01
The chapter opens with a question: at what point did the Israelites of scripture, the inhabitants of the kingdom of Judah in the south, become what we now call Jews, and what warrants changing the name we use for them?
Hall 02 · 587–332 BCE
Becoming the People of the Book
From the Babylonian Exile to Persia
587–332 BCE
The scope runs from the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BCE (timeline, p. 519) to the end of Persian rule in 332 BCE, when the Achaemenid empire of Map 2.1 (p. 35) ends. The chapter also follows the making of the Bible and its reception to the present, well beyond those dates.
Sourced overview
Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.
Statements for this period
02
Scholars debate whether the Babylonian conquest was really as ruinous as the Bible implies, but most see it as a turning point. Once the Davidic dynasty ended, Judah was no longer independent, and its people's fate came to depend on foreign governments.
03
Babylonian rule was fairly short: it came to an end in 539 BCE, when Cyrus II, founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, defeated the Neo-Babylonian Empire; his line would be the dominant power of the Near East for two centuries. The book's timeline records Cyrus's edict allowing the exiles to return to Yehud and rebuild the Temple.
04
The Persian era is also when the Judahites first seem to turn to the writings destined to become the Bible as a way of keeping their ancestral culture alive. It looks conservative, but it is a new phase and perhaps the single most important development of the period for understanding how Judahite culture gave rise to Jewish culture.
05
The era of Babylonian conquest and Persian rule did not yield the Bible but a miscellany of texts on scrolls, not books in our sense. That miscellany is the biblical canon, a body of writings Jews regard as uniquely authoritative in religion. Why some books made it in and others did not is unknown.
06
Contested interpretation
One can argue that Jewish culture predates the Bible (Elephantine shows a Judahite community with no sign of a Bible) or that the Bible predates the Jews (it began to form in ancient Judah before the Exile and the missions of Ezra and Nehemiah). The authors do not settle this chicken-and-egg problem: they say only that Jews and the Bible developed inseparably.
§ 01Index
36 events
01fourth millennium BCEWriting and the alphabetThe Bible was only possible because writing, invented in the fourth millennium BCE, reached Canaan and was simplified into the alphabet, used by scribes and ordinary people alike.Canaan · Egypt02nineteenth or eighteenth century BCEThe Code of HammurabiThe code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, long before Israel, has laws like those of the Pentateuch, a sign of an older Near Eastern legal tradition.Babylon · Hazor03722 to 720 BCEThe Judahite point of viewBiblical literature reflects Judah's perspective, not the northern kingdom's, and survived because the Judahites preserved their texts after Assyria destroyed Israel.Samaria · Jerusalem04seventh or sixth century BCEThe Ketef Hinnom amuletsTwo silver amulets with blessings nearly identical to Numbers 6 show that biblical material was already being written down in the seventh or sixth century BCE.Ketef Hinnom · Jerusalem05640–609 BCEJosiah's law bookAccording to 2 Kings, a scroll of Moses's law found during Temple repairs led Josiah to a major reform, and scholars suspect it was Deuteronomy.Jerusalem06sixth to fifth century BCEWhen did Judahites become Jews?With no agreement on when the Jewish people appeared, the authors switch from 'Judahite' to 'Jewish' for the age in which Exile, Persian rule and the Bible reshape the culture.Jerusalem · Babylon07587 or 586 BCEThe Babylonian conquest as watershedThe fall of Jerusalem was not only a disaster: losing the Temple and exiling part of the population pushed the Judahites to preserve and create texts, much of what became the Bible.Jerusalem · Babylon08587–332 BCEThe formation of the canonThe Jewish canon began to form with the Babylonian conquest and Persian rule: texts salvaged from disaster gained authority and gave rise to biblical interpretation.Jerusalem · Babylon · Yehud (Persian Judah)09587–332 BCECrisis, repentance and restorationFor the Bible, crises in the relationship with God can be overcome: exile is punishment for unfaithfulness, but the writers look ahead to the restoration of Judah and all Israel.Jerusalem · Babylon10587 or 586 BCEThe fate of the Ark of the CovenantThe Bible does not say what happened to the Ark after the Babylonians razed the Temple, and nobody knows where it went, but in the synagogue it lives on as a metaphor.Jerusalem · Babylon11539 BCECyrus conquers BabylonIn 539 BCE Cyrus II took Babylon and placed the Judahites under Achaemenid rule, which the Bible portrays as benign.Babylon · Susa · Persepolis12539 BCECyrus in Isaiah and in the CylinderThe Bible makes Cyrus God's instrument, and the Cyrus Cylinder shows him as Marduk's pious devotee: both texts reflect the same conqueror's strategy.Babylon · Jerusalem13539–332 BCEYehud, a Persian provinceUnder Persia the Judahites could return and rebuild the Temple but not regain an independent state: Yehud was a province, with hostile neighbors and economic hardship.Yehud (Persian Judah) · Jerusalem · Samaria14539–332 BCEAramaic, Esther and Persian culturePersian rule brought a linguistic shift and a literature that portrays Persian kings sympathetically, as the book of Esther does.Yehud (Persian Judah) · Susa15539–332 BCEThe three parts of the Jewish BibleThe Jewish Bible has three parts: the Torah, which formed the core, the Prophets, probably settled in the Persian age, and the Writings, the most fluid section.Jerusalem16539–332 BCECreation, election and covenantThe Bible moves from the God who created all peoples to his relationship with Israel, and the problem that occupies it is how to sustain the bond sealed at Sinai.Sinai · Egypt17539–332 BCEIntermediaries between God and IsraelThe relationship with God depends on sacred objects, prophets, priests and kings, intermediaries whom the Bible itself shows failing.Jerusalem18522–486 BCEDarius and the TempleDarius I allowed the Temple to be finished and evidently had local laws written down, a policy that may have helped raise the Torah to communal law.Jerusalem · Yehud (Persian Judah) · Egypt19fifth century BCEThe Judahite community of ElephantineFifth-century BCE papyri reveal a community of Judahite soldiers in Persian Egypt that honored God yet lived with no sign of a Bible and without treating Jerusalem as the only sanctuary.Elephantine · Egypt · Jerusalem20from the Persian age onwardHow to read the Bible: early interpretationArchaic and incomplete texts called for interpretation, and early Jewish readers, such as the Dead Sea community, drew rules from the Sabbath and explained even the differences between the two Decalogues.Jerusalem · Qumran21c. 450 BCEEzra, Nehemiah and the lawHistorians link the turn to texts with the scribe Ezra and with Nehemiah, but the books describing them were written later and do not allow the facts to be reconstructed well.Jerusalem · Yehud (Persian Judah)22c. 450 BCEIntermarriage in the BibleNehemiah worried about Judahite marriages to non-Israelite women, but other parts of the Bible are less hostile to mixed unions.Jerusalem · Yehud (Persian Judah)23c. 450 BCEThe public reading of the TorahAt the climax of Ezra-Nehemiah, Ezra reads the law before the people and the Levites explain it, a sign that the Torah became the community's center.Jerusalem24418 BCEHananiah's Passover letterA letter of 418 BCE instructs Elephantine on Passover with rules partly known from the Torah, a sign that someone, perhaps the Persian government, was imposing norms.Elephantine25410 BCEThe Elephantine temple and the governorAfter the Elephantine temple was destroyed in 410 BCE, the community asked a Persian governor to rebuild it.Elephantine26c. 300 BCEHecataeus and the laws of MosesAbout 120 years after Hananiah, a Greek traveler describes Judah as governed by the laws of Moses. If his testimony is authentic, by the fourth century BCE the Torah would already be the community's law.Jerusalem27200 BCE to 200 CEApocrypha and pseudepigraphaWith no way to authenticate a book as biblical, Jewish authors imitated scripture's style and ascribed texts to ancient figures; some may have counted as scripture for some Jews, though they stayed outside today's Jewish canon.Jerusalem · Qumran28second century BCEThe Dead Sea Scrolls and text criticismThe oldest copies of the Bible, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, diverge from the current text and show how it grew, which text criticism tries to reconstruct.Qumran29centuries after the fall of the Second TempleThe Oral Torah and the Sabbath penaltyThe rabbis held that Sinai included an Oral Torah that elaborates and limits the written law, which explains why the biblical death penalty for the Sabbath is not applied.Jerusalem · Sinai30second century CEThe standardization of the biblical textBy around the second century CE, Jewish authorities chose the version of the Hebrew text that would become the Masoretic Bible, and today's Bible differs from the ancient scrolls.Jerusalem31after the rise of ChristianityThe Bible was not a bookPicturing the Bible as a book is anachronistic: Israelites wrote on scrolls and other materials, and most ancient Jews never had access to a Torah scroll.32third and fourth centuries CE'Old Testament' and 'people of the book''Old Testament' is a Christian term that Jews reject because it defines their Bible by reference to the New Testament; 'people of the book' was a name given to them by Muslims.Jerusalem33sixth to tenth century CEThe Masoretic Bible and the Aleppo CodexThe Masoretes copied the text and devised marks to fix reading and pronunciation; the Aleppo Codex, from about 930, is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible.Jerusalem34seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesFrom doubting Moses to the Documentary HypothesisIn the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries scholars doubted Mosaic authorship and proposed that the Pentateuch blends earlier sources, the Documentary Hypothesis, which remains a hypothesis.351872Gilgamesh and the Mesopotamian parallelsThe decipherment of cuneiform revealed, in 1872, a Babylonian flood much like Genesis's and showed that biblical literature did not arise in a cultural vacuum.Nineveh · Babylon · Assyria361886–2003Sinai in the face of modernityModern Jewish thinkers tried to remain loyal to the Sinai covenant while accepting historical criticism, the experience of the Holocaust and new values, with very different answers.Sinai
§ 02People
Who appears in this chapter
- JosiahKing of Judah
- Cyrus II, the GreatFounder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire
- Darius IPersian king who consolidated the empire
- EzraScribe, priest and leader of the Judahite community
- NehemiahCupbearer of the Persian king sent to Yehud
- Hananiah (Elephantine letter)Author of a letter on Passover to the Elephantine community
- BagavahyaPersian governor to whom the Elephantine Judahites appealed
- HecataeusGreek traveler, contemporary of Alexander
- HammurabiKing of Babylon, issuer of a law code
- Franz RosenzweigGerman-Jewish theologian
- Emil FackenheimJewish philosopher, a refugee from the Nazis
§ 03Historiography
The chapter’s debates
Scholarly debate · 01
Was the Elephantine community Jewish?
2 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Yes, they were Jews
Many scholars
The term they used for themselves, 'yehudiyin', is often translated 'Jews', with good reason: they worshiped Yahweh (Yaho), bore Yahwistic names and observed holy days such as the Sabbath and Passover.
- B
Another branch of Judahite culture
The reading the authors consider less anachronistic
Calling them Jews makes sense if 'Jewish' means someone from Judah or a descendant of Judahites, but it would mislead to picture a community like the Jews of later sources: it may be less anachronistic to see it as another, separate branch of earlier Judahite culture.
Scholarly debate · 02
When does properly Jewish history begin?
3 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
In 587 or 586 BCE
Many scholars
Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple would have set off the religious and literary creativity that gave rise to Judaism.
- B
A gradual transition with no date
The authors of the book
Because the definition of 'Jewish' is blurry, the authors refuse to name a date and prefer to examine events that proved decisive in retrospect; for them the rise of the Bible and of its interpretation marks the beginning of Jewish history as distinct from Israelite.
- C
People and Bible arise together
The authors' conclusion at the end of the chapter
One can say Jewish culture predates the Bible (Elephantine) or that the Bible predates the Jews; the authors do not decide and stress that the two developed inseparably.
Scholarly debate · 03
Is the biblical portrait of Cyrus Persian propaganda?
2 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Cyrus as God's instrument
The Bible itself (Deutero-Isaiah)
God would have handed Cyrus an empire so that he would send the Judahites home and rebuild the Temple; the Persians appear as kindly patrons.
- B
Pro-Persian propaganda
Some historians
The portrait is so glowing that Deutero-Isaiah could be pro-Persian propaganda, a plausible idea beside the Cyrus Cylinder, in which a Babylonian scribe presents Cyrus as a pious restorer of local tradition with the same rhetorical strategy.
Scholarly debate · 04
What role did Ezra play?
3 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
A second Moses
Later Jewish tradition
Ezra would have 're-revealed' the laws of Moses in the form later Jews knew and even transcribed the biblical text into the Aramaic script.
- B
Persian official enforcing God's law
The book of Ezra
The Persian king Artaxerxes appoints him to lead exiles to Judea and regulate life in Judah and Jerusalem 'according to the law of your God', probably the Five Books of Moses.
- C
Promulgator of the Five Books as law
Some scholars
The Five Books would have been introduced under his administration, not composed then but compiled, edited and promulgated as binding law.
Scholarly debate · 05
What does the Bible say about marrying foreigners?
3 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Strong opposition (Nehemiah)
Nehemiah and the laws against marriage with Canaanites
Nehemiah curses and beats Judahites married to women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab; the biblical ban seems to have arisen from fear that such marriages lead to worship of Canaanite gods, but Nehemiah's worry is that the children lose the language of Judah.
- B
No blanket ban
Other texts of the Hebrew Bible
The ban targets non-Israelites living in Canaan; there is no general veto on marrying foreigners, and Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses marry Arameans, Egyptians and Midianites.
- C
Mixed marriage as blessing
Ruth and Esther
In Ruth, David descends from the marriage of the Israelite Boaz and the Moabite Ruth; the author of Esther likewise is not troubled by Esther's marriage to Ahasuerus.
Scholarly debate · 06
Did Persia shape the Torah's authority?
2 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Persian government encouragement
A hypothesis the authors find plausible
The Torah would have taken root among the people of Judah in Persian times as a charter of religion and social life, perhaps with government encouragement; Persia may have enlisted officials such as Ezra, or the Hananiah of the letter, to instruct people in it and apply it as a regional code.
- B
Israelite legacy, not Persian invention
The authors' own caveat
The authors do not suggest that Persian rule created the Five Books or that they were canonized to serve Persian interests: they were part of the cultural legacy inherited from Israel.
Scholarly debate · 07
What was the scroll found in Josiah's reign?
2 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
A forgotten Torah of Moses
The account of 2 Kings 22 and 23
During Temple repairs a long-lost Torah of Moses was found, setting out the commands of the covenant; Josiah sees they have been violated and launches a major reform.
- B
Deuteronomy and a staged 'rediscovery'
Modern scholars
The scroll would be Deuteronomy and its rediscovery a ruse by the king to pass a newly composed law book off as an ancient text of Moses.
Scholarly debate · 09
Why does 1 Samuel 11 have an extra passage in the Dead Sea Scrolls?
2 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Later insertion
A possibility the authors admit
The additional material could have been inserted into the text secondarily.
- B
Accidental omission
The explanation the authors judge more likely
A scribe would have deleted the passage by accident while copying the text that became the version Jews read today.
Scholarly debate · 10
Why did Jews fix a single version of the biblical text?
2 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Other versions were lost with the Temple
A hypothesis of the authors
The Temple may have been a repository for the varying forms of the biblical manuscripts, and its fall in 70 CE may have wiped them out, leaving a single form of the Hebrew text.
- B
Reduce interpretive conflict
Another hypothesis of the authors
With Jews sharply divided into sects and a new Christian community reading the Bible in its own way, Jewish leaders may have sought to narrow the gaps between biblical versions.
Scholarly debate · 11
How should the two versions of the Sabbath commandment be understood?
3 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
A doublet from different sources
Modern scholars
The two versions of the Ten Commandments would be one more doublet in the Torah, which combines material from different sources.
- B
Two messages spoken at once
Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael (rabbis)
'Remember' and 'keep' would have been said by God as one word, a feat impossible for mortals, showing that the Torah exceeds ordinary human speech.
- C
A separate command: safeguard the Sabbath
Members of the Dead Sea Scrolls community
'Keep' in Deuteronomy 5 would be another command revealed at the same time: stop working before the Sabbath so as not to risk missing its start.
Scholarly debate · 12
How did the rabbis understand biblical law and its death penalty?
2 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Binding law, elaborated by the Oral Torah
The rabbis
The Sinai revelation included an Oral Torah, not recorded in the Five Books and passed from Moses to Joshua, the prophets and the rabbis, which details biblical law, adds qualifications and makes exceptions.
- B
Death penalty emptied in practice
The rabbis, according to the authors
By demanding a very high standard of proof (a specific warning to the accused) or limiting the penalty to the days in the wilderness, the rabbis made it inapplicable; today no religious court would have authority to impose it.
Scholarly debate · 13
How do modern Jews relate to the revelation at Sinai?
4 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Revelation without verbal content (Rosenzweig)
Franz Rosenzweig
The Bible registers something genuine, but what matters is what the experience stirs, not whether the facts occurred: all the Torah's words are human, and reading the Torah is an encounter with God.
- B
The Holocaust as a second revelation (Fackenheim)
Emil Fackenheim
The Holocaust threatened to destroy faith in God but also issued the command to stay faithful to the Sinai covenant, denying Hitler a posthumous victory.
- C
Women as full partners in revelation (Plaskow)
Judith Plaskow
Using midrash as precedent, the theologian reimagines Sinai by setting aside the male-centered description of God and including women fully.
- D
The efforts are beside the point
Religious Jews who do not acknowledge scholarship, and secular Jews
Some do not admit that modern scholarship raises challenges; others see no use in rescuing what they take to be myth.
Scholarly debate · 14
What happened to the Ark of the Covenant?
3 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Hidden under the Temple or in a cave
Some sources
The ark would have been concealed beneath the Temple site or in a cave.
- B
Carried off by the Romans
Other sources
The Romans would have carried it off after the destruction of the Second Temple.
- C
Taken to Ethiopia
Ethiopian tradition
It would have been smuggled to Ethiopia, where it would be to this day.