Origins of Judaism

This article discusses the historical roots of Judaism throughout the 1st millennium BCE. For
the origins of the modern-day religion of Judaism, see Origins of Rabbinic Judaism.

The origins of Judaism lie in the Bronze Age amidst polytheistic ancient Semitic religions, specifically Canaanite religion, co-
existing with a syncretization with elements of Babylonian religion and of the worship of Yahweh reflected in the early prophetic
books of the Hebrew Bible. During the Iron Age I, the Israelite religion became distinct from other Canaanite religions due to the
unique monolatristic (proto-monotheistic) worship ofYahweh.

During the Babylonian captivity of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE (Iron Age II), certain circles within the exiled Judahites in Babylon
refined pre-existing ideas about monotheism, election, divine law and Covenant into a strict monotheistic theology which came to
dominate the former Kingdom of Judah in the following centuries.[1]

From the 5th century BCE until 70 CE, Israelite religion developed into the various theological schools of Second Temple Judaism,
besides Hellenistic Judaism in the diaspora. Second Temple eschatology was significantly influenced by Zoroastrianism. The text of
the Hebrew Bible was redacted into its extant form in this period and possibly alsocanonized as well.

Rabbinic Judaism developed during Late Antiquity, during the 3rd to 6th centuries CE; the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible and
the Talmud were compiled in this period. The oldest manuscripts of the Masoretic tradition come from the 10th and 11th centuries
CE; in the form of the Aleppo Codex of the later portions of the 10th century CE and the Leningrad Codex dated to 1008–1009 CE.
Due largely to censoring and the burning of manuscripts in medieval Europe the oldest existing manuscripts of various rabbinical
works are quite late. The oldest surviving complete manuscript copy of theBabylonian Talmud is dated to 1342 CE.[2]

Contents
Overview
Monarchic period Yahwism
Second Temple Judaism
Development of Rabbinic Judaism
See also
References
Citations
Bibliography

Overview
Judaism has its origins in the Iron Age Kingdom of Judah and in Second Temple Judaism.[3] It has three essential and related
elements: study of the writtenTorah (the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy); the recognition of Israel
(defined as the descendants of Abraham through his grandson Jacob) as a people elected by God as recipients of the law at Mount
T [3]
Sinai, his chosen people; and the requirement that Israel live in accordance with God's laws as given in theorah.

Monarchic period Yahwism

The Iron Age kingdoms of Israel (or Samaria) and Judah first appear in the 9th century BCE.[4][5] The two kingdoms shared Yahweh
as their national god, for which reason their religion is commonly called Yahwism.[6] Neighbouring kingdoms of the time each had
their own national gods: Chemosh was the god of Moab, Moloch the god of the Ammonites, Qaus the god of the Edomites, and so
on, and in each kingdom the king was his god'sviceroy on Earth.[6][7][8] The various national gods were more or less equal, reflecting
the fact that kingdoms themselves were more or less equal, and within each kingdom a divine couple, made up of the national god
[5][9][10]
and his consort – Yahweh and the goddessAsherah in Israel and Judah – headed a pantheon of lesser gods.

By the late 8th century both Judah and Israel had become vassals of Assyria, bound by treaties of loyalty on one side and protection
on the other. Israel rebelled and was destroyed c. 722 BCE, and refugees from the former kingdom fled to Judah, bringing with them
the tradition that Yahweh, already known in Judah, was not merely the most important of the gods, but the only god who should be
served. This outlook was taken up by the Judahite landowning elite, who became extremely powerful in court circles in the next
century when they placed the eight-year-old Josiah (reigned 641–609 BC) on the throne. During Josiah's reign Assyrian power
suddenly collapsed, and a pro-independence movement took power promoting both the independence of Judah from foreign
overlords and loyalty to Yahweh as the sole god of Israel. With Josiah's support the "Yahweh-alone" movement launched a full-scale
reform of worship, including a covenant (i.e., treaty) between Judah and ahweh,
Y replacing that between Judah and Assyria.[11]

By the time this occurred, Yahweh had already been absorbing or superceding 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.[9] The people of ancient Israel and Judah, however, were not followers of
Judaism: they were practitioners of a polytheistic culture worshiping multiple gods, concerned with fertility and local shrines and
legends, and not with a writtenTorah, elaborate laws governing ritual purity, or an exclusive covenant and national god.[12]

Second Temple Judaism

In 586 BCE Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, and the Judean elite – 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 and the Babylonian exile ended and a number of the exiles, but by no means all and probably a minority,
returned to Jerusalem. They were the descendants of the original exiles, and had never lived in Judah; nevertheless, in the view of the
authors of the Biblical literature, they, and not those who had remained in the land, were "Israel".[13] Judah, now called Yehud, was a
Persian province, and the returnees, with their Persian connections in Babylon, were in control of it. They represented also the
descendants of the old "Yahweh-alone" movement, but the religion they instituted was significantly different from both monarchic
Yahwism[14] and modern Judaism. These differences include new concepts of priesthood, a new focus on written law and thus on
[14]
scripture, and a concern with preserving purity by prohibiting intermarriage outside the community of this new "Israel".

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 Torah (the books of Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the historical works, and much of the prophetic and Wisdom literature.[15][16] The
Bible narrates the discovery of a legal book in the Temple in the seventh century BCE, which the majority of scholars see as some
form of Deuteronomy and regard as pivotal to the development of the scripture.[17] The growing collection of scriptures was
translated into Greek in the Hellenistic period by the Jews of the Egyptian diaspora, while the Babylonian Jews produced the court
Tobit and Esther.[18]
tales of the Book of Daniel (chapters 1–6 of Daniel – chapters 7–12 were a later addition), and the books of

Other scholars contend that the development of a strict monotheism was the result of cultural diffusion between Persians and
Hebrews. While (in practice) dualistic, Zoroastrianism believed in eschatological monotheism (i.e. only one god in the end). Some
suggest that it is not merely coincidence that Zoroastrianism's model of eschatological monotheism and the Deuteronomic historians'
[19]
strictly monotheistic model receive formative articulations during the period after Persia overthrew Babylon.

Second Temple Judaism was divided into theological factions, notably the Pharisees and the Sadducees, besides numerous smaller
sects such as the Essenes, messianic movements such as Early Christianity, and closely related traditions such as Samaritanism
(which gives us the Samaritan Pentateuch, an important witness of the text of the Torah independent of theMasoretic Text).
During the 2nd to 1st centuries BCE, when Judea was under Seleucid and then Roman rule, the genre of apocalyptic literature
became popular, the most notable work in this tradition being theBook of Daniel.

Development of Rabbinic Judaism

For centuries, the traditional understanding has been that Judaism came before
Christianity and that Christianity separated from Judaism some time after the
destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Starting in the latter half of the 20th
century, some scholars have begun to argue that the historical picture is quite a bit
more complicated than that.[20][21] In the 1st century, many Jewish sects existed in
competition with each other, see Second Temple Judaism. The sects which
eventually became Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity were but two of these.
Some scholars have begun to propose a model which envisions a twin birth of
Scenes from the Book of Esther
Christianity and Judaism rather than a separation of the former from the latter. For
decorate the Dura-Europos
example, Robert Goldenberg (2002) asserts that it is increasingly accepted among synagogue dating from 244 CE
scholars that "at the end of the 1st century CE there were not yet two separate
religions called "Judaism" and "Christianity"".[22] Daniel Boyarin (2002) proposes a
revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent
Rabbinical Judaism in Late Antiquity which views
the two religions as intensely and complexly intertwined throughout this period.

The Amoraim were the Jewish scholars of Late Antiquity who codified and commented upon the law and the biblical texts. The final
phase of redaction of the Talmud into its final form took place during the 6th century CE, by the scholars known as the Savoraim.
This phase concludes theChazal era foundational to Rabbinical Judaism.

See also
Ancient Semitic religion
Atenism, the two-decade duration ancient Egyptian monotheistic religion of the 14th century BCE
The Bible and history
Hellenistic religion
Maccabees
Old Testament theology
Origins of Christianity
Religions of the ancient Near East

References

Citations
1. Gnuse, Robert Karl (1997).No Other Gods: Emergent
Monotheism in Israel (https://books.google.com/book
s?id=pBSJNDndGjwC&pg=PA225#v=onepage&q&f=fa
lse). Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 1-85075-657-0.
2. Golb, Norman (1998). The Jews in Medieval
Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History(https://bo
oks.google.com/books?id=QErKNTFrZnkC&pg=P A53
0&lpg=PA530&dq=%22Babylonian+Talmud%22+1342
&source=bl&ots=rUiMSCRxK1&sig=HDLMJHrfoXi1Or
J7HaZUoMUHjeY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CiUyUIPCGMWb
1AXk8IDgDA&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%
22Babylonian%20Talmud%22%201342&f=false).
Cambridge University Press. p. 530.ISBN 978-
0521580328.
3. Neusner 1992, p. 3.
4. Schniedewind 2013, p. 93.
 5. Smith 2010, p. 119. 18. Coogan et al. 2007, p. xxvi.
6. Hackett 2001, p. 156. 19. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/15283-
7. Davies 2010, p. 112. zoroastrianism
8. Miller 2000, p. 90. 20. Becker & Reed 2007.
9. Anderson 2015, p. 3. 21. Dunn, James D. G., ed. (1999).Jews and Christians:
the parting of the ways A.D. 70 to 135(https://books.g
10. Betz 2000, p. 917.
oogle.com/books?id=9zCh9SBb6Y8C&printsec=frontc
11. Rogerson 2003, p. 153-154. over&dq=Jews+and+Christians:+The+Parting+of+the+
12. Davies 2016, p. 15. Ways&source=bl&ots=uayp6KFZkr&sig=MnZ1wjNVicf
13. Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 397. 0Og6Jw6mAwwXkioA&hl=en&ei=SG2GTPK-HYi8sAO
14. Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 402. 1q6m6Ag&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3
&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false) .
15. Coogan et al. 2007, p. xxiii.
William B Eerdmans Publishing Company .
16. Berquist 2007, p. 3-4.
22. Goldenberg, Robert (2002). "Reviewed Work: Dying
17. Frederick J. Murphy (15 April 2008). "Second e
Tmple for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and
Judaism". In Alan Avery-Peck. The Blackwell Judaism by Daniel Boyarin". The Jewish Quarterly
Companion to Judaism(https://books.google.com/boo Review. 92 (3/4): 586–588. doi:10.2307/1455460 (http
ks?id=bEyD_MaeqP4C&pg=PA61). Jacob Neusner,. s://doi.org/10.2307%2F1455460). JSTOR 1455460 (ht
John Wiley & Sons. pp. 61–.ISBN 978-0-470-75800- tps://www.jstor.org/stable/1455460).
7.

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