifestation of lived Persian period Yahwism ¿ as
religio-historical sources the Elephantine documents reveal more about the actual religious
practice of the Elephantine Judaeans than what the highly edited and canonised texts of the
Bible reveal about the religious practice of the contemporary Yahwistic coreligionists in Judah
and ¿ the image of the Elephantine Judaism emerging from the Elephantine documents can revise
the canonised image of Judaean religion in the Persian period (cf. A. Assmann). The Elephantine
Yahwism should not be interpreted within a framework dependent upon theological conceptual and
spatial concepts alien to it such as biblical ones. The study proposes an alternative
framework by approaching the Elephantine documents on the basis of N. Smart¿s multidimensional
model of religion. Elephantine should not be exotified but brought to the very centre of any
discussion of the history of Judaism.
