Was there a “Proto-Judaism”? Prospects and Pitfalls in Identifying Proto-Judaic Cultural Features in Ancient Israel and Judea

• In Event: Law, Culture and the Bible

Abstract

In my recent book, THE ORIGINS OF JUDAISM: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL-HISTORICAL REAPPRAISAL, I set out to investigate when and how the ancestors of today’s Jews—as a society—first came to regard the regulations of the Torah as authoritative law, and to put these laws into practice in their daily lives. My interest was to examine when and why adherence to the laws of the Torah came to characterize the way of life of Jews within ancient Jewish society at large—among the farmers, the craftspeople, and the homemakers. There I used the term “Judaism” to describe this society-wide Jewish way of life characterized by conformity to the rules and regulations of the Torah.

There can be little doubt that Judaism thus envisioned did not emerge ex nihilo with the widescale adoption of the Torah as authoritative law. Throughout the book, I showed that the roots of several of the practices found in the Torah almost certainly reach back to extraordinarily early periods of time, manifesting as elements of Iron Age Israelite/Judean culture and their precursors—sometimes even within Bronze Age “Canaanite” culture—long before they came to be expressed as prescriptive regulations in Pentateuchal texts and later as components of Judaism. As these cultural elements predate the Pentateuch and hence Torah law itself, they are best envisioned as belonging to a prehistory of Judaism, rather than to Judaism proper. It is to this prehistory that I wish to turn in the present paper.

Here I will examine methodological prospects and pitfalls we face in identifying specific practices prescribed in the Pentateuch and that were adopted as elements within Judaism which have roots in much earlier Israelite/Judean cultural praxis. Identifying such practices—which we may think of as “proto-Judaic”—is crucial for investigating the degree to which early Judaism manifests the culmination of a long-evolving cultural inheritance reaching back to before the compilation of Pentateuchal texts, versus the degree to which early Judaism reflects fundamentally novel developments following widespread adoption of the Pentateuch as authoritative Torah law.

Author

• Yonatan Adler, Ariel University