When Did the Torah Become Authoritative?
The Torah (the five Books traditionally attributed to Moses) forms the heart of the Hebrew Bible, and its interpretation was central to Second Temple Judaism in the time of Jesus and to Rabbinic Judaism today. Why then does so much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament, ignore it? The earliest Israelite prophets do not even show awareness of the stories in Genesis, but even later prophets rarely quote the Torah. Much of the Wisdom tradition beginning with Proverbs completely ignores the Torah and it is only with relatively late sages like Sirach (in the Apocrypha) that focus on it. We often consider when the earliest sections of the Torah were composed and when it took shape in a form relatively similar to the text we have today, but in this lecture, John Hamer of Toronto Centre Place will examine when the Torah became important and authoritative in Second Temple Judaism.
Join the livestream to participate in the discussion and to ask questions to our lecturer during the Q&A.
Other topics covered in this lecture include:
Ezra
Sirach (Yeshua ben Eleazar ben Sira)
The Documentary Hypothesis
Josephus
Dead Sea Scrolls
Philo of Alexandria
Hasmoneans (Maccabees)
Hellenism
Elephantine Temple
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