Rabbinic Judaism developed in
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 of 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 the
Babylonian Talmud dates from 1342 CE.[16]
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]
Other neighbouring Canaanite kingdoms also each had their own national god originating from the Canaanite pantheon of gods:
Chemosh was the god of
Moab,
Milcom the god of the
Ammonites,
Qaus the god of the
Edomites, and so on. In each kingdom, the king was his national god's
viceroy on Earth.[8][23][24]
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
Assyrian Empire, 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.[27]
Various
prophets traditionally played significant roles in promoting Yahwism at the expense of its rival religions, both in the North and in the South.[28]
The Yahwist-centred outlook was taken up by the Judahite landowning élite, 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 (after 631 BC), and a pro-independence movement took power in Jerusalem, 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 Yahweh, replacing that between Judah and Assyria.[29]
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]
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
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".[31] 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[6] and modern Judaism. These differences include new concepts of priesthood, a new focus on written law and thus on scripture, and a concern with preserving purity by prohibiting intermarriage outside the community of this new "Israel".[6]
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.[32][33] 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.[34] 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 tales of the
Book of Daniel (chapters 1–6 of Daniel – chapters 7–12 were a later addition), and the books of
Tobit and
Esther.[35]
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]
For centuries, the traditional understanding has been that the
split of early Christianity and Judaism some time after the
destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE was the first major theological schism in Jewish tradition. 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.[43][44]
By the 1st century, Second Temple Judaism was divided into competing 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 the
Masoretic Text). The sect of Israelite worship that eventually became
Rabbinic Judaism and the sect which developed into
Early Christianity were but two of these separate Israelite religious traditions. Thus, some scholars have begun to propose a model which envisions a twin birth of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, rather than an evolution and separation of Christianity from Rabbinic Judaism. It is increasingly accepted among scholars that "at the end of the 1st century CE there were not yet two separate religions called 'Judaism' and 'Christianity'".[45]Daniel Boyarin (2002) proposes a revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Rabbinic 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 the
Chazal era foundational to Rabbinical Judaism.
See also
Atenism, the two-decade duration ancient Egyptian monotheistic religion of the 14th century BCE
^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."
^
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.
ISBN9789004065628. 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.
^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.
^Golb, Norman (1998).
The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History. Cambridge University Press. p. 530.
ISBN978-0521580328. 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.
^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.)"
^
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.
ISBN9781108842860. 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).
^Rogerson, John (27 August 2009) [2007]. "Ancient Israel to the fall of the Second Temple". In
Hinnells, John R. (ed.).
The Penguin Handbook of Ancient Religions. London: Penguin UK.
ISBN9780141956664. 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.
^Davies, Philip R. (1 April 2016) [2011]. "Early Judaism(s)".
On the Origins of Judaism. Abingdon: Routledge. p. 15.
ISBN9781134945023. 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.
^Frederick J. Murphy (15 April 2008).
"Second Temple Judaism". In Alan Avery-Peck (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Judaism. Jacob Neusner. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 61–.
ISBN978-0-470-75800-7.
^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."
^Goldenberg, Robert (2002). "Reviewed Work: Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism by Daniel Boyarin". The Jewish Quarterly Review. 92 (3/4): 586–588.
doi:
10.2307/1455460.
JSTOR1455460.
Betz, Arnold Gottfried (2000).
"Monotheism". In Freedman, David Noel; Myer, Allen C. (eds.). Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Eerdmans.
ISBN9053565035.
Davies, Philip R. (2010).
"Urban Religion and Rural Religion". In Stavrakopoulou, Francesca; Barton, John (eds.). Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah. Continuum International Publishing Group.
ISBN9780567032164.
Freedman, D. N.; O'Connor, M. P.; Ringgren, H. (1986).
"YHWH". In Botterweck, G. J.; Ringgren, H. (eds.). Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Vol. 5. Eerdmans.
ISBN9780802823298.
Gnuse, Robert Karl (1999). "The Emergence of Monotheism in Ancient Israel: A Survey of Recent Scholarship". Religion. 29 (4): 315–336.
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Gorman, Frank H. Jr. (2000).
"Feasts, Festivals". In Freedman, David Noel; Myers, Allen C. (eds.). Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Amsterdam University Press.
ISBN978-1-57506-083-5.
Humphries, W. Lee (1990).
"God, Names of". In Mills, Watson E.; Bullard, Roger Aubrey (eds.). Mercer Dictionary of the Bible. Mercer University Press.
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Levenson, Jon Douglas (2012). Inheriting Abraham: the legacy of the patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Rogerson, John W. (2003).
"Deuteronomy". In Dunn, James D. G.; Rogerson, John W. (eds.). Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible. Eerdmans.
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Smith, Mark S. (2003).
"Astral Religion and the Divinity". In Noegel, Scott; Walker, Joel (eds.). Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World. Penn State Press.
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Sommer, Benjamin D. (2011).
"God, Names of". In Berlin, Adele; Grossman, Maxine L. (eds.). The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion. Oxford University Press.
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Van der Toorn, Karel (1999).
"Yahweh". In Van der Toorn, Karel; Becking, Bob; Van der Horst, Pieter Willem (eds.). Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. Eerdmans.
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Wyatt, Nicolas (2010).
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