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

Judaism
ancient Semitic religions, specifically evolving out of the
polytheistic ancient Canaanite religion, then co-existing with ‫ַיֲה דּות‬
Babylonian religion, and syncretizing elements of Babylonian Yahadut
belief into the worship of Yahweh as reflected in the early
prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible.

During the Iron Age I, the Israelite religion became distinct from
the Canaanite polytheism out of which it evolved. This process
began with the development of Yahwism, the monolatristic
worship of Yahweh, one of the Canaanite gods, that gave
acknowledgment to the existence, but suppressed the worship, of
the other Canaanite gods. Later, this monolatristic belief cemented
into a strict monotheistic belief and worship of Yahweh alone, with
the rejection of the existence of all other gods, whether Canaanite
or foreign.

During the Babylonian captivity of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE
(Iron Age II), certain circles within the exiled Judahites in Babylon Judaica (clockwise from top):
refined pre-existing ideas about their Yahweh-centric monolatrism, Shabbat candlesticks, handwashing
election, divine law, and Covenant into a strict monotheistic cup, Chumash and Tanakh, Torah
theology which came to dominate the former Kingdom of Judah in pointer, shofar and etrog box
the following centuries.[6]
Type Ethnic religion[1]
From the 5th century BCE until 70 CE, Israelite religion Classification Abrahamic
developed into the various theological schools of Second Temple
Scripture Hebrew Bible
Judaism, besides Hellenistic Judaism in the diaspora. Second
Temple eschatology has similarities with Zoroastrianism.[7] The Theology Monotheistic
text of the Hebrew Bible was redacted into its extant form in this Leaders Jewish leadership
period and possibly also canonized as well.
Movements Jewish religious
Rabbinic Judaism developed during Late Antiquity, during the 3rd movements
to 6th centuries CE; the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible and Associations Jewish religious
the Talmud were compiled in this period. The oldest manuscripts organizations
of the Masoretic tradition come from the 10th and 11th centuries
Region Predominant
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 religion in Israel
CE. Due largely to censoring and the burning of manuscripts in and widespread
medieval Europe, the oldest existing manuscripts of various worldwide as
rabbinical works are quite late. The oldest surviving complete minorities
manuscript copy of the Babylonian Talmud is dated to 1342 CE.[8] Language Biblical Hebrew[2]
Headquarters Jerusalem (Zion)
Founder Abraham[3][4]
 (traditional)
Contents
Origin 1st millennium
Iron Age Yahwism BCE
Second Temple Judaism 20th–18th
Development of Rabbinic Judaism century BCE[3]
(traditional)
See also
Judah
References
Mesopotamia[3]
Citations
(traditional)
Bibliography
Separated from Yahwism
External links
Congregations Jewish religious
communities
Iron Age Yahwism Members c. 14–15 million[5]
Ministers Rabbis
Judaism has three essential and related elements: study
of the written Torah (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 Sinai,
his chosen people; and the requirement that Israel live
in accordance with God's laws as given in the
Torah.[9] These have their origins in the Iron Age
Kingdom of Judah and in Second Temple Judaism.[9]

The Iron Age kingdoms of Israel (or Samaria) and

Judah first appear in the 9th century BCE.[10][11] The
two kingdoms shared Yahweh as the national god of
their respective kingdom, for which reason their
religion is commonly called Yahwism.[12]

Other neighbouring Canaanite kingdoms of the time

each also had their own national god 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.[12][13][14]

The various national gods were more or less equal, Image on a pithos sherd found at Kuntillet Ajrud
reflecting the fact that kingdoms themselves were more with the inscription "Yahweh and his Asherah"
or less equal, and within each kingdom a divine
couple, made up of the national god and his consort –
Yahweh and the goddess Asherah in Israel and Judah – headed a pantheon of lesser gods.[11][15][16]

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 Yahweh, replacing that between Judah and Assyria.[17]

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.[15] 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 written Torah, elaborate laws governing ritual purity, or an exclusive covenant and national
god.[18]

Second Temple Judaism

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 Model of the Second Temple showing
original exiles, and had never lived in Judah; nevertheless, in the the courtyards and the Sanctuary, as
view of the authors of the Biblical literature, they, and not those described in Middot
who had remained in the land, were "Israel". [19] 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[20] 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".[20]

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.[21][22] 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.[23] 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.[24]

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 the Masoretic Text).
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.[25][26]

In the 1st century, many Jewish sects existed in competition with

each other; see Second Temple Judaism. The sect of Israelite Scenes from the Book of Esther
decorate the Dura-Europos
worship that eventually became Rabbinic Judaism and the sect
synagogue dating from 244 CE
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'".[27] 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
Hellenistic religion
Historicity of the Bible
Maccabees
Old Testament theology
Religions of the ancient Near East

References

Citations
1. Jacobs 2007, p. 511 quote: "Judaism, the religion, philosophy, and way of life of the Jews.".
2. Sotah 7:2 with vowelized commentary (http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=14163&st
=&pgnum=292) (in Hebrew). New York. 1979. Retrieved Jul 26, 2017.
3. Mendes-Flohr 2005.
4. Levenson 2012, p. 3.
 5. Dashefsky, Arnold; Della Pergola, Sergio; Sheskin, Ira, eds. (2018). World Jewish
Population (https://www.jewishdatabank.org/content/upload/bjdb/2018-World_Jewish_Popul
ation_(AJYB,_DellaPergola)_DB_Final.pdf) (PDF) (Report). Berman Jewish DataBank.
Retrieved 22 June 2019.
6. Gnuse, Robert Karl (1997). No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel (https://books.go
ogle.com/books?id=pBSJNDndGjwC&pg=PA225). Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 1-
85075-657-0.
7. "Diseases in Jewish Sources" (https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1872-9029_ej_com_0049).
Encyclopaedia of Judaism. doi:10.1163/1872-9029_ej_com_0049 (https://doi.org/10.1163%
2F1872-9029_ej_com_0049). Retrieved 2020-09-11.
8. Golb, Norman (1998). The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History (htt
ps://books.google.com/books?id=QErKNTFrZnkC&q=%22Babylonian+Talmud%22+1342&
pg=PA530). Cambridge University Press. p. 530. ISBN 978-0521580328.
9. Neusner 1992, p. 3.
10. Schniedewind 2013, p. 93.
11. Smith 2010, p. 119.
12. Hackett 2001, p. 156.
13. Davies 2010, p. 112.
14. Miller 2000, p. 90.
15. Anderson 2015, p. 3.
16. Betz 2000, p. 917.
17. Rogerson 2003, p. 153-154.
18. Davies 2016, p. 15.
19. Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 397.
20. Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 402.
21. Coogan et al. 2007, p. xxiii.
22. Berquist 2007, p. 3-4.
23. Frederick J. Murphy (15 April 2008). "Second Temple Judaism" (https://books.google.com/bo
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24. Coogan et al. 2007, p. xxvi.
25. Becker & Reed 2007.
26. Dunn, James D. G., ed. (1999). Jews and Christians: the parting of the ways A.D. 70 to 135
(https://books.google.com/books?id=9zCh9SBb6Y8C&q=Jews+and+Christians:+The+Parti
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27. 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 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F1455460). JSTOR 1455460 (https://w
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External links
Amzallag, Nissim (August 2018). "Metallurgy, the Forgotten Dimension of Ancient Yahwism"
(https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/2018/08/amz428015). The Bible and Interpretation.
University of Arizona. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20200726101534/https://biblein
terp.arizona.edu/articles/2018/08/amz428015) from the original on 26 July 2020. Retrieved
28 July 2021.
Brown, William, ed. (October 2017). "Early Judaism" (https://www.worldhistory.org/article/11
39/early-judaism/). World History Encyclopedia. Retrieved 28 July 2021.
Gaster, Theodor H. (26 November 2020). "Biblical Judaism (20th–4th century BCE)" (https://
www.britannica.com/topic/Judaism/Biblical-Judaism-20th-4th-century-bce). Encyclopædia
Britannica. Edinburgh: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 28 July 2021.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Origins_of_Judaism&oldid=1079880290"

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