Toward Identifying Proto-Judaic Cultural Features in Ancient Israel and Judea

What is it about?

In this article, I examine prospects and pitfalls we face in identifying specific practices prescribed in the Pentateuch and that were adopted as elements within Judaism which have roots in much earlier Israelite/Judean cultural practices. It is important to identifying such practices—which we may think of as “proto-Judaic”—in order to better understand the degree to which early Judaism was the culmination of a long-evolving cultural inheritance, or it was the result of of fundamentally novel developments following widespread adoption of the Pentateuch as authoritative Torah law.

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