The Words of Ahiqar

The Words of Ahiqar are the teachings that Ahiqar, the wise scribe who was chief counselor to the kings of Assyria, imparted to his nephew and adopted son Nadin. The teachings are preceded by a narrative that tells how the childless Ahiqar groomed Nadin to be his successor and, after succeeding Ahiqar, Nadin falsely accused him of scheming to overthrow the king. The king ordered Ahiqar’s death, but the officer put in charge of his execution was an old friend whose life Ahiqar had once saved, so he instead executed a slave and hid Ahiqar. The rest of the story is missing in the version presented here, but later versions tell how the king later came to wish that Ahiqar was still alive, at which point the officer brought him back to the king and Ahiqar was reinstated and Nadin punished.

The Words of Ahiqar is not a Jewish work but was apparently read by Jews, as implied in the postbiblical book of Tobit (e.g., 1:22; 14:10), in which Ahiqar is regarded as an Israelite from the tribe of Naphtali. The oldest known copy, albeit fragmentary, is an Aramaic version of the fifth century BCE found at Elephantine, Egypt, among the documents of the Jewish garrison there. There are a number of later versions of this work, from the Christian era, and several sayings known from the Syriac version—including one also found in the Elephantine text—appear in the Talmud and Midrash. We present excerpts here from the Elephantine version; it is the only one with a documented Jewish connection. Some lines of the text are missing or only partly preserved. Much of the narrative section can be restored based on parallel passages elsewhere in the text or in the later versions.