#80 – Origin and evolution of Judaism and nation of Israel

Apr 22, 2022

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Was this religion dropped onto a unified nation that had just marched out of Egypt, or did both the nation and its religion evolve over the course of millennia?

We’ve been looking at hominids over the past couple hundred thousand years, paying particular attention to the evolution of cognitive abilities which contributed to the emergence of a religious streak: external agency detection, assigning intention and purpose (“promiscuous teleology”), and religious thinking (perception of the future; belief in an afterlife; creating statues/idols; music). They migrated out of Africa and established religions every where they went around the globe: we have remnants of these at Stonehenge, the Aztec/Mayan ruins, temples in South Asia, markings on cave walls as far east as Australia and as far west as North America.

But their first steps out of Africa took them into the region we now call Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. This is where we find the earliest human writings (Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets) and the oldest temple structures (Gobekli Tepe; pyramids of Egypt), complete with religious stories and myths. From these and other artifacts, we can piece together the world’s earliest religions: Babylonian, Egyptian, Zoroastrian … and Judaism.

Today, we’ll talk to Dr. Aren Maeir, a world-leading archaeologist who works in the sands of modern day Palestine, about the emergence and evolution of Judaism and the people who created that religion.

Or did you think that Yahweh dropped the religion of Judaism on some of those early people at the foot of Mount Sinai?

The archaeological evidence tells us that Israel did not emerge from Egypt as a unified nation. It did not conquer Canaan through the major battles described in the Old Testament. It did not worship one God … Yahweh … exclusively. Instead, that early nation of Israel comprised a mixture of people groups — including some who may have come from Egypt, migrated into Canaan peacefully and settled in together, and worshiped a variety of Canaanite gods — until they became a nation with a monarchy and one national religion. This version of Israelite history is supported by extensive archaeological research (layers in the soil; pottery; weapons; tools; texts).

The alternate version that we find in the Old Testament — the traditional story of a monotheistic Israel marching as a nation out of Egypt — is supported almost solely by …

… the Old Testament itself.

We already heard from Dr. Peter Enns (episode #57), an Old Testament theologian, about how those documents were written by the Israelites themselves, and were later massively edited by them, many centuries after their story introduces them as new-comers to the Promised Land. This massive reformulation of their texts, their religious practices, and their religious thinking occurred when they were in captivity in Babylon and trying to re-discover who they were, where they came from, and why Yahweh seemed to have abandoned them.

This does not mean that the Old Testament is merely a human fabrication, nor that Judaism is a false religion. Nor that neither were Divinely-inspired (we will have to do an episode on what that concept means … and doesn’t mean). Again, that conclusion would be yet another example of what philosophers call “the Genetic Fallacy”.

But it does mean that we need to be more careful and more fully informed about this religion when we contemplate what it means to/for us today. Especially when we also contemplate the major world religion which emerged out of it … Christianity.