Judaism and Christianity
The Sciences vs. Religion
In Ernest Wright’s God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital, Wright had declared, “In biblical faith everything depends upon whether the central events happened” (1952, 126–27).
It takes a lot of time-consuming labor to filter through all the biases in all fields of science and religion, but it is very necessary if we hope to find unfiltered truth. Then there are our own biases. We might wish to believe we have none, but we’d be fooling ourselves. Therefore, I do not present this as absolute. This is only my effort to filter through the biases. I thought archaeology would be pretty straightforward. It didn’t take long at all to expose my naivety. Religious archaeologists want their findings to support their religious writings, while non-religious ones do the opposite. Then there are the pro-Arab vs. pro-Israelite camps. I’ll try to make note as I continue which camp it seems each falls into.
While the Torah dates Adam to around 3,761 BCE, Homo sapiens first appeared approximately 200,000 years ago. Early human-like beings, including Homo erectus and Neanderthals, existed for millions of years before modern humans appeared, not in Mesopotamia, but likely in Africa in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.
So what of the biblical story of Adam and Eve? There are many theories, but solid answers are impossible to produce. A favorite of mine states that by the time the Torah was written (or rewritten) by Ezra, much of it was interpreted in a way that would restore the Judaehites’ national identity. Israel was long gone as a nation, having fallen a century before Judah, and those remaining in the land formerly occupied by that people were now identified as Samarian. These people wanted to participate in the rebuilding of Jerusalem, but Ezra and the Judaehites would have nothing to do with them. It was at this time they became known as Jews. More on that later.
In the process of establishing the people of Judah as the only people of God, much of the Torah was skewed to fit their present circumstances. Exiles from Judah clung to the belief that a descendant of David would arise to sit on the throne as king. Samaria, on the other hand, formed a priestly government. Ezra’s translation of the Torah referenced Adam as the first Jew. In their view, the Jews were the only true humans created in the image of God. The implication in Genesis of God saying, “Let us make man in our own image” referred to the creation of the Jewish people as opposed to the other humans God would, or had, created. The original ‘āḏām, of course, meant humankind and not an individual named Adam, but that was not what Ezra needed the text to convey.
Genesis 2, beginning with verse 4, then relates a rather confusing mash-up of creation, singling out Adam as an individual who was placed in the Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia and listing rivers that flowed through countries that would not have existed at that time. For instance, the people of the Aksumite Empire began using the designation “Ethiopians” only around the 4th century AD, when the Aksumite King Ezana conquered Nubia. Before that, the region was identified as the Kingdom of Kush. It seems apparent the Eden story is an edit by a later scribe.
The Bible then follows an impossible trail connecting this Adam to Noah, Abraham, and the Jews, the only people truly created in the image of God, the chosen people of God. There are some Hebrew literary tools in play here, so don’t try to follow the genealogy as we would today. There are gaps and overlaps in time that prove confusing even to scholars. This can be, and has been, interpreted to mean whatever the scholar chooses.
Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are several fragments and even some complete or near-complete manuscripts of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). The most significant of these include
> The “4Q17” manuscript containing portions of Genesis
> The “4Q22” manuscript containing portions of Exodus
> The “4Q46” manuscript containing portions of Deuteronomy
These manuscripts are approximately 2,200–2,300 years old and predate any other known Hebrew biblical manuscripts by about 1,000 years. They provide valuable insights into the textual history of the Hebrew Bible before the standardization of the Masoretic Text.
Before their discovery, scholars looked mainly to two texts to answer the question posed here—the traditional Hebrew text known as the Masoretic Text (or MT), which was finalized by Jewish scholars in about 1000 CE, and a Greek translation of the Hebrew text called the Septuagint (or LXX). This Greek translation of the Pentateuch (Torah) was made for the Jews of Alexandria in the beginning of the third century BCE. The Torah of the Septuagint more closely follows the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, so did they have access to some of the original Hebrew texts? There is not enough evidence to say at this point. The scrolls could be closest to Ezra’s edits, which were made around 457 BCE, but no original documents have yet been found.
During the captivity of the people under Nebuchadnezzar the Scriptures had been destroyed by corruption… But when seventy years later the Jews had returned to their own land in the times of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, Ezra the priest of the tribe of Levi was inspired to order in his mind all the words of the former prophets and to reestablish the Mosaic legislation for the people. [Iraneaus, Against Heresies, 3.21.2]
While “destroyed by corruption” is a different claim than 4 Ezra’s physical destruction during the Babylonian destruction of the temple, both sources assume that the pristine Mosaic revelation was lost until Ezra the scribe.
Classical rabbinic sources also claim that Ezra the Scribe repaired, replaced, or changed the Pentateuch after the destruction of the First Temple.
Ezra at Yehud
Yehud is the Aramaic version of ‘Judah’ (Hebrew Yehudah). In the Persian empire, where Aramaic was the common language of the western part of the empire, it was the name of the administrative province succeeding to a small portion of the former territory of the kingdom of Judah. In recent scholarly work it has become common to refer to Judah by this name when dealing with the Persian period (539–323 BCE), just as it is called Judaea during the Roman period.
Geography, government, and history
The province was probably about 30 miles from east to west and 25 miles from north to south, extending from Jericho and the Dead Sea in the east to the edge of the hill country in the west (certainly not as far as the coast), and from somewhere near Hebron in the south to just beyond Bethel in the north. Jerusalem lay in the center. It covered most of the old territory of the tribe of Benjamin as well as some of that of Judah.
Yehud formed part of the satrapy (top-level administrative division, governed by a Persian satrap) of ‘Beyond-the-River’ (Abar-nahara in Aramaic), which covered all of Syria and Palestine to the west of the Euphrates. The government of the province of Yehud was for a time entrusted to Jews, specifically Zerubbabel, a member of the royal family, around 520 BCE, and Nehemiah from 444 to some time after 432. However, the governor at the end of the 5th century was a Persian, Bigvai or Bagohi.
Interestingly, Ezra is not mentioned in other writings following the return from exile. Scholars can only guess as to the reason. Nevertheless, Ezra became known to many today as the father of Judaism because of his teaching (and many say re-writing) of the Torah. Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, who is strongly biased against biblical history, wrote, “When Judah suddenly faced the non-Israelite world on its own, it needed a defining and motivating text.” (1) This, according to Finkelstein, caused Ezra to rewrite the Torah in such a way as to emphasize Judah’s preeminence and to modify the promise of an everlasting Davidic kingship, something also promoted in the New Testament by the apostle Paul. When King Josiah, the last hope of fulfillment of the prophecy, was accidentally killed, that ended the kingly line. Ezra had to reorder the prophecies to point to ruling priests rather than a monarchy.
- Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts (p. 229). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
