I would say there are four possibilities and from most to least likely, this is how I’d rank them:
Mesopotamia or Persia
The Bible strongly suggests that Abraham and the first Jewish people were from ancient Mesopotamia and migrated to Israel, though I think the Hebrew people were probably mostly native Canaanites who took on the Hebrew culture from the east. The Jewish communities in Iraq are very ancient and Judaism has a lot of parallels with Zoroastrianism so in my opinion this is the bet that fits what we know from history the best.
Palestine
It’s of course entirely possible that Judaism is completely native to Palestine and the Biblical accounts are just fabrications to make their history seem grander, or simply mistaken and that the Jews and Canaanites are in fact one and the same, or more precisely the Hebrews were one tribal confederation of the greater Syriac/Levantine culture.
Egypt
I think another possibility is that Judaism began as a group of Egyptians who converted to Zoroastrianism and then were banished from the Nile Delta, explaining the wandering in the desert and Red Sea story.
Cyprus/Crete
There are significant genetic and cultural links between these islands and Palestine that go back 3 to 5 millennia. Cypriots are genetically very similar to Jews.
The Babylonian Exile seems to have been a real event, and the return to Judea of some number of exiles, (as noted in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah with various corroborating comments among the major Prophets, particularly Ezekiel and Trito-Isaiah), suggests that Judaism arose at that time.
Note, that your thread title expressly asks when Judaism, the religious beliefs and traditions, began as opposed to when the Jewish people arose.
Were you actually asking about the rise of the religion or of the ethnic group? (Depending on one’s views, they may or may not be congruent.)
The Jewish communities in Iraq and Iran are ancient because the Babylonians took over the Jewish kingdom in the 7th century and moved a lot of Jews to Babylon. Then, after Persia conquered Babylon, Jewish communities set up there.
Assuming you don’t believe the biblical story, most of the archaeological evidence suggests your second option…that the Hebrew people were originally a Canaanite tribal confederation.
That’s pretty much it. There never was an Exodus from Egypt, there never was a united Davidic-Solomonic kingdom of Israel-Judah, and most of the OT appears to have been the work of Israelite priests who found refuge in Judah after the Assyrian conquest of Israel.
Weirdly, considering (much of) the Talmud was written in Babylon, Jewish populations in Iraq have come and gone. The Iraqi Jewish population in the first half of the last century (largely gone now) was not continuous with the Mesopotamian Jewish population 2000 years ago. I know, it surprised me too!
And Iraqi Jewish populations probably have very little to do with the origins of the Hebrews in Mesopotamia.
For a set of writings that are attempting, among other things, to put forward the case that the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people and that they were given it by God, I don’t think that the “they were never in Egypt someone made it all up” theory makes any kind of psychological sense. If you are trying to shore up your claim to possess a bit of land, you don’t make up a “well we came here from somewhere else therefore the land is ours” story. You make up a “we were always here since the dawn of creation” story. The point of the stories about, say, Abraham buying land to bury Sarah in, or being shown the land by God and told that it would be his children’s is “look, even though we WEREN’T always here, it’s still ours.”
Therefore, I don’t see any reason to doubt that the people of Israel did, in fact, come into the land at some point from somewhere else. The argument that the Exodus never happened because there’s no archaeological support only really works if you assume that the numbers in the Pentateuch are correct. If you’re talking 6 million people - yes, you’ve got a problem if you don’t find any physical evidence. If you’re talking, say, a few thousand or tens of thousands, I don’t see how we’d expect there to be much physical evidence remaining after three and a half thousand years.
Which, of course, says nothing about the reliability of the specific stories in the Pentateuch - ten plagues, parting of the Red Sea, and so forth. What we can say though is that the Jewish people clearly had a very well defined sense of themselves as a distinct people with a distinct God well before the Babylonian conquest - it had to be strong, to keep going through two generations of conquest and exile. People do sometimes argue that Judaism was basically born during the exile but even if it was mostly codified then there must have been something pretty significant that was already part of the culture and prevented them from simply assimilating. That sort of identity doesn’t spring up overnight.
My understanding is that basis of Judaism was in the Canaanite religious practices where they worshipped Baal and El .
The Hebrews were wandering tribes related to the Bedouin. They started aggregating in the Palestinian hill country 3000- 3500 years ago and adapted the local Western Semitic language and local religious practices including the historical story of Abraham. They also worshiped the usual Canaanite Gods.
The Hebrews formed a schism from the mainstream religions and their language altered a bit. Mainstream Canaa went on to develop the Aramaic dialect while the Hebrews developed, well, Hebrew.
In terms of religion the Hebrews renamed God to Yaweh and cut out the Canaanite Gods, hence stories in the Bible about worshiping false idols etc - though there is plenty of records these same idols were worshiped by Hebrews before.
One significant difference between the Canaanites and the Hebrews was the Hebrew rejection of graven images and material things. That’s why there is almost no BC Hebrew related statues or art, nor even philosophy and science. All they really had was their book the Torah, which as many have pointed out, is mostly fake. The Canaanites on the other hand were into graven images and art and architecture and Jewelry in a big way. They also explored the world and set up the Phoenician Empire and later Carthaginian Empire.
Amusingly the big period of Hebrew construction and enlightenment was under Herod the Great who was of immediate Bedouin descent. His fondness for architecture and art, together with no long Jewish lineage made him a hated figure. It’s almost possible that if the Romans hadn’t destroyed the temple, the local radical Jews would have.
If you had to put a date when Judaism actually first developed, my guess is when Moses (or equivalent scribe) wrote it all down in the Torah.
Your understanding based on what? The detail you present here looks like so much “reasonable supposition” that sells books, but that shouldn’t be accepted as remotely factual without a lot more corraborating evidence than “It makes sense to me.”
Which goes back into the end of Egyptian rule in Egypt theory. We saw similar fights between and within countries in Africa and Asia about which group was boss now that the Brits/Dutch/French/Spanish are gone. The Hebrews were the people who won. And therefore we hear their story.
A very simple example is the name of Israel. Yisraʾel Triumphant God. Yisra - Triumphant, El - God.
Or in other versions “El fights/struggles”, or '[The God] El rules.
El of course was the Canaanite God. In the Canaanite religion, or Levantine religion as a whole, El or Il was a god also known as the Father of humanity and all creatures, and the husband of the goddess Asherah as recorded in the clay tablets of Ugarit
And regarding Jewish worship of El and Baal. There are plenty of sources. You could try Jewish Baal worship
In detail from Jewish Encyclopedia
It would appear that the Hebrews first learned Ba’al-Worship from the agricultural Canaanites. Their life before the conquest of Canaan, whether lived in or outside of Palestine, was nomadic, and therefore kept them beyond the circle of religious associations promoted by the cultivation of the soil. After their settlement the Israelites began to live as did the people of the land, and with the new mode of industrial and domestic life came the example and the incitement of the religious use and wont that were inseparable from the soil. The stated festivals, in which the Ba’als of the land had drawn to themselves all the enthusiasm and devotion of an intensely religious people, were a part of the fixed order of things in Palestine, and were necessarily appropriated by the religion of Yhwh. With them came the danger of mixing the rites of the false gods and the true God; and, as a matter of fact, the syncretism did take place and contributed more than anything else to the religious and moral decline of Israel.
I’m sure I’ll be scoffed at, but isn’t there a case for origin along the Nile?
Consider the Falasha (Beta Israel) of Ethiopia. IIRC, some of the oldest versions of Biblical works were found among the Falasha, yet they did not celebrate post-Exilic festivals such as Hanukkah and Purim. These facts both seem in accord with their own myth that they separated from the Hebrew mainstream before the Exile. The existence of the Qemant people, also in Ethiopia, who practice a primitive religion with Hebrew elements adds further support.
Ignoring stories before Joseph or Moses, the Hebrew’s own origin myth starts in Egypt – one needn’t find vast manna trees in the Sinai desert to believe there might be some basis in fact. The Ark found in Tutankhamen’s tomb resembles the Ark of the Covenant described in the Bible. The Exodus is sometimes dated to the rejection of King Tut’s Aten-worshipping father. Even the names Adonai and Moses are sometimes linked to Egyptian cognates.
I am not a Biblical scholar, and haven’t even provided cites – scholars here probably know much more about the hypotheses I outline than I do. I’d be happy to be disabused of this ignorance once and for all, … but cite-free condescending dismissal is not the way to win my heart!
Based on the text of the Old Testament, Noah seems to have lived in the region just North or West of Babylon (AKA Sumer, depending on era). His children are recorded as having founded a number of cities in Syria and Babylon and his descendants were involved in building the tower of Babel, in Babylon. Abraham is famous for making the long journey, West over the desert, and down the Levant to Canaan.
The legends of the Deluge are shared with the Babylonians and it seems likely that other early tales of the OT are largely based on tales from that region.
The Old Testament, itself, was mostly written/edited into its present form around 500 BC. As such, when the book talks about the region of Babylon that Noah and Abraham came from, they call it Chaldea. However, the Chaldeans were fairly recent arrivals to the Sumerian region. They had only been living there since roughly 600 BC. So clearly we need to take everything with a grain of salt.
One of those things is the concept that Canaan and Israel are different things. In terms of language and culture, everything East of Egypt, West of Babylon, and South of Assyria, was populated by people who were “Canaanites”. Some regions were highly organized, urban nations. Others were populated by nomadic groups that mostly lived in the desert. But calling any of it a “nation state”, as we view it in the modern sense, is just silly. If you were a nomad, you probably had a chief. If you lived in a city, you probably had a prince. The princes of some regions might have had close ties to their neighboring princes, and many of them might have bent a knee to a centralized king. But there were probably towns that existed alone, with just their prince. And there were probably regions of friendly princes with no overarching king. All of this probably varied widely from year to year, and particularly as one generation gave way to the next.
But probably the largest, organized group of Canaanites in the Ancient world was the Amorites. They did live in the Akkadian region, Northwest of Babylon. Their capital was in the city of Mari. And, more importantly, they did migrate West over the desert, and down the Levant to the region later known as Canaan (or today, Israel).
Now, just as every town had its own prince and every tribe had its own chief, it seems to be that every particular group of Canaanites has their own god. In the overarching mythos of Canaanitic culture, there were many shared gods, all lead by El. But similar to how each city in Medieval Europe had its own Saint, each group of Canaanites had their tribal god. For the Amorites, this was Amurru. But for other groups, it might be Ba’al, Chemosh, Moloch, Kaus, etc. The Bible tells us of “sons” forming their own kingdoms. E.g., the sons of Lot formed the Moabites and the Ammonites. From archaeology, we know that the Moabites existed from 1250-600 BC, worshiping Chemosh, and the Ammonites from 900-100 BC and worshiped Moloch. So, based on the Bible, there’s every indication that they considered all of these groups to be “family” and to have been founded by people who had believed in the same original god (whoever that might be) and who had the same history as themselves. From archaeology we know that they each named their tribal god differently from one another, but that they did all tend to make him live on a mountain - choosing the nearest mountain to the tribe.
Overall, the greatest indication is that Judaism’s oldest history starts with the Amorites. They were the largest, most organized group in the ancient Canaanite world and, after moving West, had complete ownership of the upper half of the Levant, at least, and possibly went all the way South to Egypt.
However, Yahweh pretty clearly comes from the South. So where I just talked about Ancient Judaic history, now let’s talk about Middle Judaic history.
Yahweh’s mountain is Mt. Sinai (probably Jebel al-Madhbah, the earliest references to Yahweh that we know of from archaeology are from Southern Canaan - e.g., writings by the Egyptians and of course the Kuntillet Ajrud. Probably Yahweh was the tribal god of a nomadic group who roamed around the Northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba or Southeast of there that was friendly with the Midianites. While everyone that we have talked about is “Canaanite”, this group is the ones that generally would be referred to as the “Israelites”. Though, it’s worth noting that the name “Israel” is a reference to the god, El. El was the SUPREME, not tribal, god of the various Canaanite groups.
One theory is that the Israelites moved North, became urbanized, rose through the ranks, and eventually became the upper-crust of Canaanite society. But if you read the Bible, all mentions of gods like Chemosh, Moloch, Ba’al, etc. are written to demonize those gods. From that, I take it that there was a fair amount of political struggle between these groups for the top rung. I would not be surprised if the principal motivation behind the compilation of the Old Testament was to induce or solidify the leadership of the Israelites over the Moabites, Ammonites, Philistines, and Edomites.
But, there’s every indication that the Israelites still worshiped El, Asherah, and the remainder of the Canaanite pantheon well past the point where they had ceased being nomads.
And of course, the OT agrees that the kings of Israel were poor at following monotheism until just before the writing of the OT.
Which brings takes us out of Middle Judaic history to Formative Judaic history.
Speculation that there may have been some politics behind the formation of the Old Testament aside, archaeology would seem to show that monotheism really came into the kingdom of Israel as the most powerful nearby nation, Assyria, came to be Zoroastrian. And when Assyria collapsed, a large number of educated bureaucrats and nobles moved South into Israel.
Within a hundred years, El was replaced by Yahweh, all of the competing tribal gods were being demonized, icons were being rounded up and destroyed, and the Old Testament was compiled.
So that’s where, overwhelmingly, Judaism came from.
However, leading up to approximately the era of Jesus, Jewish legend continued to increase the scope of the Old Testament. Much of this was incorporated into Christianity (e.g., Satan and The Fall), but some of it also made it into the Ethiopian branch of Judaism (e.g., The Book of Enoch) and I think that most Jews would recognize stories about Adams’s first wife, Lilith, and how she bore all the demons. These stories generally originate from this time period and, while not canonical, have influenced some of the more literary aspects of Judaic lore and, subsequently, the religions that grew out of it.
However my impression from reading various stuff was that the Hebrews (less complex than religion) were closely linked and probably derived from from the Edomites and Nabateans. i.e. a South-East ethnic Arab origin and closely related to modern Bedouin.
In the process they adopted the North-West Semitic language - not sure what they spoke before. Some Semitic variant I guess.
In terms of geography they ceased being nomads and started to accumulate in the Rocky Mountain ridge on the axis Hebron, Jerusalem, Schechem. They were without the fertile lands of Canaan and I guess a bit covetous. Actual civil establishment peaked about 3000 years ago and flickered and fell over the next 1000 years
I don’t recall they ever took over Canaan proper. Or at least not all of it at any one time and then for a quite brief period.
I think it’s reasonable to say that the Edomites were properly proto-Jews. The Nabateans and Midianites are probably more closely connected to the Arabic tradition. But certainly, the Israelites were in the general region of all three of those groups and, originally, may have been an offshoot of one of them.
But since we don’t really have sufficient evidence, at the moment, I think it’s more reasonable to try and fill in the gaps using the OT. Besides being linked to Southern Canaan in the Old Testament, the Israelites are also linked to Egypt and, supposedly, are the remnants of Israelites who had lived in and subsequently fled Egypt. That would leave one to believe that the Israelites have some history with the Hyksos (possibly Amorite but definitely Canaanitic groups who crossed Sinai to take over the Northern coast of Egypt, just to be driven out by Ahmose I after a couple centuries.)
If we’re to believe any part of the Exodus, it would seem to tell us that the Israelites were the descendants of Canaanites who fled Egypt, after being expelled by Ahmose (or another Egyptian emperor sometime between Ahmose and Rameses II), fled across Sinai, and ended up being saved by the Midianites, possibly intermarrying with them, before splitting off again.
But just as it’s speculation that the story of Abraham relates to the Amorites based on archaeology, this is also speculation. Some ancient person could have just come up with a story out of thin air and - pattern finders that we humans are - a modern historian, given enough millenia of history to work with, will find a way to make it fit.
The slight references to the Shasu and (maybe) Yahweh, by the Egyptians, don’t correspond all that well to the idea that the Hyksos had anything to do with the Israelites. Or maybe the Shasu decided to team up with the Amorites and invade Egypt. But certainly the Shasu do correspond well to the nomad/bedouin concept.
Ultimately, I’d say that the evidence about who the “Israelites” were before the Kuntillet Ajrud era is too slight to say anything conclusive. They seem to have considered themselves part of the “Jewish” side of things and the “Arabic” to be a different branch. But by the time they wrote that down, any history there may have been between proto-Jews and proto-Arabs was already 700 years old. Plenty of time for a lot of stuff to get garbled and invented from whole cloth.
Arabs did not exist. The first reference to them is about 300 years later at Kakar until 853 BC in an inscription about the battle, and it’s disputed whether it is a reference to Arabs at all.
I doubt that. They were speaking an ancient version of Arabic in North West Arabian Peninsula at that time.
In terms of ethnic Arabs - as distinct from Arabic speaking peoples - the archaeological record shows human presence in the Arabian Peninsula from at least the Lower Paleolithic. Later records show genetic transfer from the North, but for certain there were people there at all times and in particular in the Biblical period.
There was separately Levantine Arabian transmigration which resulted in Hebrew speaking tribes living in and near Medina - who presumably assimilated and became modern Arabs. I’m not sure if they were just Hebrew speaking or were Levantine migrants. In history, languages generally migrate a lot faster than genes.
