Part 4 turns from Iran to the small highland people whose god became the God of three world religions. The scholarly literature in the library agrees on one starting point. Israelite religion did not arrive from outside Canaan as a…
Part 4. Israel, Judaism and the Second Temple
Part 4 starts inside the West Semitic world of El, Baal and Asherah, where John Day and Mark S. Smith place the emergence of Yahweh. It sets the biblical founding stories beside the archaeological record and follows the monarchy and the Deuteronomic revolution of Josiah.
Chapters 28–37
- Out of Canaan: El, Baal, Asherah and the Emergence of Yahweh
- Patriarchs, Exodus and Conquest: The Biblical Story and the Archaeological Record
- Kings and Prophets: Monarchy, the Two Kingdoms and the Deuteronomic Revolution
- By the Rivers of Babylon: Exile, Cyrus and the Persian Imprint on Judaism
- Athens and Jerusalem: Hellenism, Antiochus IV and the Maccabean State
- The Four Philosophies: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and the Qumran Scrolls
- Under Rome: Herod, the Great Revolt, the Fall of the Temple and Bar Kokhba
- The Oral Law Written: Yavneh, the Mishnah and the Two Talmuds
- Mystics, Messiahs and Moderns: Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, Hasidism, Reform and Orthodoxy
- Who Is a Jew? The Khazar Debate, Jewish Identity and the Road to Zionism
Chapter 29. Patriarchs, Exodus and Conquest: The Biblical Story and the Archaeological Record
The books of Genesis to Joshua tell Israel’s founding story. The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob receive the promise of the land. Seventy souls go down to Egypt. After 430 years of sojourn and bondage, Moses leads some 600,000 men…
Chapter 30. Kings and Prophets: Monarchy, the Two Kingdoms and the Deuteronomic Revolution
Between about 1000 and 586 BCE the highland tribes of chapter 29 became first a kingdom, then two rival kingdoms, and finally a single surviving Judah whose priests and scribes wrote the core of the Hebrew Bible. This is the…
Chapter 31. By the Rivers of Babylon: Exile, Cyrus and the Persian Imprint on Judaism
The half-century between the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar and the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great is the point where the history of Israel meets the history of Iran. The Judaism that came back from Babylon was not…
Chapter 32. Athens and Jerusalem: Hellenism, Antiochus IV and the Maccabean State
Alexander’s conquest of the Levant in 332 BCE drew the small temple-state of Judea into the Greek world. Over the next three centuries the Persian pattern of a priestly community under a tolerant empire broke down. In its place came…
Chapter 33. The Four Philosophies: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and the Qumran Scrolls
In the last two centuries of the Second Temple, Judaism was a field of competing schools. Each had its own view of scripture, fate, purity, the Temple and the end of days, and each took its own position toward the…
Chapter 34. Under Rome: Herod, the Great Revolt, the Fall of the Temple and Bar Kokhba
Between Pompey’s entry into Jerusalem in 63 BCE and the crushing of Simon bar Kokhba in 135 CE, Judaea moved from Hasmonean independence to client kingship, then to direct Roman rule, two catastrophic wars, and finally to the loss of…
Chapter 35. The Oral Law Written: Yavneh, the Mishnah and the Two Talmuds
The destruction of the Temple removed the institution around which Judaism had been organised: the priesthood, the sacrifices and the pilgrim feasts. What replaced it was a religion of study, built by Pharisaic sages who had learned their traditions by…
Chapter 36. Mystics, Messiahs and Moderns: Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, Hasidism, Reform and Orthodoxy
Between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, rabbinic Judaism, the Talmudic order described in the previous chapter, broke into the forms it has today. Kabbalah, a mystical system, produced a messianic explosion in 1666 that ended in apostasy. Out of…
Chapter 37. Who Is a Jew? The Khazar Debate, Jewish Identity and the Road to Zionism
Part 4 closes with a question the Second Temple period did not settle and modern history made political: who, by descent, belief or law, counts as a Jew? The question matters for the study of religion because modern answers to…