20 CHAPTER ONEother practices with the Jews. For example, males seem to have been circum-
cised, pigs were rarely consumed, and mourning rituals seem to have included
fasting, sackcloth, and ashes. But on the whole, except for brief periods of
pietistic reform, most Israelites were not henotheists, and they may not have
known of many characteristic biblical observances, such as the festivals of
Passover and Sukkot, allegedly instituted either by the reformist king Josiah
(reigned 639–609B.C.E.) shortly before the Babylonian conquest or by Ezra or
Nehemiah, in the fifth century. And their rituals seem often to have included
practices forbidden by the Pentateuch, such as skin cutting, a mourning cus-
tom. Most importantly, perhaps, there is no evidence that the Israelites pos-
sessed a single authoritative “Torah” that bore any resemblance to the Penta-
teuch. The implications of the shift from the Israelite religion to Judaism will
be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Here we will briefly consider some
aspects of its history.
This history is controversial and poorly understood. According to the bibli-
cal books of Ezra-Nehemiah, Haggai, and Zechariah, the Persian emperors
permitted several groups of Judahite exiles to return from their exile to Judah
and build a temple in Jerusalem. The temple, devoted to the worship of Yah-
weh alone, was completed in 515B.C.E. Two generations later, Artaxerxes I
permitted first Ezra and then the courtier Nehemiah (or perhaps the order was
reversed) to return to Judah and establish the “Torah of Moses,” apparently a
book, as the official law of the Judahites. To judge from the biblical accounts,
this boo kclosely resembled the Pentateuch but may not have been identical
with it. The account of Ezra’s career is incomplete, but Nehemiah is said to
have been successful in his mission, mainly because of his political skill.
In the absence of external confirmation, it is difficult to know what to make
of these stories. Most scholars, impressed by their meaningful translatability
into rational historical narrative (i.e., their verisimilitude), have been inclined
to take them seriously, notwithstanding some problematic details. Others, per-
haps a growing number, reject the stories on the grounds that they are after
all stories, whose biases are quite conspicuous.^3 We need not solve this prob-
lem, since it is nearly certain that the Jerusalem Temple was built under the
aegis of the Achaemenids, and likely too that some version of the Torah be-
came the authorized law of the Jews in the same general period, if not in the
circumstances the biblical books describe. We may wonder why the Persian
emperors should have been interested in imposing Judaism on the Jews.
(^3) For discussion, see S. Japhet, “In Search of Ancient Israel: Revisionism at All Costs,” D.
Myers and D. Ruderman, eds.,The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 212–34, which cites the most important “revision-
ist” works. I agree with Japhet that the extreme skeptics are wrong. Indeed, they can actually be
seen as naive positivists, since they tend to regard the stories as pure ideology (as opposed to
complicated mixtures of history, tradition, invention, and folklore combined into ideologically