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Ancient Israelite Religion(2000-587 BCE) Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.
- Ancient Jewish History
Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and...
- Modern Jewish History
Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and...
- Ancient Jewish History
Viewed in this way, the emergence of Judaism was the catalyst for setting the course of much of world history over the past 2,000 years. Throughout much of history, Jewish life and culture have been characterized by strict adherence to the practices and prohibitions given in the Torah. The origins of that observance, however, have remained a ...
Concurrently, Christianity began to diverge from Judaism, evolving into a predominantly Gentile religion. Decades later, the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE) further diminished the Jewish presence in Judea , leading to a geographical shift of Jewish life to Galilee and Babylonia , with smaller communities scattered across the Mediterranean .
- Ritual Baths, Chalk Cups and Graven Images
- Jewish Holy Days
- Hasmonean Nation-Building
The Hebrew Bible contains a number of provisions required to maintain ritual purity, which eventually took the form of bathing in distinctive immersion pools known as mikvahs. As Jesus’s disciple Mark says in the biblical book of the same name, Jews returning from the marketplace “do not eat unless they wash.” In the past century, excavators have i...
Biblical law also forbids preparing food, riding and drawing water, among other activities, on what is known as the Sabbath. “We do not know how pervasive Sabbath observance was during early biblical times, and when exactly the observance of the Sabbath took hold among the ancient Israelites,” says Rifat Sonsino, a theologist at Boston College. Adl...
Before the middle of the second century B.C.E., Adler believes Judeans were governed by “cultural norms and traditions inherited from the Iron Age”—that is, the centuries immediately after the Israelites arrived in Jerusalem. Veneration of the deity Yahweh was clearly part of this tradition, and there are hints of practices that later became common...
The Jewish diaspora (Hebrew: תְּפוּצָה, romanized: təfūṣā) or exile (Hebrew: גָּלוּת gālūṯ; Yiddish: golus) is the dispersion of Israelites or Jews out of their ancient ancestral homeland (the Land of Israel) and their subsequent settlement in other parts of the globe.
NOVA | The Bible's Buried Secrets | The Foundation of Judaism | PBS. In this article, biblical scholar Shaye Cohen looks at how a pagan practice became a religion rooted in the Torah and...
Israeli Jews or Jewish Israelis ( Hebrew: יהודים ישראלים Yêhūdīm Yīśrāʾēlīm) comprise Israel 's largest ethnic and religious community. The core of their demographic consists of those with a Jewish identity and their descendants, including ethnic Jews and religious Jews alike. Approximately 99% of the global Israeli Jewish ...
