Introduction
Modern Judaism dates to the middle-ages. Before that came the Rabbinic Period, beginning late in the first century. Before that was the period described as the “Late Second Temple” Period which included the Persian, Seleucid, Hasmonean and Roman occupation periods. Before that were the Babylonian exile and post-exilic periods, and before that the Assyrian obliteration of the northern tribes of the House of Israel.
And before that? We simply don’t know. Because of sparse archaeological data, scholars dispute the historicity of David and Solomon, the conquest of Canaan, the Exodus, Moses’s upbringing in Pharaoh’s court, and the patriarchal sagas stretching back to Abraham and beyond.
But we’re not concerned here with whether Israel’s ancient history, per se, is accurate. We’re concerned with something far more consequential: the narrative Israel eventually adopted to justify the unquestioned authority of its religious system.
That narrative, I contend, was constructed—not received. This view, of course, is utterly blasphemous to practicing Jews. But acknowledging the emotional weight of the Judaic tradition does not preclude examining its origins honestly.
The Narrative
Mainstream scholarship holds that Israel’s story was largely unwritten until after the Babylonian exile (586 BC) [i]. Almost none of its historical narrative, therefore, represents eyewitness testimony, nor was that ever its goal.
Its purpose was simple and focused: to institutionalize a story in which God chose to establish a covenant with the people descended from the patriarch Jacob and transmit it through the revered Moses to the people. This covenant, as it was eventually revealed, was founded on the keeping of a sweeping set of laws and system by which Israelites were to live and worship their God. Why this system? Because its rules demanded a Temple, a group of priests, and a large group of Temple workers (Levites) to operate it, all of whom were to be supported in perpetuity by the people through the mechanisms of the people’s sacrifices and temple taxes.
The Israelite people were hardly shocked by this innovation. Every culture in the Ancient Near East had temples, priests, and sacrificial systems. Israel’s priestly authors were not inventing something unprecedented; if anything, they were simply aligning their practices with the religious norms of their world.
The narrative’s problem was simply that it was fabricated. God never expressed his desire for a Temple or sacrifices [ii]. Just the opposite, according to the Prophets. But their critical, “minority view” texts were seemingly ignored by the literate elite in favor of those supporting the cultic system. And the people remained oblivious.
Few realize that until the 1st century BC (and more broadly, the 1st century AD), no synagogues existed (in Israel) in which people could learn what their sacred texts actually said. Because of illiteracy and the unavailability of sacred scrolls, the people had no access to the voices of these Prophets issuing God’s protests against the elite’s cultic system.
Their system, therefore, flourished unchallenged—in spite of those inconvenient prophetic warnings.
Now, were those responsible for fabricating their narrative entirely self-serving, or disingenuous? Not necessarily. It is possible that the original architects of the system, perhaps in response to Babylon (or possibly in response to King Hezekiah’s “reforms”, or possibly the widespread idol worship and sacrifice in the Hasmonean period![iii]) may have been convinced that such a system was truly the right way (not just the most profitable) to worship YHVH. It also looked, reassuringly, like their neighboring nations’ practices (who, notably, had not been destroyed and exiled).
Their disingenuousness was their calculated decision to hide their plan behind the cover of the label of “the Law of Moses”.
Consequences
Having grown up hearing of Moses’s heroics that saved their ancestors from Egypt, once texts were attributed to him—and by extension to God—they became unassailable. Anything said to be a part of the “Law of Moses”[iv] was accepted without discussion owing to the people’s perception of Moses’s stature.
By the time these texts gained normative authority (beginning in the 3rd century BCE), the people were already beginning to be shaped by their demands: sacrifices, purity laws, food restrictions, festival observances, and marital regulations.
Under the power of the concept of a Torah given by God to Moses, who was said to have written it down (or passed it on orally down through the generations), an entire culture and pattern of living had been defined. By the time the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, Jews had lived for over 200 years inside their calendar and lifestyle defined by this priestly law.
When the Temple fell, the culture did not collapse. Instead, it reinvented itself. The Mishnah (see The Strange Case of the Mishna) and later rabbinic writings replaced the Temple and its priests as the new center of religious authority. Indeed, in the post-war environment of Palestine, some rabbis (“sages”, e.g., Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Judah ha‑Nasi) gained normative personal authority for themselves and their writings.
This is key. What had once been sold as obedience to a “divine” Torah became obedience to a cultural system—a system created by priests, expanded by scribes, and eventually codified by the first rabbis.
This Torah (and its Oral counterpart) became esteemed. Consequently, some Jews elevated it to mystical heights, treating it as the source of all wisdom and reality (see Kabbalah e.g., Zohar, Midrash Rabbah; and Hasidic Masters e.g., Baal Shem Tov, Tanya, etc.)
But its power comes not from its philosophers or mystics but from the millions of everyday Jews who have continued to observe its festivals and remaining laws, implicitly maintaining their connection with their ancestors including those of whom it is said were chosen by God.
Evidence
At this point, if you’re even modestly objective, you should be mentally demanding to know my evidence for these heretical claims. And you would be right to do so.
I support my case on two primary and one supplemental pillars of logic:
- First, God repeatedly states through his prophets not just his lack of desire for sacrifices, but his utter disgust with them (e.g., Amos 5:21-24, Isaiah 1:11–17, Jeremiah 6:20, etc.) In encountering these statements, one has to ask: “Why are these statements only found in the Prophets, the same prophets who report God’s disdain for Israel’s Temple to house him (2 Samuel 7:5–7), but never in the Torah? What is the difference in pedigree conferred on the Torah (“the Law of Moses”) and the Prophets? Furthermore, what is the prophet objecting to when he writes: ‘“How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie.’”? As Dr. Tim Mackey has noted[v], the Hebrew Bible is a “minority report” on the history of Israel that, tragically, was ignored until it was too late.
It seems more than strange that such an obvious and enormous dichotomy (theologically) should be laying in plain sight in our Bibles but that none of its authors/redactors seem to have made any attempt to reconcile it. It has already been mentioned that there was no method of exposing the dichotomy outside of the clique of the scribal and religious elite until long after the cultic system had been established. By then it had become the way of life for multiple generations.
- It is indisputable that the primary beneficiaries of the Temple’s cultic system were its priests, and those in its employ, including its scribes. Suggesting that some self-interest might have crept into the formation of the Torah’s Levitical, ceremonial laws is a platitude. We know human nature, if not from formal study, then from simple observation of ourselves. Said another way, it would be difficult to conceive of a rules- and procedure-based Torah being drafted by humans that was absent any influence or any consideration of its authors, and far harder to imagine it being dictated by the God of the Universe. (If there is something cosmically significant about not mixing wool and linen in a garment, the Bible never mentions what it is.)
Of course, it is well established from both archaeology and the historical literature that priests were fabulously wealthy compared to lay people. They never dealt with “common” objects or tasks. Others did that for them as they were “set aside for God” i.e., holy, and so above incurring the taint of common life.
Nearly 2,000 years have passed since the last sacrifice. If God commanded the sacrificial system, why has He not restored it? Why has He not expressed displeasure at its absence? Instead, Judaism has evolved into a rich tapestry of practices—food laws, prayers, festivals, and communal rituals—all rooted in the priestly Torah. Yet nowhere does the Hebrew Bible assert God’s pleasure in these practices or His displeasure at their absence.
Does God care, one way or the other? If he does, it’s clear Moses didn’t know of it as he never mentions any of it. (Paul didn’t seem to think so either, as he notes in Romans 3:27-30.)
Whatever God’s endorsement of these practices or lack thereof, they act, as they always have, as a substitute for our personal devotion and fidelity to him.
Conclusions
I find it unimaginably tragic that an entire people have been led astray by a disingenuously provenanced text. There was a “Law/Book/Scroll of Moses”. It just didn’t contain virtually any of the Levitical ceremonial material that later was associated with it, becoming the foundation of the Jewish religion.
The non-Levitical Torah did contain the historical narrative relating the origins of the world, the Patriarchs, and the “children of Abraham”. It did contain God’s instructions to those children as to how they were to love God and neighbor. It was a complete moral and ethical manifesto for Israel’s life in the land.
What took its place was religiosity. (A similar substitution can be seen in modern “Christian” practice that is marked by knowing and saying the “right” things, and publicly pretending to be righteous).
It might be argued that the non-sacrificial and non-Temple offering components of the Torah that are practiced today are harmless enough. After all, they do act to establish a cultural identity and a pool of social capital among those in the Jewish communities where they are practiced.
But I would disagree. Like virtually any symbolic religious practices, they act to divert their adherents’ attention away from the “all or nothing” nature of relationship with God that he plainly lays out in his Shema. Following a religious routine, be it attending church and singing worship songs, or preparing and partaking of weekly Sabbath Seders, acts as a kind of anesthetic that leaves its participants the impression that by “following the rules” they are living faithfully to their God. They may be, but if they are, it has nothing to do with their religious routine.
The entire purpose of the Bible is to relate God’s desire for us to live in covenant relationship with him as our father. He set the terms of this covenant millennia ago, calling for our total submission and fidelity to him, and service to our neighbors, which he promised to equip us to live out (Jer 31:31-34, Eze 37:14). Unfortunately, men continue to reject that covenant and so have obscured his message with their own, resulting in what we have today.
God’s call remains steady and clear: replace our religiosity with a return to single-minded devotion to him and his will for us as the focus of our lives.
[i] Some of the Prophets’ material, possibly Job, and some of the poetry of the Psalms likely came earlier (8th-7th century) in large part due to the influx of skilled, knowledgeable scribes who immigrated from the north in response to the Assyrian exile of the northern tribes in the 8th century.
[ii] God’s Issues With the Temple Cult, Did God Want a Temple, Sacrifices, or a Monarchy?
[iii] Balentine, Samuel E. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible, Ch 28 The Politics of Worship, Oxford University Press, September, 2020
[iv] I have detailed in Wrestling With the Origins of the Pentateuch that it is impossible for the “Law/Book/Scroll of Moses” to be the entire Torah – the entire five books of the Pentateuch. But that is nevertheless the identity those books have acquired over the course of time quite irrespective of their origins.
[v] Making of the Bible [Extended Version] Tim Mackie (The Bible Project) – YouTube (t=55:50)
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