How old is the torah

But there is one big difference: The function of Assyrian vassal treaties was to oblige subdued people to the Assyrian king in terms of absolute loyalty. The book of Deuteronomy likewise demands absolute loyalty from the people of Israel, but to God, not to the Assyrian king.

So the book of Deuteronomy seems to take up both the structure and the basic concept of an Assyrian vassal treaty, while at the same time reinterpreting it. A second example of how the ancient Near East shaped the Pentateuch has to do with the Persian empire. In B. Persian rule was perceived by many peoples in the Levant as peaceful, with the era seen as a quiet one, where various peoples could live according to their own culture, language, and religion.

In the Hebrew Bible, nearly every foreign nation is addressed with very harsh curses except for the Persians, probably due to their tolerant policy towards those whom they subdued. In the Pentateuch, we can locate some indications of Persian imperial ideology. A very telling piece is the so-called table of nations in Genesis This text explains the order or the world after the flood, and it structures the seventy people of the globe according to the offspring of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, including three, nearly identical refrains: [46].

At first glance, these texts may not look very interesting. But they are quite revolutionary insofar as they tell us that the world is ordered in a pluralistic way. After the flood, God intended humanity to live in different nations, with different lands and different languages.

Genesis 10 is probably a Persian period text reflecting this basic conviction of Persian imperial ideology. The same ideology is also attested, e. This is a radically different political view when compared to the Assyrians and Babylonians, both of whom strove to destroy other national identities, especially by means of deportation. The Persians deported no one, and they allowed people to rebuild their own sanctuaries, such as the temple in Jerusalem that the Babylonians had destroyed.

Once again, though, Genesis 10 is not merely a piece of Persian imperial propaganda. It also includes important interpretive changes. Specifically, it is not the Persian king who determines world order; rather, the God of Israel allots every nation its specific place and language.

Of course, the Pentateuch eventually makes clear that Israel has a specific function in the world, but it is important to see that the Bible acknowledges and allows cultural and religious variety in the world. These examples highlight how the Bible interacts with imperial ideologies from the ancient Near East, a point that is crucial to see if we are to reconstruct its formation.

But how do such different ideologies and theologies go together in the Bible? It is important to see that the Pentateuch in particular and the Bible in general are not uniform pieces of literature. They instead resemble a large cathedral that has grown over centuries. Its content is not the result of one, but rather of many voices. And these different voices establish the overall beauty and richness of the Pentateuch.

The literary history of the Pentateuch and the reconstruction of the redactional processes that led to its final shape constitute the main focus of his research. In —13, he co-directed a research group on the formation of the Pentateuch at the Israel Institute of Advanced Study, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Gertz et al. Papers presented at an international conference at Lund University, october , ed.

Studien zur Anthropologie des Alten Testaments. Geburtstag ed. See also Ron E. Tappy and P. Could any hebrew literature have been written prior to the eighth century B. Philip S. Muraoka on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday ed. Martin F.

Baasten and Wido Th. James D. Andrew Dearman, ed. Politics, Culture, and Identity eds. Psalm 8,5. Aspekte einer theologischen Anthropologie. Geburtstag Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, , 33—53; ibid. Ingo Kottsieper et al. The oldest manuscript of the Greek Pentateuch is Papyrus Rylands , dating to the mid second century B. James W. D , Wuppertal Juli ed. Hanna Jenni et al. Kottsieper et al. Martti Nissinen; VT. Festschrift zum Geburtstag von Lothar Perlitt ed.

Bereishith Rabbah ; Zohar, Terumah b. Gerald Schroeder, Genesis and the Big Bang , chapters 3, 4, and 5. Schroeder, Chapter 2, p. Sanhedrin 97a; see section The implication might be that there is a cosmological Yovel [Jubilee], seven Shmittah cycles, equaling 7 cycles of years. Heard from R. Ari Kahn. It seems that the Sefer HaTemunah says that all years are God years, which leaves us with the problem of resolving our man years of history with the final cycle of God years.

FYI i have a different resolution. Hi Roger! Nice to hear from you. You can send it to my gmail account. My user id is sveffer. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Not Ready to Subscribe? Start here And we'll also send you our Weekly Updates from Israel - cancel anytime. Free Israel Cookbook! Plus get new recipes weekly. Time is a Creation In contrast to the Greeks, the Torah teaches Time was created with the physical world. The Age of the Universe According to Astronomy Through astronomy, it has been observed that all stars are receding from us.

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Celebrating Shavuot I find this very interesting. I do need to do more research on the Oral Torah and the Midrash. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. So all they kept were the Five Books of Moses, and Joshua. The Book of Joshua tells of their capturing the land of Israel, so they felt it supported them. All the other Holy Books of the Tanach were written after the break up and for the most part also supported King David , so the Ten Tribes never had those Books at all.

So now there were two kings at once: one in Judah and one in Israel. However, the leaders of Judaism were the Prophets. The Prophets traveled to both Israel and Judah, and were seen in both kingdoms of the country. So while we call this period the era of the kings, we also call it the era of the Later Prophets.

About two hundred and fifty years later in the year B. We do not know where he sent them. Those are the Ten Lost Tribes, and we will not see them again until the Messiah comes. Assyria was, at that time, a world power, having conquered many countries.

Shalmanesser, King of Assyria, had the practice of relocating entire nations, in order to better subjugate and control them. When he took the Ten Tribes of Israel away from Samaria, he brought the people called the Cuthites to replace them.

Since the Cuthites settled in the area known as Samaria Shomron , they later became known as the Samaritans Shomronim. When the Cuthites were first relocated into Samaria, they were being killed by plagues of lions, and they did not know what to do about it. So they sent a message to the king of Assyria, asking for help. The king of Assyria did not know what to do about this either, so he asked advice from some kohanim priests of Israel, those people he had exiled from the land of Samaria and relocated elsewhere.

The king of Assyria therefore decided to send some Kohanim of Israel to teach the Cuthites how to keep the Torah. The Cuthites, because of the plagues, decided to accept some of the Torah. They began to worship Hashem, but it was soon discovered that they had not stopped worshiping their idols.

They were doing some odd combination of both. Nevertheless, the lions went away. You can read about all this in II Kings, Chapter Since the Samaritans still worshiped their idols, their conversion was not proper, and it was unacceptable. The Jews could therefore not accept the Samaritans as Jews. For this, the Samaritans developed a deep and terrible hatred for the Jews. They did whatever they could to destroy the Jews. They would send messages to the enemy overlord, claiming that the Jews were planning to revolt.

They tried many times to get the Jews killed. They also built their own temple on Mount Gerizim, and there they worshiped an odd combination of religions, which includes their distorted version of the Chumash, and idolatry. Their temple was dedicated to both G-d and to their own pagan idols.

The Samaritans also decided to accept the Sacred Book of the country i. However, they did not adopt all the Books of the Torah. They adopted some of what the kohanim of the Kingdom of Israel taught them about. The Samaritans accepted the Chumash, with some distortions of their own, but they refused to accept the Book of Joshua, because it excluded their ownership of the land they occupied. So they created their own book, which they call Joshua. Today, the small number of Samaritans on Mount Gerizim still have a distorted version of the Chumash, and their own book that they call Joshua.

So, during the sixth and fifth century B. Then, or so years later, in B. The people of Judah were taken into exile. The Holy Temple was destroyed. The Jews were exiled to a number of places. Most were taken to Babylon, but there were many sent to such faraway places as Yemen. The Babylonians finally lost their ascendancy over the world, and the Persians and Medes came into power. The Persians eventually gave the Jews permission to rebuild the Holy Temple.

So some Jews returned to Israel, the part of it called Judea, and began to rebuild the city and the Holy Temple. Most Jews, however, stayed where they were, but some Jews left Babylon to return to Israel, to resettle the area of Judah and to rebuild the Holy Temple.

Jews in or from Iraq and Iran this century are decendants of those Jews who stayed in Babylon and did not return for the resettling of Judah and the building of the Second Holy Temple. The returning Jews encountered many hardships in their endeavor, not the least of which was the Samaritans, who often waged war against them. The Samaritans also attempted to sabotage the building of the Holy Temple. At one point they tried to turn the Holy Temple into a pagan temple for their own religion.

Among the tricks they tried was pretending to be interested in helping the rebuilding. The Jews had already had too much negative experience with the Samaritans to be fooled by this trick, so the Jews refused to allow the Samaritans to join.

The Samaritans did not like the competition, so they decided to prevent the rebuilding of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. They told the king of Persia that the Jews were only pretending to rebuild the Holy Temple, but were really planning a revolt which was not true. Persia put an immediate stop to the rebuilding of the Holy Temple. Then a Jewish woman became queen of Persia. Her name was Esther. She could not convince her husband King Ahasueraus to allow the rebuilding of Holy Temple, but when her husband died she convinced her son Darius to let the Jews rebuild the Holy Temple.

Finally, in B.