The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal by Yonatan Adler (review)

Reviewed by: The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal by Yonatan Adler Benjamin D. Gordon Yonatan Adler. The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. xiv + 369 pp. Among the elements of Judean life that thrived with the advent of Hellenism were traditionalist forms of piety revering the holy laws of the people. These laws had been codified in Torah and were now fiercely debated. Their widespread reverence created a scholastic, Torah-based strand of Judean expression—a halakhic turn—that established itself among the common people. In this forceful book, Yonatan Adler claims that this halakhic turn was the beginning of Judaism as we know it. The book's chapters focus on the dietary laws, ritual purity, figural art, tefillin and mezuzot, an assortment of miscellaneous customs (circumcision, Sabbath, Passover, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and the seven-branched menorah), and the synagogue. In each chapter, Adler first establishes that a Torah-based custom was prevalent in Judean communities of the first century CE. He then shows that End Page 204 the custom's widespread observance began only in the late Hellenistic period, usually during the period of Hasmonean rule. Adler supposes that this change in the nature of the Torah, from arcane text to a broadly influential constitution, was powered by a few developments. One is a little-known Ptolemaic judicial reform in the early third century BCE that required colonized territories such as Judea to govern themselves using their native laws. Adler's appeal to this reform recalls the Persian imperial authorization theory for Torah formation, only shifted to a later period. Another development involves Hasmonean attempts a century later to use the Pentateuch as a national constitution to unite diverse segments of the kingdom's population. This change also brought about a new, common expression of what it meant to be Judean. Furthermore, Adler underscores that the synagogue was an important institution in the dissemination of Torah learning and one that only became widely present in Judean communities from the second century BCE onward. The book is essential reading for scholars of Second Temple Judaism, and Adler is right to see it as expanding upon the work of E. P. Sanders, who posited that there was such a thing as "common Judaism" in the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods. But here Adler writes much more about material culture than Sanders did, and much less about the temple cult (more on that below). The book should also be read together with the work of the archaeologist Andrea Berlin, who has written extensively on the makings of a shared household Judaism in these periods, giving special attention to the mechanisms of social change that can explain how Judean communities confronted western colonialism. To read The Origins of Judaism is to be reminded of the extent to which the cultural record of Judean life in the Second Temple period is marked by preservation bias. Judea in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods was sparsely populated and impoverished—a backwater—its material culture rather nondescript and austere, leaving us little to study. We must rely heavily on the Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch, to get a sense of the society's cultural institutions. The region paled in comparison to the wealthier coastal cities of the time, and especially to what Judea would become in the first centuries BCE and CE. For those centuries, on the other hand, we have a glut of evidence: the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of Josephus and Philo, the New Testament sources, and an uncommonly rich archaeological record of a society that was experiencing pronounced economic growth. Its cities had never been so prosperous, and its material culture never so distinctive, as Judeans sought new identities in an increasingly cosmopolitan milieu. This preservation bias means that there are perils to Adler's dogged reliance on arguments from silence. The absence of evidence for widespread observance of Torah-based customs before the Hellenistic period, which is to say, from sources outside the Torah itself, as Adler requires, may simply reflect the limitations of our source material. It may be true, for example, that...