Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

both the Essenes and the Sadducees adopted conservative, stricter under-

standings of the Law.

The community of the Dead Sea Scrolls illustrates the fact that the

social makeup of early Judaism was more complex than our other sources

suggested. Before they were discovered between 1947 and 1956, there was

only a hint or two in the literature that such a group existed; there was no

indication that it had a large library indicative of extensive study and

much more. The scrolls reveal a community that had in protest separated

itself physically from other Jews and that apparently did not participate in

worship at the Temple in Jerusalem. In the wilderness of Judea they pur-

sued the way of life they thought was revealed in the Scriptures and

looked to the day when, in a final war between the sons of light and the

sons of darkness, the former would win a great victory and a new age

would dawn.

These were not the only groups in the land of Israel in the later Sec-

ond Temple period. Josephus also speaks of a fourth “philosophy” whose

members refused to accept human rule, although in other respects they

agreed with the Pharisees (Ant.18.23). Josephus considered them and

their violent ways instrumental in causing the revolt against Rome in 66

c.e.(Ant.18.6-10).

Literature

There is no doubting that Jews in the land of Israel wrote a sizable litera-

ture in the centuries when the Second Temple stood, and a considerable

amount of it has survived to the present in one form or another, that is, in

whole or in part, in the original language or in translation. Rarely is there

information about exactly when a book was written or who wrote it, but

texts of a variety of literary genres were composed in the period. A number

of those works are now incorporated into the Hebrew Bible, although it is

not always certain which books date from the Second Temple era. There

would be a large amount of agreement among experts about the following

as coming from the postexilic age:

Final form of the Pentateuch

1-2 Chronicles

Ezra

Nehemiah

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james c. vanderkam

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:54 PM