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How Israel lost the kingdom of God and developed into just another religious system.
From the very beginning of time, God’s plan for mankind centered in the fact that He desired to have a personal relationship with man. Through this relationship, He would communicate to man His will and desires so that man would establish God’s kingdom on earth. God’s kingdom on earth simply means how God intended the earth to be run through man.
Through His kingdom on earth, God desired to bless all nations and people’s of the earth through the nation of Israel, as He had promised Abraham. The nation of Israel was supposed to be God’s representatives before the rest of the world.
However, following a long succession of kings, most of whom rejected God and served idols, Israel failed in this mission. And having disobeyed the commands and ways which they received from the One True God, the Israelites inevitably came under the Covenant curses as described in Deuteronomy 28, one being exile. As a result, their country fell to a series of conquerors, and the Jews scattered throughout the world.
First the northern kingdom was assimilated into the Assyrian empire and ceased to exist and then the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians. Through this integration, the main factors that have always been inevitable threats to the Jewish identity are assimilation, intermarriage, persecution and plain disobedience to God’s commands.
We shall now look at Israel’s history very briefly in order to see how these factors working in conjunction with the mechanisms described in the other video about how religions are created, have caused the development of the diverse branches of Judaism that exist today.
During the Babylonian exile and the Persian period from 586-331 B.C, the Hebrews struggled with questions of how to be faithful to God as they were now neither independent nor in their land, had no temple and were living in the midst of people who did not know Hashem. In an attempt to keep their traditional worship alive, some Jews in Egypt at Elephantine even violated the prohibition found in Deut. 12:5 to build other temples. The choice of this group was to syncretize their faith.
The Developments that took place during this period, that caused major changes in Jewish life and perspective included:
a. The synagogue as a place of prayer, gathering, education and worship, which arose to make up for the absence of the temple / and then the problem of distance from Jerusalem after the temple was rebuilt . The synagogue was not a temple but an innovation rather than a violation of the law, and it became the center of religious identity and practice. This then led to the development of teachers and rabbis who would lead the nation in instruction about the law. Judaism now became an ethnic way of life and worship built around a Nomocracy (which is where the law rules) rather than a theocracy (which is where God rules …as it had formerly been). This Nomocracy was supported by a growing oral law or tradition, designed to deal with the demands of the new and changing setting.
b. With no King, a decrease of the role of prophets and a rebuilt temple, the high priest now became central in Jewish religion and life. He used to share authority with the king but now he took on an expanded role, which not only involved the temple, but he was also national representative to foreign powers.
c. The emergence of other dominant languages meant that Jews no longer had direct access to the language of their scriptures in their native tongue.
d. Exposure to the foreign belief systems of other nations influenced their thinking.
The country was then ruled by the Greeks under Alexander the Great of Macedonia, then by the Ptolemies of Egypt, and then by the Seleucids of Syria. With the rise of Hellenism, many Hellenistic practices and worship were brought in, and since many Jews were attracted to this new way of life, there were increasing fears of a loss of Jewish identity.
In 168 B.C king Antiochus IV of Syria, tried to stop the practice of Judaism, but the Jews led by Judah Maccabee, revolted and overthrew the Syrians. The Jews established an independent state that lasted about 100 years under a series of rulers called the Hasmoneans. However the marriage of politics and religion contributed to both the expansion and destruction of the Hasmoneans.
It was During this period, that several different religious groups developed within Judasim. The Sadducees who accepted only the written law or the Torah, preferred a road of compromise, open to other ways of doing things, commercial opportunity, and support for those in power, then there were the Pharisees who added their own interpretations to the Torah, and tried to keep the law and a life that reflected Jewish identity and then there were the Essenes who withdrew from society and kept their faithfulness in the desert to wait for a better day.
In 63.B.C, the Romans conquered Judea and made it a Roman province. Roman rule was so harsh that many Jews left Judea to escape their domination. This also led the Jews to hope for the coming of a messiah to lead them to victory over their enemies. Another sect known as the Zealots believed that only God was their ruler and Lord and they advocated overthrow of the Roman government by violence and re-establishment of the independent Jewish state. The Jews revolted in the great Zealot uprising of 66 A.D. and drove out the Romans for a brief time. But 4 years later, the Romans retook Jerusalem and destroyed the 2nd Temple.
So in the decades before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D, the Jewish people in the Roman province of Judaea were divided into the several movements of Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots, sometimes warring among themselves: Historic sources such as Josephus, the New testament, recovered fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Rabbinical writings from later periods, including the Talmud, give evidence of the divisions among Jews at this time.
A remnant of Jewish resistance was centered on the fortress of Masada but it, too, fell in 73 A.D.
Jewish national independence came to an end, but Judaism survived and developed as scholars founded religious academies where they continued their study of traditional Jewish religious and social laws.
By about 200 A.D, scholars at the academies had assembled these laws into a collection called Mishnah (or oral law) and from about 200-500 A.D, other scholars collected interpretations of the Mishnah into a work known as the Gemara. Together the Mishnah and the Gemara form a work called the Talmud and next to the Bible, the Talmud is the most important and sacred book of Judaism.
Most streams of modern Judaism have developed from the Pharisee movement, which became known as Rabbinic Judaism with the compilation of the oral law into Mishna. After the destruction of the Second Temple and the Bar Kokhba revolt, the other religious movements disappeared from the historical record.
By the middle ages, the Jewish Diaspora had become divided into 2 areas: the Sephardi Jews of Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean world and the Ashkenazi Jews of Germany and central Europe. Religious persecution of the Jews increased during the middle ages when the Christian church became the most powerful force in Europe. The military expeditions of the crusades to free the Holy Land from the Muslims, stirred intense feelings against non-Christians. Again the Jews kept alive the hope that a messiah would free them from their enemies and create a better world.
Under Muslim rule, Sephardi Jews in Spain and Portugal, flourished for several hundred years and Islamic thought in general influenced the Jews. For a time the 2 cultures were able to coexist harmoniously, but it did not last as Muslim attitudes towards Jews had become more aggressive and intolerant. During the 13th Century, when Spanish Christian armies began to reconquer Muslim Spain, growing religious intolerance eventually turned into active persecution through the Inquisition. In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain many taking refuge in the Netherlands, while others went to Turkey.
Other forms of Judaism that developed during the middle ages include Kabbalah and Karaite . Kabbalah differed from traditional Judaism in that its approach to interpretation of scripture was mystical and subjective and in its views that emanations from God did the work of creation rather than Creation being directly from God. Karaite Judaism developed when its founder Anan Ben David and his followers rejected the oral law.
The greatest divisions since the time of the division between the Sadducees and Pharisees 2,000 years ago are the divisions that have arisen in the past 2 centuries within the Ashkenazi community, ever since the Enlightenment and the Renaissance influenced Jews from northern and eastern Europe.
During the 1600 and 1700’s, most of the leading philosophers stressed the use of reason as the best way to determine truth. The emphasis on reason led many Jews, including philosophers Moses Mendelssohn and Baruch Spinoza to question traditional religious beliefs. One can only imagine the detrimental effect this had on Jews and their thinking, since their historical record is filled with accounts of trusting in God’s power rather than in reason for defeat. Thus it cut at the heart of Judaism. Mendelssohn founded the Haskalah (or Enlightenment) movement and its leading thinkers called for Jews to take a greater role in non Jewish life.
This movement known as reform Judaism abandoned or reformed aspects of Jewish worship and ritual in order to adapt to modern and corrupt changes in social, political, and cultural life, even to the point of violating basic biblical principles. Opponents of the Reform movement became known as Orthodox Jews. The Orthodox Jews who were sympathetic to the Haskalah became known as modern Orthodox Jews. But the Orthodox Jews who opposed the Haskalah became known as Haredi Jews.
Later, members of the Reform movement who felt that it was moving away from tradition too quickly formed another movement known as the Conservative movement.
At about the same time that Haskalah appeared in Western Europe, another movement called Hasidic Judaism developed among the Jews of Eastern Europe. This movement founded by Israel Ben Eliezar stressed feeling and joyful worship rather than study and learning. And In the late 18th century, another serious schism occurred between Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews.
The most recent denomination within Judaism, Reconstructionism rejects the assertion that the Torah was given to Moses at Mount Sinai, It views Judaism as a continual process of evolution, incorporating the inherited Jewish beliefs and traditions with the needs of the modern world.
So as one can see from a brief outline of Jewish history, the nation of Israel lost its divine mission to represent God and his Kingdom to the rest of the world and developed into another religion system. Judaism is not a religion exempt from the mechanisms that form every religion known on this planet as described in the other thread.
The fact that it has become so divided in its practice and observance bears witness that it has fallen away from the true kingdom of God. Only when the Jew truly knows the Tanach and the character of God are they then in a position to rightly judge whether the Judaism they claim to adhere to is truth.
Topic: How Israel lost the Kingdom of God and developed into another religious system (Read 5959 times)