APPROACHING RELIGION IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

The practices, beliefs, and social values that have coalesced within the religious system we call Judaism have their foundation in the Hebrew Bible, also called the Tanakh. It is therefore critical to assess the Tanakh as a source of historical, social, and religious information; often additional insights stem from artifacts and texts that are separate from the biblical books. The writings in the Tanakh reflect a time span of close to a millennium. Scholars debate how early to date Genesis narratives in which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob directly encounter God, but it is clear that the latest biblical literature, for example, the book of Daniel, was written after Alexander's conquest of the early fourth century BCE. The Tanakh is built upon religious perceptions and sentiments reflecting a range of historical experiences that shaped the people we have come to call “the Jews.”

History is thus crucial to Judaism as a religion in several ways, but, at the same time, it is not easy to provide “a history” of the first section of the Tanakh, the “Five Books of Moses,” which contains the major blueprints for how biblical Israelites were to organize their lives. Three of these books, from the latter parts of Exodus through Leviticus and Numbers, contain detailed instructions about a sacrificial cult, including how to build a Tabernacle in the desert, how priests (kohanim) should be dressed, how sacrificial animals are to be prepared, and which sacrifices are appropriate to which festivals.