Origins of Judaism
Judaism | |
---|---|
יַהֲדוּת Yahadut | |
Type | Ethnic religion[1] |
Classification | Abrahamic |
Scripture | Hebrew Bible |
Theology | Monotheistic |
Leaders | Jewish leadership |
Movements | Jewish religious movements |
Associations | Jewish religious organizations |
Region | Predominant religion in Israel and widespread worldwide as minorities |
Language | Biblical Hebrew[2] |
Headquarters | Jerusalem (Zion) |
Founder | Abraham[3][4] (traditional) |
Origin | 1st millennium BCE 20th–18th century BCE[3] (traditional) Judah Mesopotamia[3] (traditional) |
Separated from | Yahwism |
Congregations | Jewish religious communities |
Members | c. 14–15 million[5] |
Ministers | Rabbis |
Part of a series on |
Judaism |
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The origins of Judaism lie in
During the
During the
From the 5th century BCE until 70 CE, Yahwism evolved into the various theological schools of
Iron Age Yahwism
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Ajrud.jpg/300px-Ajrud.jpg)
Judaism has three essential and related elements: study of the written Torah; the recognition of Israel as the chosen people and the recipients of the law at Mount Sinai; and the requirement that Israel and their descendants live according to the laws outlined in the Torah.[17] These three elements have their origins in Iron Age Yahwism and in Second Temple Judaism.[18]
Iron Age Yahwism was formalized in the 9th century BCE, around the same time that the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel (or Samaria) and Judah became consolidated in Canaan.[19][failed verification][20][failed verification][21] Yahweh was the national god of both kingdoms.[22]
Other neighbouring Canaanite kingdoms also each had their own national god originating from the Canaanite pantheon of gods:
The various national gods were more or less equal, reflecting the fact that the kingdoms in Canaan themselves were more or less equal, and within each kingdom a divine couple, made up of the national god and his consort – in the case of Israel and Judah: Yahweh and the goddess Asherah – headed a pantheon of lesser gods.[20][25][26]
By the late 8th century, both Judah and Israel had become vassals of the
By the time this occurred, Yahweh had already been absorbing or superseding the positive characteristics of the other gods and goddesses of the pantheon, a process of appropriation that was an essential step in the subsequent emergence of one of Judaism's most notable features: its uncompromising monotheism.[25] Philip R. Davies holds that the people of ancient Israel and Judah were not followers of Judaism; they were practitioners of a polytheistic culture worshiping multiple gods, concerned with fertility and local shrines and legends. They probably lacked a written Torah, elaborate laws governing ritual purity, and the sense of a covenant with an exclusive national god.[30]
Second Temple Judaism
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/Jerus-n4i.jpg/230px-Jerus-n4i.jpg)
In 586 BCE, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, and the Judean elite – the royal family, the priests, the scribes, and other members of the elite – were taken to Babylon in captivity. They represented only a minority of the population, and Judah, after recovering from the immediate impact of war, continued to have a life not much different from what had gone before. In 539 BCE, Babylon fell to the Persians; the
The Yahweh-alone party returned to Jerusalem after the Persian conquest of Babylon and became the ruling elite of Yehud. Much of the Hebrew Bible was assembled, revised and edited by them in the 5th century BCE, including the
Afterwards, Yahwism split into Second Temple Judaism and Samaritanism.[36] These religions initially had friendly relations but after John Hyrcanus's destruction of the Mount Gerizim temple in 120 BC, they became rival competitors. [37]The latter is infamously recorded in the Christian New Testament.[38]
Widespread adoption of Torah law
In his seminal Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Prologue to the History of Israel) of 1878, Julius Wellhausen argued that Judaism as a religion based on widespread observance of Torah law first emerged in 444 BCE when, according to the biblical account provided in the Book of Nehemiah (chapter 8), a priestly scribe named Ezra read a copy of the Mosaic Torah before the populace of Judea assembled in a central Jerusalem square.[39] Wellhausen believed that this narrative should be accepted as historical because it sounds plausible, noting: "The credibility of the narrative appears on the face of it."[40] Following Wellhausen, most scholars throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries have accepted that widespread Torah observance began sometime around the middle of the 5th century BCE.
More recently, Yonatan Adler has argued that in fact there is no surviving evidence to support the notion that the Torah was widely known, regarded as authoritative, and put into practice, any time prior to the middle of the 2nd century BCE.[41] Adler explored the likelihood that Judaism, as the widespread practice of Torah law by Jewish society at large, first emerged in Judea during the reign of the Hasmonean dynasty, centuries after the putative time of Ezra.[42]
Development of Rabbinic Judaism
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/Duraeuropa-1-.gif/220px-Duraeuropa-1-.gif)
For centuries, the traditional understanding has been that the
By the 1st century, Second Temple Judaism was divided into competing theological factions, notably the
The
See also
- Atenism, the two-decade duration ancient Egyptian monotheistic religion of the 14th century BCE
- Hellenistic religion
- Historicity of the Bible
- Jewish history
- Jewish studies
- Maccabees
- Old Testament theology
- Religions of the ancient Near East
References
Citations
- ^ Jacobs 2007, p. 511 quote: "Judaism, the religion, philosophy, and way of life of the Jews.".
- ^ Sotah 7:2 with vowelized commentary (in Hebrew). New York. 1979. Retrieved Jul 26, 2017.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ a b c Mendes-Flohr 2005.
- ^ Levenson 2012, p. 3.
- Berman Jewish DataBank. Retrieved 22 June 2019.
- ^ a b c Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 402.
- ^ Hackett 2001, p. 132: "The period in Israel's history that extends for most of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE is the era of the judges, which archaeologists call Iron Age I."
- ^ a b Hackett 2001, p. 156.
- ^
Compare:
Ahlström, Gösta Werner (1982). Royal Administration and National Religion in Ancient Palestine. Volume 1 of Studies in the history of the ancient Near East / Studies in the history of the ancient Near East. Leiden: E. J. Brill. p. 83. ISBN 9789004065628. Retrieved 11 November 2023.
[...] the picture drawn for us of the northern kingdom and its religion is not reliable. Furthermore, the so-called conservative Yahwism which is said to have predominated in Judah, seems to have existed only in the biblical writers' reconstruction of history.
- ^ Smith 2002, pp. 8, 33–34.
- ^ Betz 2000, p. 917: "Monotheism in Israel [...] appears to have developed over a long period of time, beginning about the 10th century up until the end of the Babylonian Exile."
- ^ Albertz 1994, p. 61 The propagation of the sole worship of Yahweh is said to have begun only at a late stage, at the earliest with Elijah in the ninth century, but really only with Hosea in the eighth century, and to have been the concern of only small opposition groups (the 'Yahweh alone['] movement). [...] According to this view, this movement was only able to influence society for a short period under Josiah, but then finally helped monotheism to victory in the exilic and early post-exilic period.
- ^ Gnuse 1997, p. 225.
- .
- ^ Adler 2022.
- ISBN 978-0521580328.
A copy [...] was completed at the end of 1342 [...] by the scribe Solomon b. Simson [...]. [...] This manuscript, now at the Bayerische Staatsbibliotek in Munich (MS Heb. 95), remains the only complete manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud to survive from the Middle Ages.
- ^ Neusner 1992, p. 3.
- ^ Neusner 1992, p. 4.
- ^ Schniedewind 2013, p. 93.
- ^ a b Smith 2010, p. 119.
- ^ Finkelstein, Israel, (2020). "Saul and Highlands of Benjamin Update: The Role of Jerusalem", in Joachim J. Krause, Omer Sergi, and Kristin Weingart (eds.), Saul, Benjamin, and the Emergence of Monarchy in Israel: Biblical and Archaeological Perspectives, SBL Press, Atlanta, GA, p. 48, footnote 57: "...They became territorial kingdoms later, Israel in the first half of the ninth century BCE and Judah in its second half..."
- ^ Hackett 2001, p. 156: "[...] some contemporary scholars propose that what distinguished 'Israel' from other emerging Canaanite Iron I societies was religion - the belief in Yahweh as one's god rather than Chemosh (of the Moabites), for example, or Milcom (of the Ammonites). Indeed, the early Iron Age marked the rise of national religion in the Near East, tying belief in the national god to ethnic identity. Thus the Israelites are the people of Yahweh, just as Moabites are the people of Chemosh; Ammonites, worshipers of Milcom; Edomites, of Qaus. [...] (The terms national religion and national god, though commonly used, are admittedly misleading: the particulars of modern nation-states should not be read back into these ancient societies.)"
- ^ Davies 2010, p. 112.
- ^ Miller 2000, p. 90.
- ^ a b Anderson 2015, p. 3.
- ^ Betz 2000, p. 917.
- ^
Staples, Jason A. (20 May 2021). "The Other Israelites: Samaritans, Hebrews, and non-Jewish Israel". The Idea of 'Israel' in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 61, 62. ISBN 9781108842860. Retrieved 4 February 2024.
[Note 23:] The settlement of Israelite groups in Judah in the wake of the northern kingdom's destruction may have brought much of the northern biblical material with it, engendering a pan-Israelite sentiment in Judah (Finkelstein, Forgotten Kingdom, 155).
- ^
ISBN 9780141956664. Retrieved 4 February 2024.
'Pure' Yahwism was upheld by ecstatic prophetic groups led by men such as Samuel, Elijah and Elisha who involved themselves actively in political matters. Later, this role was taken on by the so-called writing prophets: Hosea, Amos, Micah and Isaiah [...] in the eighth century. These prophets were the creators of the ethical monotheism of ancient Israel.
- ^ Rogerson 2003, p. 153-154.
- ^
ISBN 9781134945023. Retrieved 4 February 2024.
The culture of the Israelite or Judean farmer seems to have been polytheistic, concerned with fertility and based on local and domestic shrines. Its folklore would probably have comprised such things as local legal practices, local stories about ancestors and places, and a collection of proverbial sayings and myths and legends associated with local shrines, not with a written torah, purity laws or belief in a corporate 'covenant' with an exclusive national deity.
- ^ Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 397.
- ^ Coogan et al. 2007, p. xxiii.
- ^ Berquist 2007, p. 3-4.
- ISBN 978-0-470-75800-7.
- ^ Coogan et al. 2007, p. xxvi.
- ^ Pummer 2016, p. 25.
- ^ Knoppers 2013, pp. 173–174.
- ^ "Samaritan | Definition, Religion, & Bible | Britannica". britannica.com. Retrieved 2022-05-25.
- ^ Wellhausen 1885, p. 405–410.
- ^ Wellhausen 1885, p. 408 n. 1.
- ^ Adler 2022, p. 223: "[...] the literary sources that are firmly dated to the early Hellenistic period provide no compelling evidence regarding the degree to which the Torah might have been known or regarded as authoritative among the Judean masses of the time."
- ^ Adler 2022, p. 223–234.
- ^ Becker & Reed 2007.
- ISBN 9780802844989.
- JSTOR 1455460.
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External links
- Adler, Yonatan (16 February 2023). "When Did Jews Start Observing Torah? – TheTorah.com". thetorah.com. Retrieved 23 February 2023.
- Amzallag, Nissim (August 2018). "Metallurgy, the Forgotten Dimension of Ancient Yahwism". The Bible and Interpretation. University of Arizona. Archived from the original on 26 July 2020. Retrieved 28 July 2021.
- Brown, William, ed. (October 2017). "Early Judaism". World History Encyclopedia. Retrieved 28 July 2021.
- Gaster, Theodor H. (26 November 2020). "Biblical Judaism (20th–4th century BCE)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Edinburgh: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 28 July 2021.