As a reward for his act of faith in one God, he was promised that Isaac , his second son, would inherit the Land of Israel then called Canaan. At Mount Sinai they received the Torah — the five books of Moses. Eventually, God led them to the land of Israel where the tabernacle was planted in the city of Shiloh for over years to rally the nation against attacking enemies.
As time went on, the spiritual level of the nation declined to the point that God allowed the Philistines to capture the tabernacle. The people of Israel then told the prophet Samuel that they needed to be governed by a permanent king, and Samuel appointed Saul to be their King. When the people pressured Saul into going against a command conveyed to him by Samuel, God told Samuel to appoint David in his stead. The Kingdom of Judah continued as an independent state until it was conquered by a Babylonian army in the early 6th century BCE, destroying the First Temple that was at the center of ancient Jewish worship.
Later many of them returned to their homeland after the subsequent conquest of Babylonia by the Persians seventy years later, a period known as the Babylonian Captivity. A new Second Temple was constructed, and old religious practices were resumed.
During the early years of the Second Temple , the highest religious authority was a council known as the Great Assembly, led by Ezra of the Book of Ezra. Among other accomplishments of the Great Assembly, the last books of the Bible were written at this time and the canon sealed. Hadrian built a pagan idol on the Temple grounds and prohibited circumcision; these acts of ethnocide provoked the Bar Kokhba revolt — CE after which the Romans banned the study of the Torah and the celebration of Jewish holidays, and forcibly removed virtually all Jews from Judea.
This became known as the Second Jewish Diaspora. Following the destruction of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews, Jewish worship stopped being centrally organized around the Temple, prayer took the place of sacrifice, and worship was rebuilt around the community represented by a minimum of ten adult men and the establishment of the authority of rabbis who acted as teachers and leaders of individual communities.
While we know nothing whatsoever of Hebrew life in Egypt, the flight from Egypt is described in Hebrew history with immense and powerful detail. The migration itself creates a new entity in history: the Israelites; Exodus is the first place in the Torah which refers to the Hebrews as a single national group, the "bene yisrael," or "children of Israel.
The flight from Egypt itself stands as the single greatest sign from Yahweh that the Israelites were the chosen people of Yahweh; it is the event to be always remembered as demonstrating Yahweh's purpose for the Hebrew people.
It is the point in history that the scattered tribes descended from Abraham become a single unit, a single nation. It is also the crucial point in history that the Hebrews adopt Yahweh as their national god.
Hebrew history is absolutely silent about Hebrew worship during the sojourn in Egypt. A single religious observance, the observation of Passover , originates in Egypt immediately before the migration.
This observance commemorates how Yahweh spared the Hebrews when he destroyed all the first born sons in the land of Egypt. The Yahweh religion itself, however, is learned when the mass of Hebrews collect at Mount Sinai in Midian, which is located in the southern regions of the Arabian peninsula.
During this period, called the Sinai pericope , Moses teaches the Hebrews the name of their god and brings to them the laws that the Hebrews, as the chosen people, must observe. The Sinai pericope is a time of legislation and of cultural formation in the Hebrew view of history.
In the main, the Hebrews learn all the cultic practices and observances that they are to perform for Yahweh. Scholars are in bitter disagreement over the origin of the the Yahweh religion and the identity of its founder, Moses.
While Moses is an Egyptian name, the religion itself comes from Midian. The Midianites seem to have a Yahweh religion already in place; they worship the god of Mount Sinai as a kind of powerful nature deity.
So it's possible that the Hebrews picked up the Yahweh religion from another group of Semites and that this Yahweh religion slowly developed into the central religion of the Hebrews.
All scholars are agreed, however, that the process was slow and painful. In the Hebrew history, all during the migration and for two centuries afterwards, the Hebrews follow many various religions unevenly. The Mosaic religion was initially a monolatrous religion; while the Hebrews are enjoined to worship no deity but Yahweh, there is no evidence that the earliest Mosaic religion denied the existence of other gods. In fact, the account of the migration contains numerous references by the historical characters to other gods, and the first law of the Decalogue is, after all, that no gods be put before Yahweh, not that no other gods exist.
While controversial among many people, most scholars have concluded that the initial Mosaic religion for about two hundred years was a monolatrous religion. For there is ample evidence in the Hebrew account of the settlement of Palestine, that the Hebrews frequently changed religions, often several times in a single lifetime. The name of god introduced in the Mosaic religion is a mysterious term. Linguists believe that the word is related to the Semitic root of the verb, "to be," and may mean something like, "he causes to be.
You will say to the children of Israel, I AM has sent you. For a few centuries, Yahweh was largely an anthropomorphic god, that is, he had human qualities and physical characteristics. The Yahweh of the Torah is frequently angry and often capricious; the entire series of plagues on Egypt, for instance, seem unreasonably cruel.
In an account from the monarchical period, Yahweh strikes someone dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant; that individual, Uzza, was only touching the ark to keep it from falling over I Chronicles But there are some striking innovations in this new god. First, this god, anthropomorphic or not, is conceived as operating above and outside nature and the human world. The Mosaic god is conceived as the ruler of the Hebrews, so the Mosaic laws also have the status of a ruler.
The laws themselves in the Torah were probably written much later, in the eighth or seventh centuries. It is not unreasonable, however, to conclude that the early Mosaic religion was a law-based religion that imagined Yahweh as the author and enforcer of these laws. In fact, the early Hebrews seemed to have conceived of Yahweh as a kind of monarch.
In addition, Yahweh is more abstract than any previous gods; one injunction to the Hebrews is that no images of Yahweh be made or worshipped. Finally, there was no afterlife in the Mosaic religion. All human and religious concerns were oriented around this world and Yahweh's purposes in this world. As the Hebrews struggled with this new religion, lapsing frequently into other religions, they were slowly sliding towards their first major religious and ethical crisis: the monarchy.
The Yahweh religion would be shaken to its roots by this crisis and would be irrevocably changed. Wearied from over two centuries of sporadic conflict with indigenous peoples, broken by a ruinous civil war, and constantly threatened on all sides, the disparate Hebrew settlers of Palestine began to long for a unified state under a single monarch. Such a state would provide the organization and the military to fend off the war-like peoples surrounding them.
Their desire, however, would provoke the first major crisis in the Hebrew world view: the formation of the Hebrew monarchy. In the Hebrew account of their own history, the children of Israel who settled Palestine between and BC, believed Yahweh to be their king and Yahweh's laws to be their laws whether or not this is historically true is controversial. In desiring to have a king, the tribes of Israel were committing a grave act of disobedience towards Yahweh, for they were choosing a human being and human laws of Yahweh and Yahweh's laws.
In the account of the formation of the monarchy, in the books of Samuel , the prophet of Yahweh, Samuel, tells the Israelites that they are committing an act of disobedience that they will dearly pay for. Heedless of Samuel's warnings, they push ahead with the monarchy. The very first monarch, Saul, sets the pattern for the rest; disobedient towards Yahweh's commands, Saul falls out with both Samuel and Yahweh and gradually slips into arbitrary despotism.
Whatever the causes, a group of religious leaders during the eighth and seventh centuries BC responded to the crisis created by the institution of the monarchy by reinventing and reorienting the Yahweh religion.
In Hebrew, these religious reformers were called " nivea ," or " prophets. These four, and a number of lesser prophets, are as important to the Hebrew religion as Moses. The innovations of the prophets can be grouped into three large categories:. Whatever the character of Mosaic religion during the occupation and the early monarchy, the prophets unambiguously made Yahweh the one and only one god of the universe.
Earlier, Hebrews acknowledged and even worshipped foreign gods; the prophets, however, asserted that Yahweh ruled the entire universe and all the peoples in it, whether or not they recognized and worshipped Yahweh or not. The Yahweh religion as a monotheistic religion can really be dated no earlier than the prophetic revolution. While Yahweh is subject to anger, capriciousness, and outright injustice in the earlier Mosaic religion, the Yahweh of the prophets can do nothing but good and right and justice.
Yahweh becomes in the prophetic revolution a "god of righteousness"; historical events, no matter how arbitrary or unjust they may seem, represent the justice of Yahweh. The good and the just are always rewarded, and the evil are always punished. If there is any evil in the world it is through the actions of men and women, not through the actions of Yahweh, that it is committed.
While the Mosaic religion was overwhelmingly concerned with the cultic rules to be followed by the Israelites, the prophets re-centered the religion around ethics. Ritual practices, in fact, become unimportant next to ethical demands that Yahweh imposes on humans: the necessity of doing right, showing mercy, punishing evil, and doing justice. There still, however, is no afterlife of rewards and punishments in the prophets, but a kind of House of Dust, called Sheol , to which all souls go after their death to abide for a time before disappearing from existence forever.
There is no salvation, only the injunctions to do justice and right in order to produce a just and harmonious society. The historical origins of these innovations are important to understand. The monarchy brought with it all the evils of a centralized state: arbitrary power, vast inequality of wealth, poverty in the midst of plenty, heavy taxation, slavery, bribery, and fear.
The prophets were specifically addressing these corrupt and fearsome aspects of the Jewish state. They believed, however, that they were addressing these problems by returning to the Mosaic religion; in reality, they created a brand new religion, a monotheistic religion not about cultic practices, but about right and wrong. The most profound spiritual and cognitive crisis in Hebrew history was the Exile.
Defeated by the Chaldeans under Nebuchadnezzar in BC, the Judaean population was in part deported to Babylon, mainly the upper classes and craftsmen. Typically, conservative Jews honor the traditions of Judaism while allowing for some modernization.
Reconstructionist Judaism : Reconstructionism dates back to when Mordecai Kaplan founded the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Humanistic Jews celebrate Jewish history and culture without an emphasis on God.
Passover : This holiday lasts seven or eight days and celebrates Jewish freedom from slavery in Egypt. Rosh Hashanah : Jews celebrate the birth of the universe and humanity during this holiday, which is also known as the Jewish New Year.
The High Holy Days are considered a time of repentance for Jewish people. Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabees defeated the Syrian-Greeks over 2, years ago. Purim : This is a joyous holiday that celebrates a time when the Jewish people in Persia were saved from extermination. Religion: Judaism. Ancient Jewish Texts. My Jewish Learning. The Jewish Denominations.
What is Judaism? Jewish Sacred Texts. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Jewish Population. Judaism But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Since , the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the ideological and systematic state-sponsored The instability created in Europe by the First World War set the stage for another international conflict—World War II—which broke out two decades later and would prove even more devastating.
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Usually, the upper floors of the office building at Prinsengracht were silent. But on August 4, , they came to terrible life.
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