28 A History of Judaism
attested in later centuries. Philo, Josephus and the authors of the Dead
Sea scrolls treated the precise wording of biblical texts as a source of
spiritual enlightenment. So too did the early rabbis: the tannaim (the
rabbinic sages whose teachings are preserved in the Mishnah) and their
successors the amoraim (sages of the third to sixth centuries ce whose
teachings are enshrined in the Talmud) produced biblical commentaries,
such as the tannaitic compilations Mekilta on Exodus, Sifra on Leviticus
and Sifre on Numbers and Deuteronomy, dedicated specifically to deriv-
ing moral and legal lessons from such close readings.^3
The biblical text itself was the product of multiple external influences
on the literary genres, religious motifs and legal formulations scattered
through the biblical books. The Mesopotamia from which Abraham
was alleged to have come, and to which some of his supposed descend-
ants returned as exiles after 586 bce when Jerusalem was conquered by
the Babylonians, was by the third millennium bce home to a highly
developed civilization with efficient bureaucracies, whose operations
can still be traced on hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets. The
Babylonians espoused complex religious myths which in some cases,
such as the Sumerian version of the flood story, bear striking resem-
blance to the stories in the Bible. Similarities have long been noted
between some characteristics of the detailed law codes of the Babylo-
nian state, such as the need to pay for medical care for an opponent one
has injured in a fight in the Code of Hammurabi, and the rulings found
in the law codes in the Pentateuch.^4
The Egypt where Israel was said to have suffered in slavery before
salvation under the leadership of Moses had been for millennia an
equally advanced society, managing (as in Mesopotamia) an irrigation
economy through a centralized state. With some notable exceptions,
such as the biblical book of Proverbs, Egyptian cultural and religious
influences have been less easy to detect in most of the biblical texts, per-
haps reflecting the frequent expression of hostility to the Egyptian state
to be found, for instance, in the prophecies of Jeremiah. Such hostility
was founded both on the traditions of the exodus and on the proximity
of Egypt as a great power on the borders of Israel and Judah: ‘the God
of Israel said: “See, I am bringing punishment upon ... Egypt and her
gods and her kings, upon Pharaoh and those who trust in him .. .” ’ It
has been suggested that the intolerant monotheism attributed to Moses,
with its clear divide between true and false religion, was influenced by
the failed religious revolution in Egypt of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who
abandoned traditional Egyptian polytheism in favour of worship of a