From “Ex Eventu Prophecy” to Predictions about the Future: Prophetic Literature from Persian and Hellenistic Egypt

With a largely overlooked Aramaic papyrus in the British Library (P. BL Or. 106) as its starting point, this article presents an overview of prophetic literature from Persian and Hellenistic Egypt. By placing the Aramaic prophecy in a twofold context, with the Prophecy of Neferti and the Oracle of the Lamb, it argues that a shift from “ex eventu” prophecy to “real” prediction of the future had already taken place in the Persian period. While the Aramaic prophecy and the demotic Oracle of the Lamb represent an earlier stage of such prophetic literature, the Greek Oracle of the Potter and the demotic prophetic text from the Tebtunis library illustrate the continuity of this tradition during the Hellenistic period. Regarding possible reasons for the paradigm shift towards predictions of a far distant future, rather than arguing for a single historical event (such as the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes), this article looks to sociopolitical change in which formerly powerful elites found themselves in a marginalized position. Therefore, the prophetic texts from Persian and Hellenistic Egypt served as “hermeneutics of crisis” written from the perspective of a group of literati who can most likely be linked to specific temples.

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