What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
if we were forced to choose just one, there would be no way to deny that Judaism is the most important intellectual development in human history.
I think Jewish history did away with a priesthood when the Temple was destroyed, and it became, supposedly, a religion of scholars. A rabbi is just a scholar.
Judaism is in a sense a Rabbinic, Talmudic religion, rather than a Biblical religion.
It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.
Around A.D. 930, the sages in Tiberias assembled all 24 holy books and completed the writing of the codex, the first definitive Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible. From Tiberias, the codex was taken to Jerusalem.
For a thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, the Jewish holy scriptures - the five parts of the Torah and 19 other holy books - were copied and passed down in the various Jewish communities from generation to generation.
The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too.
