JAMPEL, SIGMUND

JAMPEL, SIGMUND (1874–1934), rabbi and Bible scholar. Jampel, who was born in Galicia, studied Semitics at Heidelberg University and subsequently became rabbi at Schwedt, Brandenburg in 1910. He was among the first Jewish Bible scholars who recognized the value of archaeological and epigraphical finds for establishing the antiquity of the historical accounts of the Bible and the questioning of Wellhausen's hypotheses. His work (most of which was first published in mgwj but was also intended for the general reader) includes Die Wiederherstellung Israels unter den Achaemeniden (1904), dealing with the epigraphic material relative to Ezra-Nehemiah; Das Buch Esther auf seine Geschichtlichkeit kritisch untersucht (1907), which takes into account the archaeological excavations of Susa which authenticated the description of the royal palace in the Book of Esther; Vorgeschichte des israelitischen Volkes und seiner Religion; mit Beruecksichtigung der neuesten inschriftlichen Ergebnisse (1913, 1928²), a study of the importance of the western Semitic onomastic material, particularly from Mesopotamia in the Hammurapi period, for the understanding of the religion of the patriarchs; and Die Hagada aus Aegypten (1911, 1922²), in which he used Egyptian documents for the reconstruction of Israelite religious and social conditions in the Exodus period. He also wrote Die neusten Papyrusfunde in Elephantine (1911), and a number of studies on new developments in biblical research such as the two-volume Vom Kriegsschauplatze der israelitischen Religions-wissenschaft (1909–12).

bibliography:

T. Preschel, in: Ḥokhmat Yisrael be-Ma'arav Eiropah, 2 (1963), 146–55 incl. bibl. of Jampel's writings.

[Yehoshua M. Grintz]