Israelite Religion: From Tribal Beginnings to Scribal Legacy

University of Amsterdam religion professor Van Der Toorn (Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible) meticulously surveys the 2,000-year evolution of the Israelite religion, which preceded Judaism but differed in key respects (including that adherents initially worshiped a pantheon of gods—of which Yahweh was one—and that it was so woven into daily life that adherents wouldn’t have thought of it as a religion). Beginning in the Iron Age, Der Toorn traces how the faith evolved in tribes and clans as Yahweh slowly rose to prominence over other gods, later becoming a source of political power for rulers who styled themselves as “God’s lieutenants.” After the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel led to the Israelites’ exile, the religion absorbed Babylonian customs, and, as literacy rates rose during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, splintered into various “reading communities” with different interpretations of sacred texts. The author perceptively analyzes how the religion assumed different purposes in response to cultural and political changes, transforming from a tool for fostering civil obedience to a means of “preserv[ing] a collective identity” among an increasingly disconnected diasporic people. The result is a a valuable history of an influential yet little-understood faith. (Apr.)