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“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.”
(Romans
8:2)
Judaism
– Britannica
Judaism
religion
Theodor H. GasterAll
Britannica Editors
June 30, 2026 •History
Judaism, monotheistic religion developed among the ancient
Hebrews. Judaism is characterized by a belief in one transcendent God who
revealed himself to Abraham, Moses, and the Hebrew prophets and by a religious
life in accordance with Scriptures and rabbinic traditions. Judaism is the
complex phenomenon of a total way of life for the Jewish people, comprising
theology, law, and innumerable cultural traditions.
The first section of this article treats the history of
Judaism in the broadest and most complete sense, from the early ancestral
beginnings of the Jewish people to contemporary times. In the second section
the beliefs, practices, and culture of Judaism are discussed.
The history of Judaism
It is history that provides the key to an understanding of
Judaism, for its primal affirmations appear in early historical narratives.
Thus, the Bible reports contemporary events and activities for essentially
religious reasons. The biblical authors believed that the divine presence is
encountered primarily within history. God’s presence is also experienced within
the natural realm, but the more immediate or intimate disclosure occurs in
human actions. Although other ancient communities also perceived a divine
presence in history, the understanding of the ancient Israelites proved to be
the most lasting and influential. It is this particular claim—to have
experienced God’s presence in human events—and its subsequent development that
is the differentiating factor in Jewish thought.
Moreover, the ancient Israelites’ entire mode of existence
was affected by their belief that throughout history they stood in a unique
relationship with the divine. The people of Israel believed that their response
to the divine presence in history was central not only for themselves but for
all humankind. Furthermore, God—as person—had revealed in a particular
encounter the pattern and structure of communal and individual life to this
people. Claiming sovereignty over the people because of his continuing action
in history on their behalf, he had established a covenant (berit) with them and
required from them obedience to his teaching, or law (Torah). This obedience
was a further means by which the divine presence was made manifest—expressed in
concrete human existence. The corporate life of the chosen community was thus a
summons to the rest of humankind to recognize God’s presence, sovereignty, and
purpose—the establishment of peace and well-being in the universe and in
humankind.
History, moreover, disclosed not only God’s purpose but
also humankind’s inability to live in accord with it. Even the chosen community
failed in its obligation and had to be summoned back, time and again, to its
responsibility by the prophets—the divinely called spokespersons who warned of
retribution within history and argued and reargued the case for affirmative
human response. Israel’s role in the divine economy and thus Israel’s
particular culpability were dominant themes sounded against the motif of
fulfillment, the ultimate triumph of the divine purpose, and the establishment
of divine sovereignty over all humankind.
General observations
Nature and characteristics
In nearly 4,000 years of historical development, the Jewish
people and their religion have displayed a remarkable adaptability and
continuity. In their encounter with the great civilizations, from ancient
Babylonia and Egypt to Western Christendom and modern secular culture, they
have assimilated foreign elements and integrated them into their own social and
religious systems, thus maintaining an unbroken religious and cultural
tradition. Furthermore, each period of Jewish history has left behind it a
specific element of a Judaic heritage that continued to influence subsequent
developments, so that the total Jewish heritage at any given time is a
combination of all these successive elements along with whatever adjustments
and accretions have occurred in each new age.
The various teachings of Judaism have often been regarded
as specifications of the central idea of monotheism. One God, the creator of
the world, has freely elected the Jewish people for a unique covenantal
relationship with himself. This one and only God has been affirmed by virtually
all professing Jews in a variety of ways throughout the ages.
Jewish monotheism has had both universalistic and
particularistic features. Along universal lines, it has affirmed a God who
created and rules the entire world and who at the end of history will redeem
all Israel (the classical name for the Jewish people), all humankind, and
indeed the whole world. The ultimate goal of all nature and history is an
unending reign of cosmic intimacy with God, entailing universal justice and
peace. Between creation and redemption lies the particularistic designation of the
Jewish people as the locus of God’s activity in the world, as the people chosen
by God to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). This
arrangement is designated a covenant and is structured by an elaborate and
intricate law. Thus, the Jewish people are both entitled to special privileges
and burdened with special responsibilities from God. As the prophet Amos (8th
century BCE) expressed it: “You alone have I intimately known of all the
families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities”
(Amos 3:2). The universal goal of the Jewish people has frequently expressed
itself in messianism—the idea of a universal, political realm of justice and
peace. In one form or another, messianism has permeated Jewish thinking and
action throughout the ages, and it has strongly influenced the outlook of many
secular-minded Jews (see also eschatology).
Law embraces practically all domains of Jewish life, and it
became the principle means by which Judaism was to bring about the reign of God
on earth. It is a total guide to religious and ethical conduct, involving
ritualistic observance as well as individual and social ethics. It is a
liturgical and ethical way constantly expatiated on by the prophets and
priests, by rabbinic sages, and by philosophers. Such conduct was to be
performed in the service of God, the transcendent and immanent ruler of the
universe, the Creator and the propelling force of nature, and the one giving
guidance and purpose to history. According to Judaic belief, this divine
guidance is manifested through the history of the Jewish people, which will
culminate in the messianic age. Judaism, whether in its “normative” form or in
its sectarian deviations, never completely departed from this basic ethical and
historical monotheism.
Salo Wittmayer Baron Lou Hackett Silberman
Periodization
The division of the millennia of Jewish history into
periods is a procedure frequently dependent on philosophical predilections. The
Christian world long believed that until the rise of Christianity the history
of Judaism was but a “preparation for the Gospel” (preparatio evangelica) that
was followed by the “manifestation of the Gospel” (demonstratio evangelica) as
revealed by Christ and the Apostles. This formulation could be theologically
reconciled with the assumption that Christianity had been preordained even
before the creation of the world.
In the 19th century, biblical scholars moved the decisive
division back to the period of the Babylonian Exile and the restoration of the
Jews to the kingdom of Judah (6th–5th century BCE). They asserted that after
the first fall of Jerusalem (586 BCE) the ancient “Israelitic” religion gave
way to a new form of the “Jewish” faith, or Judaism, as formulated by the
reformer Ezra (5th century BCE) and his school. In Die Entstehung des Judentums
(1896; “The Origin of Judaism”) the German historian Eduard Meyer argued that
Judaism originated in the Persian period, or the days of Ezra and Nehemiah (5th
century BCE); indeed, he attributed an important role in shaping the emergent
religion to Persian imperialism.
These theories, however, have been discarded by most scholars
in the light of a more comprehensive knowledge of the ancient Middle East and
the abandonment of a theory of gradual evolutionary development that was
dominant at the beginning of the 20th century. Most Jews share a long-accepted
notion that there never was a real break in continuity and that
Mosaic-prophetic-priestly Judaism was continued, with only a few modifications,
in the work of the Pharisaic and rabbinic sages well into the modern period.
Even today the various Jewish groups—whether Orthodox, Conservative, or
Reform—all claim direct spiritual descent from the Pharisees and the rabbinic
sages. In fact, however, many developments have occurred within so-called
normative or Rabbinic Judaism.
Key People: Theodore Bikel St. Paul the Apostle Martin
Buber Philo Judaeus Jeremiah
Related Topics: Jewish law Ananite Jewish fundamentalism
Sicarii Jewish literature
In any event, the history of Judaism can be divided into
the following major periods: biblical Judaism (c. 20th–4th century BCE),
Hellenistic Judaism (4th century BCE–2nd century CE), Rabbinic Judaism
(2nd–18th century CE), and modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present).
Salo Wittmayer Baron
Biblical Judaism (20th–4th century BCE)
The ancient Middle Eastern setting
The Bible depicts the family of the Hebrew
patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (all early 2nd millennium BCE)—as having
its chief seat in the northern Mesopotamian town of Harran, which then belonged
to the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni. From there Abraham, the founder of the
Hebrew people, is said to have migrated to Canaan (comprising roughly the
region of modern Israel and Lebanon), which was a vortex of west Asian,
Egyptian, and east Mediterranean cultures throughout the biblical period and
later ages. From Canaan the Hebrew ancestors of the people of Israel (named
after the patriarch Jacob, also called Israel) migrated to Egypt, where they
lived in servitude; a few generations later they returned to occupy part of Canaan.
Israelite culture initially resembled that of its
surroundings; it was neither wholly original nor wholly primitive. The Hebrews
were seminomadic herdsmen and occasionally farmers. Their tribal structure
resembled that of the West Semitic steppe dwellers known from the
18th-century-BCE tablets excavated at the north-central Mesopotamian city of
Mari; their family customs and law have parallels in the Old Babylonian and
Hurro-Semite law of the early and middle 2nd millennium. The conception of a
messenger of God that underlies biblical prophecy was Amorite (West Semitic)
and also found in the tablets at Mari. Mesopotamian religious and cultural
conceptions are reflected in biblical cosmogony, primeval history (including
the Flood story in Genesis 6:9–8:22), and law collections. The Canaanite
component of Israelite culture consisted of the Hebrew language and a rich
literary heritage—whose Ugaritic form (which flourished in the northern Syrian
city of Ugarit from the mid-15th century to approximately 1200 BCE) illuminates
the Bible’s poetry, style, mythological allusions, and religious or cultic
terms. Egypt provides many analogues for Hebrew hymnody and wisdom literature.
All the cultures among which the patriarchs lived had cosmic gods who fashioned
the world and preserved its order, all had a developed ethical system expressed
in law and moral admonitions, and all had elaborate religious rites and myths.
Although plainer when compared with some of the learned
literary creations of Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt, the earliest biblical
writings are so imbued with contemporary ancient Middle Eastern elements that
the once-held assumption that Israelite religion began on a preliterate level
must be rejected. Late-born amid high civilizations, the Israelite religion had
from the start features characteristic of all the known religions of the area.
Implanted on the land bridge between Africa and Asia, it was exposed to
crosscurrents of foreign thought throughout its history.
The pre-Mosaic period: the religion of the patriarchs
Israelite tradition identified YHWH (by scholarly
convention pronounced Yahweh), the God of Israel, with the creator of the
world, who had been known and worshipped from the beginning of time. Abraham
did not discover this God but entered into a new covenantal relationship with
him, in which Abraham was promised the land of Canaan and numerous progeny. God
fulfilled that promise, it is believed, through the actions of the Hebrew
leader Moses (14th–13th century BCE): he liberated the people of Israel from
Egypt, imposed covenantal obligations on them at Mt. Sinai, and brought them to
the Promised Land.
Historical and anthropological studies present formidable
objections to the continuity of YHWH worship from Adam (the biblical first man)
to Moses. The Hebrew tradition itself, moreover, does not unanimously support
even the more modest claim of the continuity of YHWH worship from Abraham to
Moses. This lack of continuity is demonstrated in Exodus 6:3, which says that
God revealed himself to the patriarchs not as YHWH but as El Shaddai—an archaic
epithet of unknown meaning that is not specifically Israelite but is found throughout
the patriarchal narratives and in the Book of Job. The epithet El Elyon (God
Most High) also appears frequently in the patriarchal narratives. Neither of
these epithets is used in postpatriarchal narratives (excepting the Book of
Ruth). Other compounds with El are unique to Genesis: El Olam (God the
Everlasting One), El Bethel (God Bethel), and El Roʾi (God of Vision). An
additional peculiarity of the patriarchal stories is their use of the phrase
“God of my [your, his] father.” All these epithets have been taken as evidence
that patriarchal religion differed from the worship of YHWH that began with
Moses. A relation to a patron god was defined by revelations starting with
Abraham (who never refers to the God of his father) and continuing with a succession
of “founders” of his worship. Attached to the founder and his family, as befits
the patron of wanderers, this unnamed deity acquired various Canaanite epithets
(El, Elyon, Olam, Bethel, Qone Eretz [“Possessor of the Land”]) only after
their immigration into Canaan. Whether the name of YHWH was known to the
patriarchs is doubtful. It is significant that while the epithets Shaddai and
El occur frequently in pre-Mosaic and Mosaic-age names, YHWH appears as an
element only in the names of Yehoshuaʿ (Joshua) and perhaps of
Jochebed—persons who were closely associated with Moses.
The patriarchs are depicted as objects of God’s blessing,
protection, and providential care. Their response is loyalty and obedience and
observance of a cult (i.e., a system of religious beliefs and practices) whose
ordinary expression is sacrifice, vow, and prayer at an altar, stone pillar, or
sacred tree. Circumcision was a distinctive mark of the cult community. The
eschatology (doctrine of ultimate destiny) of their faith was God’s promise of
land and a great progeny. Any flagrant contradictions between patriarchal and
later mores have presumably been censored; yet distinctive features of the
post-Mosaic religion are absent. The God of the patriarchs shows nothing of
YHWH’s “jealousy”; no religious tension or contrast with their neighbors
appears, and idolatry is scarcely an issue. The patriarchal covenant differed
from the Mosaic, Sinaitic covenant in that it was modeled upon a royal grant to
favorites and imposed no obligations as conditions of the people’s happiness.
Evidently not the same as the later religion of Israel, the patriarchal
religion prepared the way for the later one through its familial basis, its
personal call by the Deity, and its response of loyalty and obedience to him.
Little can be said of the relation between the religion of
the patriarchs and the religions of Canaan. Known points of contact between
them are the divine epithets mentioned above. Like the God of the fathers, El,
the head of the Ugaritic pantheon, was depicted as both a judgmental and a
compassionate deity. Baal (Lord), the aggressive young agricultural deity of
Ugarit, is remarkably absent from Genesis. Yet the socioeconomic situation of
the patriarchs was so different from the urban, mercantile, and monarchical
background of the Ugaritic myths as to render any comparisons highly
questionable.
The Mosaic period: foundations of the Israelite religion
The Egyptian sojourn
According to Hebrew tradition, a famine caused the
migration to Egypt of the band of 12 Hebrew families that later made up a
tribal league in the land of Israel. The schematic character of this tradition
does not impair the historicity of a migration to Egypt, an enslavement by
Egyptians, and an escape from Egypt under an inspired leader by some component
of the later Israelite tribes. To disallow these events, it can be argued,
would make their centrality as articles of faith in the later religious beliefs
of Israel inexplicable.
15th-century German Bible illustration showing Moses
leading a group of Israelites between parted green waves of the Red Sea, with
Hebrew text above.
Moses and the IsraelitesMoses leading the children of
Israel through the Red Sea; illustration from a German Bible, 15th century.
Tradition gives the following account of the birth of the
nation. At the Exodus from Egypt (13th century BCE), YHWH showed his
faithfulness and power by liberating the Israelites from bondage and punishing
their oppressors with plagues and drowning them in the sea. At Sinai he made
the Israelites his people and gave them the terms of his covenant, regulating
their conduct toward him and each other so as to make them a holy nation. After
sustaining them miraculously during their 40-year trek in the wilderness, he
enabled them to take the land that he had promised to their fathers, the
patriarchs. Central to these events is Moses, who was commissioned by God to
lead the Israelites out of Egypt, mediate God’s covenant with them, and bring
them to Canaan.
Behind the legends and the multiform law collections, it is
possible to discern a historical figure to whom the legends and the legislative
activity can be attached. And it is precisely Moses’ unusual combination of
roles that makes him credible as a historical figure. Like Muhammad (c. 570–632
CE) at the birth of Islam, Moses fills oracular, legislative, executive, and
military functions. He shapes the main institutions of Israel: the priesthood
and the sacred shrine, the covenant and its rules, and the administrative
apparatus of the tribal league. Although Moses is compared to a prophet in
various texts in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), he is
never designated as one—the term being evidently unsuited for so comprehensive
and unique a figure.
Mosaic religion
The distinctive features of Israelite religion appear with
Moses. The proper name of Israel’s God, YHWH, was revealed and interpreted to
Moses as meaning ehye asher ehye—an enigmatic phrase of infinite
suggestiveness, literally meaning “I am/shall be what I am/shall be.” The
covenant, defining Israel’s obligations, is ascribed to Moses’ mediation. It is
impossible to determine what rulings go back to Moses, but the Decalogue, or
Ten Commandments, presented in chapter 20 of Exodus and chapter 5 of
Deuteronomy, and the larger and smaller covenant codes in Exodus 20:22–23:33
and 34:11–26 are held by critics to contain early covenant law. From them the
following features may be noted: the rules are formulated as God’s
utterances—i.e., expressions of his sovereign will, directed toward and often
explicitly addressed to the people at large, Moses merely conveying the
sovereign’s message to his subjects—and, publication being of the essence of
the rules, the people as a whole are held responsible for their observance.
The liberation from Egypt laid upon Israel the obligation
of exclusive loyalty to YHWH. This meant eschewing all other gods—including
idols venerated as such—and the elimination of all magical recourses. The
worship of YHWH was aniconic (without images); even figures that might serve in
his worship were banned, apparently because their use suggested theurgy (the
art or technique of influencing or controlling a god by fixing his presence in
a particular place and making him accessible). Although there is a mythological
background behind some cultic terminology (e.g., “a pleasing odor to YHWH” and
“my bread”), sacrifice is conceived as tribute or is regarded (in priestly
writings) as purely a sacrament—i.e., as a material means of interacting with
or making a connection to God. Hebrew festivals also have no mythological
basis; they either celebrate God’s bounty (e.g., at the ingathering of the
harvest) or his saving acts (e.g., at the festival of unleavened bread, which
is a memorial of the Exodus).
The values of life and limb, labor, and social solidarity
were protected in the rules governing interpersonal relations. The involuntary
perpetual slavery of Hebrews was abolished, and a seven-year limit was set on
bondage. The humanity of slaves was defended: one who beat his slave to death
was liable to death; if he maimed a slave, he was required to set the slave
free. Murderers were denied asylum and could not ransom themselves from death,
and for deliberate and severe bodily injuries the lex talionis—the principle of
“an eye for an eye”—was ordained (see talion). Theft and harm to property were
punished monetarily rather than by death.
Moral exhortations called for solidarity with the poor and
the helpless and for brotherly assistance to those in need. Institutions were
created—e.g., the sabbatical, or seventh, fallow year, in which land was not
cultivated—to embody such exhortations in practice.
Since the goal of the Israelites was the conquest of a
land, their religion had warlike features. Organized as an army (called “the
hosts of YHWH” in Exodus 12:41), they encamped in a protective square around
their palladium—the tent housing the ark in which rested the stone “Tablets of
the Covenant.” When journeying, the sacred objects were carried and guarded by
the Levite tribe or clan, whose rivals, the Aaronites, exercised a monopoly on
the priesthood. God, sometimes called “the warrior,” marched with the army; in
war, part of the booty was delivered to his ministers.
The period of the conquest and settlement of Canaan
The conquest of Canaan was remembered as a continuation of
God’s marvels at the Exodus. The Jordan River was split asunder, the walls of
Jericho fell at Israel’s shout, the enemy was seized with divinely inspired
terror, and the sun stood still in order to enable Israel to exploit its
victory. Such stories are not necessarily the work of a later age; they reflect
rather the impact of these victories on the actors in the drama, who felt
themselves successful by the grace of God.
A complex process of occupation, involving both battles of
annihilation and treaty agreements with indigenous peoples, has been simplified
in the biblical account of the wars of Joshua (13th century BCE). Gradually,
the unity of the invaders dissolved (most scholars believe that the invading
element was only part of the Hebrew settlement in Canaan; other Hebrews, long
since settled in Canaan from patriarchal times, then joined the invaders’
covenant league). Individual tribes made their way with varying success against
the residue of Canaanite resistance. New enemies, Israel’s neighbors to the
east and west, appeared, and the period of the judges (leaders, or champions)
began.
The Book of Judges, the main witness for the period, does
not speak with one voice on the religious situation. Its editorial framework
describes repeated cycles of apostasy, oppression, appeal to God, and relief
through a champion sent by God. Israel’s troubles prior to the institution of
the monarchy under Saul (11th century BCE) were caused by the weakness of the
disunited tribes and were thus accounted for by the covenantal sin of apostasy.
The individual stories, however, present a different picture. Apostasy does not
figure in the exploits of the judges Ehud, Deborah, Jephthah, and Samson; YHWH
has no rival, and faith in him is periodically confirmed by the saviors he
sends to rescue Israel from its neighbors. This faith is shared by all the
tribes; it is owing to their common cult that a Levite from Bethlehem could
serve first at an Ephraimite and later also at a Danite sanctuary. The
religious bond, preserved by the common cult, enabled the tribes to work
together under the leadership of elders or an inspired champion in time of
danger or religious scandal.
Both written and archaeological testimonies, however, point
to the Hebrews’ adoption of Canaanite cults—the Baal worship of Gideon’s family
and neighbors in Ophrah in Judges, chapter 6, is an example. The many cultic
figurines (usually female) found in Israelite levels of Palestinian
archaeological sites also give color to the sweeping indictments of the
framework of the Book of Judges. But these phenomena belonged to the private,
popular religion; the national God, YHWH, remained one—Baal sent no prophets to
Israel—though YHWH’s claim to exclusive worship was obviously not effectual.
Nor did his cult conform with later orthodoxy; Micah’s idol in Judges, chapter
17, and Gideon’s ephod (priestly or religious garment) were considered
apostasies by the editor, in accord with the dogma that whatever is not orthodoxy
is apostasy—heterodoxy (nonconformity) being unrecognized and simply equated
with apostasy.
To the earliest sanctuaries and altars honored as
patriarchal foundations—at Shechem, Bethel, Beersheba, and Hebron in Cisjordan
(west of the Jordan); and at Mahanaim, Penuel, and Mizpah in Transjordan (east
of the Jordan)—were added new sanctuaries and altars at Dan, Shiloh, Ramah,
Gibeon, and elsewhere. A single priestly family could not operate all these
establishments, and so Levites rose to the priesthood; at private sanctuaries
even non-Levites might be consecrated as priests. The Ark of the Covenant was
housed in the Shiloh sanctuary, staffed by priests of the house of Eli, who
traced their consecration back to Egypt. But the ark remained a portable palladium
in wartime; Shiloh was not regarded as its final resting place. The law in
Exodus 20:24–26, which authorized a plurality of altar sites and the simplest
forms of construction (earth and rough stone), suited the plain conditions of
this period.
The period of the united monarchy
The religious and political problem
Palestine and the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the
time of David and Solomon
The decentralized tribal league could not cope with the
constant pressure of external enemies—camel-riding desert marauders who
pillaged harvests annually and iron-weaponed Philistines (an Aegean people
settling coastal Palestine c. 12th century BCE) who controlled key points in
the hill country occupied by the Israelites. In the face of such threats, a
central authority that could mobilize the forces of the entire league and
create a standing army had to be established. Two attitudes were distilled in
the crisis—one conservative and anti-monarchic, the other radical and
pro-monarchic. The conservative attitude appears first in Gideon’s refusal to
found a dynasty in Judges 8:23: “I will not rule you,” he tells the people, “my
son will not rule over you; YHWH will…!” This theocratic view pervades one of
the two contrasting accounts of the founding of the monarchy fused in chapters
8–12 of the First Book of Samuel (see Samuel, books of). The popular demand for
a king was viewed as a rejection of the kingship of God, and in response to the
demand there appeared a series of inspired saviors, from Moses and Aaron
(14th–13th century BCE) through Jerubbaal, Bedan, and Jephthah to Samuel (11th
century BCE) himself. The other, more radical account depicts the monarchy as a
gift of God, designed to rescue his people from the Philistines (1 Samuel
9:16). Both accounts represent the seer-judge Samuel as the key figure in the
founding of Israel’s monarchy, and it is not unlikely that the two attitudes
struggled within him.
The Benjaminite Saul was made king (c. 1020 BCE) by divine
election and by popular acclamation after his victory over the Ammonites (a
Transjordanian Semitic people), but his career was clouded by conflict with
Samuel, the major representative of the old order. Saul’s kingship was bestowed
by Samuel and had to be accommodated to the ongoing authority of that man of
God. The two accounts of Saul’s rejection by God (through Samuel) involve his
usurpation of the prophet’s authority. King David (10th century BCE), whose
forcefulness and religious and political genius established the monarchy on an
independent spiritual footing, resolved the conflict.
The Davidic monarchy
The essence of the Davidic innovation was the idea that, in
addition to divine election through Samuel and public acclamation, David had
received God’s promise of an eternal dynasty; a conditional (perhaps earlier)
and an unconditional (perhaps later) form of this promise exist in Psalms,
chapter 132 and 2 Samuel, chapter 7, respectively. In its developed form, the
promise was conceived of as a covenant with David, paralleling the covenant
with Israel and instrumental in the latter’s fulfillment—the covenant being
that God would channel his benefactions to Israel through the chosen dynasty of
David. With this new status came the inviolability of the person of God’s
anointed (a characteristically Davidic idea) and a court rhetoric—adapted from
pagan models—in which the king was styled “the [firstborn] son of God.” An
index of the king’s sanctity was his occasional performance of priestly duties.
Yet the king’s mortality was never forgotten: he was never deified, and,
although prayers and hymns might be said on his behalf, they were never
addressed to him as a god.
David captured the Jebusite stronghold of Jerusalem and
made it the seat of a national monarchy (Saul had never moved the seat of his
government from his birthplace, the Benjaminite town of Gibeah, about three
miles north of Jerusalem). Then, fetching the ark from an obscure retreat,
David installed it in his capital, asserting his royal prerogative (and
obligation) to build a shrine for the national God and thus at the same time
joining the symbols of the dynastic and the national covenants. This move of
political genius linked the God of Israel, the chosen dynasty of David, and the
chosen city of Jerusalem in a henceforth indissoluble union.
David planned to build a temple to house the ark, but the
tenacious tradition of the ark’s portability in a tent shrine forced the
postponement of the project to the reign of his son Solomon. As part of his extensive
building program, Solomon erected the Temple on a Jebusite threshing floor,
located on a hill north of Jerusalem, which David had purchased to mark the
spot where a plague had been halted. The ground plan of the Temple—a porch with
two freestanding pillars before it, a sanctuary, and an inner sanctum—followed
Syrian and Phoenician sanctuary models. A bronze “sea” resting on bulls and
placed in the Temple court had a Babylonian analogue. The Temple of Jerusalem
resembled Canaanite and other Middle Eastern religious structures but was also
different from them: notably, in the inner sanctum of the Temple there was no
image of God but only the ancient ark covered by the wings of large cherubim.
YHWH, who was enthroned upon celestial cherubim, was thus symbolically present
in the Temple.
Alongside a brief inaugural poem in 1 Kings 8:12–13, an
extensive (and, in its present form, later) prayer expresses the distinctively
biblical view of the Temple as a vehicle through which God provided for his
people’s needs. Since no reference to sacrifice is made, not a trace appears of
the standard pagan conception of temple as a vehicle through which humans
provided for the gods.
The quality of the preserved narrative of the reign of
David, which gives every indication of having come from the hand of a
contemporary eyewitness, demonstrates that literature flourished under the
aegis of the court. Attached to the royally sponsored Temple must have been a
library and a school (in keeping with the universally attested practice of the
ancient Middle East), among whose products would have been not only royal
psalms but also liturgical pieces intended for the common people that eventually
found their way into the book of Psalms.
The latest historical allusions in the Torah literature
(the Pentateuch) are to the period of the united monarchy—e.g., the defeat and
subjugation of the peoples of Amalek, Moab (see Moabite), and Edom by Saul and
David, in Numbers 24:17–20. On the other hand, the polity reflected in the laws
is tribal and decentralized, with no bureaucracy. Its economy is agricultural
and pastoral; class distinctions—apart from slave and free—are lacking; and
commerce and urban life are rudimentary. A pre-monarchic background is evident,
with only rare explicit reflections of the later monarchy—e.g., in Deuteronomy
17:14–20. The groundwork of the Torah literature most likely crystallized under
the united monarchy.
In this period the traditional wisdom cultivated among the
learned in neighboring cultures came to be prized in Israel. Solomon is
represented as the author of an extensive literature comparable to that of
other sages in the region. His wisdom is expressly attributed to YHWH in the
account of his night oracle at Gibeon (in which he asked not for power or
riches but for wisdom), thus marking the adaptation to biblical thought of this
common Middle Eastern genre. As set forth in Proverbs 2:5, “It is YHWH who
grants wisdom; knowledge and understanding are by his command.” Patronage of
wisdom literature is ascribed to the later Judahite king, Hezekiah (8th–7th
century BCE); the connection of wisdom with kings is also common in
extra-biblical cultures.
Domination of all of Palestine entailed the absorption of
“the rest of the Amorites”—the pre-Israelite population that lived chiefly in
the valleys and on the coast. Their impact on Israelite religion is unknown,
though some scholars contend that there was a “royally sponsored syncretism”
aimed at fusing the two populations. Because popular religion incorporated
pagan elements, it is likely that it did not meet the standards of the biblical
writers; such elements may have increased as a result of intercourse with the
newly absorbed Amorites. The court itself welcomed foreigners—Philistines,
Cretans, Hittites, and Ishmaelites are named, among others—and made use of
their service. Their effect on the court religion may be surmised from what is
recorded concerning Solomon’s many diplomatic marriages: foreign princesses
whom Solomon married brought with them the apparatus of their native cults. The
king even had shrines to their gods built and maintained on the Mount of
Olives. Yet such private cults, while indeed royally sponsored, did not make
the religion of the people syncretistic.
Such compromise with the pagan world, entailed by the
widening horizons of the monarchy, violated the sanctity of the holy land of
YHWH and turned the king into an idolator in the eyes of zealots. Religious
opposition, combined with grievances against the organization of forced labor
for state projects, led to the secession of the northern tribes (headed by the
Joseph tribes) after Solomon’s death.
The period of the divided kingdom
Jeroboam I (10th century BCE), the first king of the north,
now called Israel (the kingdom in the south was called Judah), appreciated the
inextricable link of Jerusalem and its sanctuary with the Davidic claim to
divine election to kingship over all of Israel (the whole people, north and
south). He therefore founded rival sanctuaries at the ancient cult sites of Dan
and Bethel and staffed them with non-Levite priests whose symbol of YHWH’s
presence was a golden calf—a pedestal of divine images in ancient iconography
and the equivalent of the cherubim of Jerusalem’s Temple. He also moved the
autumn ingathering festival one month ahead so as to foreclose celebrating this
most popular of all festivals simultaneously with Judah.
The Book of Kings (later divided into two books; see Kings,
books of) remains the almost exclusive source for the evaluation of Jeroboam’s
innovations and the subsequent official religion of the north down to the
mid-8th century. However, this work has severe limitations as a source for
religious history. It is dominated by a dogmatic historiography that regards
the whole enterprise of the north as one long apostasy ending in a deserved
disaster. The culmination of Kings’ history with the exile of Judah shows that
it came from the northern kingdom. Yet the evaluation of Judah’s official religion
is subject to an equally dogmatic standard: namely, the royal adherence to the
Deuteronomic rule of a single cult site. The author considered the Temple of
Solomon to be the cult site chosen by God, according to Deuteronomy, chapter
12, the existence of which rendered all other sites illegitimate. Every king of
Judah is judged according to whether or not he did away with all places of
worship outside Jerusalem. The date of this criterion may be inferred from the
indifference toward it of all persons prior to Hezekiah—e.g., the prophets
Elijah and Elisha and Jehoiada, a priest of Jerusalem (all 9th century BCE).
Another serious limitation is the restriction of Kings’
purview: excepting the Elijah-Elisha stories, it recognizes only the royally
sponsored cult and pays scant attention to popular religion. In the mid-8th
century the writings of the classical prophets, starting with Amos, first
appeared. These take in the people as a whole, in contrast to Kings; on the
other hand, their interest in theodicy (the problem of reconciling the presumed
goodness of God with the existence of evil in the world) and their polemical
tendency to exaggerate and generalize what they deem evil must be taken into
consideration before accepting their statements as history per se (see also
evil, problem of).
For half a century after the north’s secession (c. 922
BCE), the religious situation in Jerusalem was unchanged. The distaff side of
the royal household perpetuated, and even augmented, the pagan cults. King Asa
(reigned c. 908–867 BCE) is credited with a general purge, including the
destruction of an image made for the goddess Asherah by the queen mother,
granddaughter of an Aramaean princess. He also purged the qedeshim
(“consecrated men”—conventionally rendered as “sodomites,” or “male sacred
prostitutes”).
Foreign cults entered the north with the marriage of King
Ahab (reigned 874–853 BCE) to the Tyrian princess Jezebel (died c. 843 BCE).
Jezebel was accompanied by a large entourage of sacred personnel to staff the
temple of Baal and Asherah that Ahab built for her in Samaria, the capital of
the northern kingdom of Israel. Although Ahab’s orthodoxy was in every other
respect irreproachable, some members of his court may have worshipped the gods
of the foreign princess. Jezebel’s persecution of the prophets of YHWH—conduct
untypical of a polytheist except in self-defense—was probably prompted by the
fierce opposition to non-YHWH cults in Israel. Elijah’s assertion that the
whole country apostatized is a piece of hyperbole based on the view that
whoever did not actively fight Jezebel was implicated in her polluted cult.
Such must have been the view of the prophets, whose fallen were the first
martyrs to die for the glory of God. The quality of their opposition may be gauged
by Elijah’s summary execution of the foreign Baal cultists after they failed at
the contest on Mt. Carmel (Elijah and the priests of Baal appealed respectively
to YHWH and Baal to set a pile of wood ablaze to prove whose god was truly
God). A three-year drought (attested also in Phoenician sources), declared by
Elijah to be punishment for the sin of apostasy, did much to kindle the
prophets’ zeal.
To judge from the stories of Elisha, devotion to the cult
of Baal existed in the capital city, Samaria, but was not felt in the
countryside. The religious tone there was set by the popular prophets and their
adherents (“the sons of the prophets”). In popular consciousness these men were
wonder-workers—healing the sick and reviving the dead, foretelling the future,
and helping to find lost objects. To the biblical narrator, they witnessed the
working of God in Israel. Elijah’s rage at the Israelite king Ahaziah’s
recourse to the pagan god Baalzebub, Elisha’s cure of the Syrian military
leader Naaman’s leprosy, and anonymous prophets’ directives and predictions in
matters of peace and war all served to glorify God. Indeed, the equation of
Israel’s prosperity with God’s interest generated the first appearance of the
issue of “true” and “false” prophecy. The fact that prophecy of success could
turn out to be a snare is exemplified in a story of conflict between the
prophet of doom Micaiah (9th century BCE) and 400 unanimous prophets of victory
who lured King Ahab to his death. The poignancy of the issue is highlighted by
Micaiah’s acknowledgment that the 400 were also prophets of YHWH—but inspired
by him deliberately with a “lying spirit.”
The period of classical prophecy and cult reform
The emergence of the literary prophets
By the mid-8th century, one hundred years of chronic
warfare between Israel and Aram had finally ended—the Aramaeans having suffered
heavy blows from the Assyrians. King Jeroboam II (8th century BCE) undertook to
restore the imperial sway of the north over its neighbor, and Jonah’s prophecy
that Jeroboam would extend Israel’s borders from the Dead Sea to the entrance
to Hamath (Syria) was borne out. The well-to-do expressed their relief in
lavish attentions to the institutions of worship and to their private mansions.
But the strain of the prolonged warfare showed in the polarization of society
between the wealthy few who had profited from the war and the masses whom it
had ravaged and impoverished. Dismay at the dissolution of Israelite society
animated a new breed of prophets—the literary or classical prophets, the first
of whom was Amos (8th century BCE), a Judahite who went north to Bethel.
The point that apostasy would set God against the community
was made in early prophecy; the idea that violation of the social and ethical
injunctions of the covenant would have the same result was first proclaimed by
Amos. Amos almost ignored idolatry, denouncing instead the corruption and
callousness of the oligarchy and rulers. He proclaimed the religious exercises
of such villains to be loathsome to God; on their account Israel would be
oppressed from the entrance of Hamath to the Dead Sea and exiled from its land.
The westward push of the Neo-Assyrian empire in the mid-8th
century BCE soon brought Aram and Israel to their knees. In 733–732 Assyria
took Gilead and Galilee from Israel and captured Aramaean Damascus; in 721
Samaria, the Israelite capital, fell. The northern kingdom sought to survive
through alliances with Assyria and Egypt; its kings came and went in rapid
succession. The troubled society’s malaise was interpreted by Hosea, a prophet
of the northern kingdom (Israel), as a forgetting of God (see Hosea, Book of).
As a result, in his view, all authority had evaporated: the king was scoffed
at, priests became hypocrites, and pleasure seeking became the order of the
day. The monarchy was godless, putting its trust in arms, fortifications, and alliances
with great powers. Salvation, however, lay in none of these but in repentance
and reliance upon God.
Prophecy in the southern kingdom
Judah was subjected to such intense pressure to join an
Israelite-Aramaean coalition against Assyria that its king Ahaz (8th century
BCE) instead submitted to Assyria in return for relief. Ahaz introduced a new
Aramaean-style altar in the Temple of Jerusalem and adopted other foreign
customs that are counted against him in the Book of Kings. It was at this time
that Isaiah prophesied in Jerusalem (see also Isaiah, Book of). At first (under
Uzziah, Ahaz’s prosperous grandfather) his message emphasized the social and
religious corruption of Judah, stressing the new prophetic themes of
indifference to God (which went hand in hand with a thriving cult) and the
fateful importance of social morality. Under Ahaz the political crisis evoked
Isaiah’s appeals for trust in God, with the warning that the “hired razor from
across the Euphrates” would shave Judah clean as well. Isaiah interpreted the
inexorable advance of Assyria as God’s chastisement. The “rod of God’s wrath,”
Assyria would be broken on Judah’s mountains because of its insolence when God
was finished with his purgative work. Then the nations of the world, which had
been subjugated by Assyria, would recognize the God of Israel as the lord of
history. A renewed Israel would prosper under the reign of an ideal Davidic
king, all humanity would flock to Zion (the hill symbolizing Jerusalem) to
learn the ways of YHWH and to submit to his adjudication, and universal peace
would prevail (see also eschatology).
The prophecy of Micah (8th century BCE), also from Judah,
was contemporary with that of Isaiah and touched on similar themes—e.g., the
vision of universal peace is found in both their books (see Micah, Book of).
Unlike Isaiah, however, who believed in the inviolability of Jerusalem, Micah
shocked his audience with the announcement that the wickedness of its rulers
would cause Zion to become a plowed field, Jerusalem a heap of ruins, and the
Temple Mount a wooded height. Moreover, from the precedence of social morality
over the cult, Micah drew the extreme conclusion that the cult had no ultimate
value and that God’s requirement of humanity could be summed up as “to do justice,
and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Reforms in the southern kingdom
According to the Book of Jeremiah (about 100 years later),
Micah’s prophetic threat to Jerusalem had caused King Hezekiah (reigned c.
715–c. 686 BCE) to placate God—possibly an allusion to the cult reform
instituted by the king in order to cleanse Judah of various pagan practices. A
heightened concern over assimilatory trends resulted in his also outlawing
certain practices considered legitimate up to his time. Thus, in addition to
removing the bronze serpent that had been ascribed to Moses (and that had
become a fetish), the reform did away with the local altars and stone pillars,
the venerable (patriarchal) antiquity of which did not save them from the taint
of imitation of Canaanite practice. Hezekiah’s reform, part of a policy of
restoration that had political as well as religious implications, was the most
significant effect of the fall of the northern kingdom on official religion.
The outlook of the reformers is suggested by the catalog in 2 Kings, chapter
17, of religious offenses that had caused the fall; the objects of Hezekiah’s
purge closely resembled them. Hezekiah’s reform is the first historical
evidence for Deuteronomy’s doctrine of cult centralization. Similarities
between Deuteronomy and the Book of Hosea lend color to the supposition that
the reform movement in Judah, which culminated a century later under King
Josiah, was sparked by attitudes inherited from the north.
Hezekiah was the leading figure in a western coalition of
states that joined with the Babylonian king Merodach-Baladan II in a rebellion
against the Assyrian king Sennacherib shortly after the Assyrian’s accession in
705 BCE. When Sennacherib appeared in the west in 701, the rebellion collapsed;
Egypt sent a force to aid the rebels but was defeated. His kingdom overwhelmed,
Hezekiah offered tribute to Sennacherib; the Assyrian, however, pressed for the
surrender of Jerusalem. In despair, Hezekiah turned to the prophet Isaiah for
an oracle. While condemning the king’s reliance upon Egyptian help, Isaiah
stood firm in his faith that Jerusalem’s destiny precluded its fall into
heathen hands. The king held fast, and Sennacherib, for reasons still obscure,
suddenly retired from Judah and returned home. This unlooked-for deliverance of
the city may have been regarded as a vindication of the prophet’s faith and was
doubtless an inspiration to the rebels against Babylonia a century later. For
the present, although Jerusalem was intact, the country had been devastated and
the kingdom turned into a vassal state of Assyria.
During the long and peaceful reign of Manasseh in the 7th
century BCE, Judah was a submissive ally of Assyria. Manasseh’s forces served
in the building and military operations of the Assyrian kings Esarhaddon
(reigned 680–669 BCE) and Ashurbanipal (reigned 668–627 BCE). Judah benefitted
from the increase in commerce that resulted from the political unification of
the entire Middle East. The prophet Zephaniah (7th century BCE) attests to
heavy foreign influence on the mores of Jerusalem—merchants who adopted foreign
dress, cynics who lost faith in the power of YHWH to do anything, and people
who worshipped the pagan host of heaven on their roofs (see also Zephaniah,
Book of). Manasseh’s court was the center of such influences. The royal
sanctuary became the home of a congeries of foreign gods; the sun, astral
deities, and Asherah (the female fertility deity) all had their cults alongside
YHWH. The countryside also was provided with pagan altars and priests,
alongside local YHWH altars that were revived. Presumably, at least some of the
blood that Manasseh is said to have spilled freely in Jerusalem must have
belonged to YHWH’s devotees. No prophecy is dated to his long reign.
With the death of Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s power faded
quickly. The young king of Judah, Josiah (reigned c. 640–609 BCE), had already
set in motion a vigorous movement of independence and restoration, a cardinal
aspect of which was religious. First came the purge of foreign cults in
Jerusalem under the aegis of the high priest Hilkiah; then the countryside was
cleansed. In the course of renovating the Temple, a scroll of Moses’ Torah (by
scholarly consensus an edition of Deuteronomy) was found. Anxious to abide by
its injunctions, Josiah had the local YHWH altars polluted to render them
unusable and collected their priests in Jerusalem. The celebration of the
Passover that year was concentrated in the Temple, as it had not been “since
the days of the judges who judged Israel,” according to 2 Kings 23:22, or since
the days of Samuel, according to 2 Chronicles 35:18; both references reflect
the theory of the Deuteronomic (Josianic) reformers that the Shiloh sanctuary
was the precursor of the Jerusalem Temple as the sole legitimate site of
worship in Israel (as demanded by Deuteronomy, chapter 12). To seal the reform,
the king convoked a representative assembly and directed it to enter into a
covenant with God over the newfound Torah. For the first time, the power of the
state was enlisted on behalf of the ancient covenant and in obedience to a
covenant document. It was a major step toward the establishment of a sacred
canon.
Josiah envisaged the restoration of Davidic authority over
the entire domain of ancient Israel, and the retreat of Assyria facilitated his
ambitions—until he became fatally embroiled in the struggle of the powers over
the dying empire. His death in 609 was doubtless a setback for his religious
policy as well as his political program. To be sure, the royally sponsored
syncretism of Manasseh’s time was not revived, but there is evidence of a
recrudescence of unofficial local altars. Whether references in the Book of
Jeremiah and the Book of Ezekiel to child sacrifice to YHWH reflect
post-Josianic practices is uncertain. Yet there is stronger indication of
private recourse to pagan cults in the worsening political situation.
The unsettled conditions following Assyria’s fall dismayed
the devotees of YHWH, who had not been prepared for it by prophecy. Their mood
finds expression in the oracles of the prophet Habakkuk in the last years of
the 7th century BCE (see Habakkuk, Book of). Confessing perplexity at God’s
toleration of the success of the wicked in subjugating the righteous, the
prophet affirms his faith in the coming salvation of YHWH, tarry though it
might. And in the meantime, “the righteous must live in his faith.”
Despite these expectations of salvation, the situation grew
worse as Judah was caught in the Babylonian-Egyptian rivalry. Some attributed
the deterioration to Manasseh’s sin of moving toward polytheism. For the
prophet Jeremiah (c. 650–c. 570 BCE), the Josianic era was only an interlude in
Israel’s career of guilt, which went back to its origins. His pre-reform
prophecies denounced Israel as a faithless wife and warned of imminent
retribution at the hands of a nameless northerner. After Nebuchadrezzar II
(reigned c. 605–c. 561 BCE) decisively defeated Egypt at Carchemish (605 BCE),
Jeremiah identified the scourge as Babylonia. King Jehoiakim’s attempt to be
free of Babylonia ended with the exile of his successor, Jehoiachin, along with
Judah’s elite (597 BCE); yet the court of the new king, Zedekiah (reigned
597–587/586 BCE), persisted in plotting new revolts, relying—against all experience—on
Egyptian support. Jeremiah now proclaimed a scandalous doctrine of the duty of
all nations, Judah included, to submit to the divinely appointed world ruler,
Nebuchadrezzar, as the only hope of avoiding destruction; a term of 70 years of
submission had been set to humiliate all nations beneath Babylonia. Imprisoned
for demoralizing the people, Jeremiah persisted in what was viewed as his
traitorous message; Judah’s leaders, on their part, persisted in their policy,
confident of Egypt and the saving power of Jerusalem’s Temple to the bitter
end.
Jeremiah also had a message of comfort for his hearers. He
foresaw the restoration of the entire people—north and south—under a new David.
And since events had shown that human beings were incapable of achieving a
lasting reconciliation with God on their own, he envisioned the penitent of the
future being met halfway by God, who would remake their nature so that doing
his will would come naturally to them. God’s new covenant with Israel would be
written on their hearts, so that they should no longer need to teach each other
obedience, for young and old would know YHWH.
Among the exiles in Babylonia, the prophet Ezekiel,
Jeremiah’s contemporary, was haunted by the burden of Israel’s sin. He saw the
defiled Temple of Manasseh’s time as present before his eyes and described God
as abandoning it and Jerusalem to their fates. Although Jeremiah offered hope
through submission, Ezekiel prophesied an inexorable, total destruction as the
condition of reconciliation with God. The majesty of God was too grossly
offended for any lesser satisfaction. The glory of God demanded Israel’s ruin,
but the same cause required its restoration. Israel’s fall disgraced YHWH among
the nations; to save his reputation, he must therefore restore Israel to its
land. The dried bones of Israel must revive, so that they and all the nations
should know that he was YHWH (Ezekiel 37). Ezekiel too foresaw the remaking of
human nature, but as a necessity of God’s glorification; the concatenation of Israel’s
sin, exile, and consequent defamation of God’s name must never be repeated. In
587/586 BCE the doom prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel came true. Rebellious
Jerusalem was reduced by Nebuchadrezzar, the Temple was burned, and much of
Judah’s population was dispersed or deported to Babylonia.
The Babylonian Exile
The survival of the religious community of exiles in
Babylonia demonstrates how rooted and widespread the religion of YHWH was.
Abandonment of the national religion as an outcome of the disaster is recorded
of only a minority. There were some cries of despair, but the persistence of
prophecy among the exiles shows that their religious vitality had not flagged.
The Babylonian Jewish community, in which the cream of Judah lived, had no
sanctuary or altar (in contrast to the Jewish garrison of Elephantine in
Egypt); what developed in their place can be surmised from new postexilic
religious forms: fixed prayer; public fasts and confessions; and assembly for
the study of the Torah, which may have developed from visits to the prophets
for oracular edification. The absence of a local or territorial focus must also
have spurred the formation of a literary center of communal life—the sacred
canon of covenant documents that came to be the core of the present Pentateuch.
Observance of the Sabbath—a peculiarly public feature of communal life—achieved
a significance among the exiles virtually equivalent to all the rest of the
covenant rules together. Notwithstanding its political impotence, the exile
community possessed such high spirits that foreigners were attracted to its
ranks, hopeful of sharing in its future glory. This moment marks the origin of
conversion to Judaism for distinctly religious reasons rather than for reasons
of politics, culture, or nationalism.
Assurance of that future glory was given not only by
Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s consolations, which were made credible by the
fulfillment of the prophecies of doom, but also by the great comforter of the
exile, the writer or writers of what is known as Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–66),
who perceived the instrument of God’s salvation in the rise and progress of the
Persian king Cyrus II (the Great; reigned 550–529 BCE; see Isaiah, Book of).
Going beyond the national hopes of Ezekiel and animated by the universal spirit
of the pre-exilic Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah saw in the miraculous restoration of
Israel a means of converting the whole world to faith in Israel’s God. Israel
would thus serve as “a light for the nations, that YHWH’s salvation may reach
to the end of the earth.” In his conception of the vicarious suffering of God’s
servant—through which atonement is made for the ignorant heathen—Deutero-Isaiah
found a handle by which to grasp the enigma of faithful Israel’s lowly state
among the Gentiles. The idea was destined to play a decisive role in the
self-understanding of the Jewish martyrs persecuted by the Syrian king
Antiochus IV Epiphanes (reigned 175–164 BCE)—as recounted in the Book of
Daniel—and later again in the Christian appreciation of the death of Jesus.
The period of the restoration
After conquering Babylonia, Cyrus allowed those Jews who
wished to do so to return and rebuild their Temple. Although some 40,000 eventually
made their way back, they were soon disillusioned and ceased their rebuilding
as the glories of the restoration failed to materialize and as controversy
arose with the Samaritans, who opposed the reconstruction. (The Samaritans were
a Judaized mixture of native north Israelites and Gentile deportees settled by
the Assyrians in the erstwhile northern kingdom.) A new religious inspiration
attended the governorship of Zerubbabel (6th century BCE), a member of the
Davidic line, who became the center of messianic expectations during the
anarchy attendant upon the accession to the Persian throne of Darius I (522
BCE). The prophets Haggai and Zechariah understood the disturbances as heralds
of the imminent overthrow of the Persian empire, as a worldwide manifestation
of God, and as a glorification of Zerubbabel (see Haggai, Book of; Zechariah,
Book of). Against the day of the empire’s fall, they urged the people to
quickly complete the building of the Temple. The labor was resumed and
completed in 516, but the prophecies remained unfulfilled. Zerubbabel then
disappears from the biblical narrative, and the spirit of the community flags
again.
The one religious constant in the vicissitudes of the
restored community was the mood of repentance and the desire to win back God’s
favor by adherence to the rules of his covenant. The anxiety that underlay this
mood produced a hostility to strangers and encouraged a lasting conflict with
the Samaritans, who asked permission to take part in rebuilding the Temple of
the God whom they too worshipped. The Jews rejected the Samaritans on
ill-specified but apparently ethnic and religious grounds: they felt the
Samaritans to be alien to the Jewish historical community of faith and
especially to its messianic hopes. Nonetheless, intermarriage between the two
peoples occurred, precipitating a new crisis in 458, when the priest Ezra
arrived from Babylon, intent on enforcing the regimen of the Torah. By reviving
ancient laws excluding Canaanites and others and applying them to their own
times and neighbors, the leaders of the Jews brought about the divorce and
expulsion of several dozen non-Jewish wives and their children. Tension between
the xenophobic and xenophilic in postexilic Judaism was finally resolved some
two centuries later with the development of a formality of religious
conversion, whereby Gentiles who so wished could be taken into the Jewish
community by a single, simple procedure.
The decisive constitutional event of the new community was
the covenant subscribed to by its leaders in 444, which made the Torah the law
of the land. A charter granted to Ezra by the Persian king Artaxerxes I
empowered the latter to enforce the Torah as the imperial law for the Jews of
the province Avar-nahra (“Beyond the River”), in which the district of Judah
(now reduced to a small area) was located. The charter required the publication
of the Torah, which in turn entailed its final editing—now plausibly ascribed
to Ezra and his circle. The survival in the Torah of patent inconsistencies and
disagreements with the postexilic situation indicate that its materials were by
then sacrosanct, to be compiled but no longer created. But these survivals made
necessary the immediate invention of a harmonizing and creative method of
textual interpretation to adjust the Torah to the needs of the times. The
Levites were trained in the art of interpreting the text to the people; the
first product of the creative exegesis later known as Midrash (meaning
“investigation” or “interpretation”; plural Midrashim) is to be found in the
covenant document of Nehemiah, chapter 9—every item of which shows development,
not reproduction, of a ruling of the Torah (see Ezra and Nehemiah, books of).
Thus, the publication of the Torah as the law of the Jews laid the basis of the
vast edifice of Oral Law so characteristic of later Judaism.
Concern over observance of the Torah was raised by the
stark contrast between messianic expectations and the harsh reality of the
restoration. The contrast signified God’s continued displeasure, and the only
way to regain his favor was to do his will. Thus, the Book of Malachi, named
after the last of the prophets, concludes with an admonition to be mindful of
the Torah of Moses. God’s displeasure, however, had always been signaled by a
break in communication with him. As time passed and messianic hopes remained
unfulfilled, the sense of a permanent suspension of normal relations with God
took hold, and prophecy died out. God, it was believed, would some day be
reconciled with his people, and a glorious revival of prophecy would then
occur. For the present, however, religious vitality expressed itself in
dedication to the development of institutions that would make the Torah
effective in life. The course of this development is hidden from view by the
dearth of sources from the Persian period. But the community that emerged into
the light of history in Hellenistic times had been radically transformed by
this momentous, quiet process.
Moshe Greenberg