Abstract
Until the nineteenth century, biblical ‘events’, as related by stories in the Hebrew Scriptures, had been generally considered as deriving from a Golden Age. They were regarded as historically reliable reports from an era when life was radically different from what modern people know today, a time when wondrous natural and human events, miracles and bodily cures wrought by divine intervention were commonplace; it was a time when giants, angels and demons openly roamed the world. However, the search for an Historical Jesus gave rise to other perceptions of ‘Jesus’: the Literary Jesus and the Biblical Jesus. These must be carefully perused.
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Notes
- 1.
See my book, Three Revolutions. Three Drastic Changes in Interpreting the Bible, ATF Press: Hindmarsh, 2012, particularly Chap. 14.
- 2.
We will see that ‘Messiah’ had a variety of meanings both in Judaism and, later, in Christianity. Its basic etymology is The Anointed One and this principally referred to a King, whose installation including a ritual of anointing. Various forms of Deliverer, sent to the People of Israel by their God, were subsumed under the title. The topic will be dealt with further in the book.
- 3.
The inscription is uncertain; it could even refer to another David or to a David who was a local chieftain but not a king. The text may not actually mean ‘David’.
- 4.
From what we can gather the name of the area around Jerusalem from the eighth century BCE was called Judah. The Babylonians translated the Hebrew name into Aramaic as Yehud Medinata (‘the province of Judah’) or simply ‘Yehud’ and made it a new Babylonian province. This was inherited by the Persians. Under the Greeks, Yehud was translated as Judaea and this was taken over by the Romans. After the Jewish rebellion of 135 CE, the Romans renamed the area as Syria Palaestina or simply Palestine. The area described by these land titles differed to some extent in the different periods.
- 5.
There is a complication for writers insofar as modern writers distinguish between the First Temple Period (Solomon to Judah’s destruction in 586 BCE) and the Second Temple Period (the building of a Temple under the Persians and its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE). The Second Temple would include the massive rebuilding under Herod the Great in the period just prior to the Christian era. However, what has been said above throws doubt on the existence of a First Temple dedicated to the sole god, Yahweh.
- 6.
The Samaritans in the north, who had used the name of ‘Israel’ for their land and became Yahweh-worshippers, were on the other hand removed from participation in this new ‘Israel’ because of their alleged moral and racial lapses in integrity. They developed separately and were later regarded by the people of the south with great suspicion.
- 7.
The figure of Isaac will be of prime interest in Chap. 8.
- 8.
For clarity in a very complex situation, we will use ‘Judahite’ for the ‘people of the land’ in Judah, who had been the subject of the Babylonian destruction and the Persian reconstruction. We will use ‘Judean’ to signify the people of Judah who have been formed as an amalgam of the Judahites and the new arrivals.
- 9.
We are unsure what the name meant, possibly ‘The Hammer’.
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Crotty, R. (2017). The Study of the Jewish Past. In: The Christian Survivor. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3214-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3214-1_2
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