The Genesis of Judaism - The BAS Library

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Throughout much of history, Jewish life and culture have been characterized by strict adherence to the practices and prohibitions given in the Torah. The origins of that observance, however, have remained a mystery. Consider the archaeological discoveries and ancient texts that reveal when and why ordinary Judeans first adopted the Torah as their authoritative law.

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Footnotes

1. See Yonatan Adler, “Watertight and Rock Solid,” BAR, Spring 2021.

2. For the problem of linking the material absence of pigs with a Torah prohibition, see Lidar Sapir-Hen, “Pigs as an Ethnic Marker? You Are What You Eat,” BAR, November/December 2016.

Endnotes

1.
These are the central questions addressed in my recent book, The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2022).

2.
Yonatan Adler and Omri Lernau, “The Pentateuchal Dietary Proscription against Finless and Scaleless Aquatic Species in Light of Ancient Fish Remains,” Tel Aviv 48 (2021), pp. 5–26.

3.
Ilaria Bultrighini and Sacha Stern, “The Seven-Day Week in the Roman Empire,” in Sacha Stern, ed., Calendars in the Making (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 10–79, esp. 11–17.

4.
Michael LeFebvre, Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-characterization of Israel’s Written Law (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), pp. 146–182.

5.
Reinhard G. Kratz, Historical and Biblical Israel: The History, Tradition, and Archives of Israel and Judah, translated by Paul M. Kurtz (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 185–186; John J. Collins, The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 184–185.