from
https://www.timesofisrael.com/what-matters-now-to-archaeologist-prof-yonatan-adler-the-origins-of-judaism/

What Matters Now to archaeologist Prof. Yonatan Adler: The origins of
Judaism

Ariel University prof discusses his ‘excavation’ into the evidence for
the practice of the Jewish religion – and points to when we know with
certainty that Passover was observed
By AMANDA BORSCHEL-DAN
5 April 2023, 7:39 am
8

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key
issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — except this week.

Ahead of Passover, as some Jews all over the world change sets of
dishes, blowtorch their stoves and, of course, cover every last counter
and corner with aluminum foil, we wonder: when did the practice of this
crazy religion get its start?

So I invited Ariel University’s head of the Institute of Archaeology
Prof. Yonatan Adler to our Jerusalem office to speak about his new book,
“The Origins of Judaism.”

In our lengthy conversation, we hear how he treats the origins of the
practice of Judaism as an archaeological excavation, working backward in
time to gather physical and textual proof of the observance of the laws
and commandments charted out in the Torah. This is a topic that has
engaged Adler for well over a decade — including his doctoral research
for “The Archaeology of Purity” — and he continues to explore it through
his Origins of Judaism Project.

Adler, who obtained rabbinical ordination through the Israeli chief
rabbinate in 2001, treats this question through a scientific assemblage
of data points collected throughout the centuries and the guiding
archaeological principle that “absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence.”

While Adler hasn’t yet found evidence for foil-covered kitchen counters,
at the end of our discussion he does speak about the earliest evidence
for the observance of Passover, and that matters now.

The following transcript has been lightly edited.

The Times of Israel: Yonatan, thank you so much for joining me today in
our Jerusalem office.

Yonatan Adler: Thank you for having me.

Ariel University’s Dr. Yonatan Adler in the field. (courtesy)
Such a pleasure. Generally, I ask people before we start diving into the
topic at hand, what matters now? Because the podcast is generally all
about current events. But today we are going to talk about “what
mattered then.” We’re talking about, of course, your new book, “The
Origins of Judaism.” So what mattered then, Yonatan?

Well, the question is when is then? The question that I pose in my book
is when did Judaism begin? And we’ll have to speak about what we mean by
Judaism. And when we speak about when did it begin, how do we go about
looking into that? That’s the question that we’ll be talking about today.

For sure. And what I like about your book is you’re, of course, an
archaeologist, and the book is, in a way, set up like an excavation.
We’re going top-down like you have to do when you’re at a dig. You’re
proving the earliest possible moment in which you have evidence for the
practice of Judaism. We’re not finding it, of course, at Adam and Eve.
Let’s have a bit of a spoiler: What is the first moment of physical
evidence for the practice of Judaism?

Okay, so I guess we’ll start with the end, and then we’ll go move
backwards from there. The bottom line is that the earliest evidence that
I find is during the Hasmonean period, so around the middle of the
second century, before the Common Era. We’re talking about 200 years
before the destruction of the Second Temple. There’s no evidence of
Jewish practices related to Torah observance prior to that. But maybe
we’ll walk this back a little bit and get a bit more into detail.

Fragment of a chalk bowl from the Hasmonean period, on which the name
Hyrcanus appears. (Clara Amit, Israel Antiquities Authority)
For sure. We need to, of course, define some terms as well. Again, we’re
talking about Judaism, which is the human practice of the idea of the
Jewish religion, shall we say. It’s more of a sociological look. Is that
fair to say?

Absolutely. Actually what I’m looking at here is the question of social
history. I’m looking at the question of what people are actually doing.
I’m not looking at the question of from when does the Torah exist? So we
can have a Torah that exists for many centuries before the regular
people, the common people, are actually practicing it. And my interest
is very specifically not in the question of when the Torah was written,
when the Torah came to be. My question is when did the ordinary people,
the people you would meet on the street, the farmers, the craftsmen, the
homemakers, the ordinary people, when did they come to know about the
Torah and actually put it into practice in their daily lives?

One of the things that scholars already in the 19th century recognized
was that when we look through the Hebrew Bible, the Tanach, we don’t
seem to find people observing the laws of the Torah. We don’t find
anyone, for example, fasting on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement. We
don’t find ordinary people keeping Shabbat. We find prophets that are
railing against people not keeping Shabbat. We don’t find people that
are actually keeping Shabbat.

We hear about King David building a palace. We never hear about him
fixing mezuzot on his door posts. We never hear about any of the figures
in the Hebrew Bible putting on tefillin or the dietary rules for that
matter. We don’t hear about anyone abstaining from eating pig or
seafood. These are things that we don’t find in the Hebrew Bible. And
already from the 19th century, scholars of the Hebrew Bible have noticed
that we don’t find this in the Hebrew Bible.

Their assumption was that this all began in the Persian period. We’re
talking about the middle of the fifth century, before the Common Era.
After the destruction of the First Temple, the Jews returned to Judea
and established a new province of Yehud, where Jerusalem is rebuilt. A
Temple is rebuilt. So this is the Second Temple, according to the
stories that we find in the Hebrew Bible, books like Ezra and Nehemiah.

And the story that we find in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah is that
there was a figure named Ezra that came from Babylonia, and he came to
Jerusalem with a Torah of Moses. And he reads this Torah before the
entire people. And the people are shocked to learn that there is such a
Torah. And they find in the Torah laws, for example, to build sukkot on
the holiday of Sukkot. And they go out and do it for the first time
since the days of Joshua bin Nun.

A Dead Sea Scrolls fragment from the book of Nehemiah, part of Museum of
the Bible’s Scholars Initiative research project published by Brill in
2016. (Image by Bruce and Kenneth Zuckerman and Marilyn J. Lundberg,
West Semitic Research, courtesy of Museum of the Bible.)
The assumption of these scholars of the 19th century was that Judaism
begins then. It begins during this Persian period, around the fifth
century before the Common Era. And since then, we have large-scale
observance of the laws of the Torah.

What I’m doing in my book is I’m asking, is it so? Is that really the
case that we have observance of Judaism from this period of time and
onward? Or perhaps not? What is the actual evidence that we have?

The physical evidence?

Physical evidence, meaning the material remains, such as archaeology,
absolutely. And also textual evidence. In other words, things that
people are writing about which might indicate that ordinary people are
keeping the laws of the Torah.

Can you give me some examples of that? Are you talking about letters or
other kinds of documents or monuments?

Let me maybe spell out the methodology of the book, and then we can get
into a bit more detail. What I do, as you mentioned, I approach this
like an archaeological dig. We start an archaeological dig, and we start
at the surface level, modern. We start digging in the ground, and we
start finding tuna cans and Coca-Cola bottles. And as we dig deeper, we
find more and more ancient artifacts.

I’m doing the same thing here in the book. I start from a period of time
when we know that there was Judaism, that ordinary people were keeping
the laws of the Torah. And what I show throughout the book is that the
first century of the Common Era was just such a time. So in the first
century of the Common Era, we find lots of evidence that ordinary Jews
were keeping the laws of the Torah. And then what I do is I go backward
in time from the first century of the Common Era. I look at the first
century before the Common Era, the second century before the Common Era,
the third century before the Common Era, and so on and so forth,
backward in time, looking for where the trail of evidence ends.

Dr. Yonatan Adler on-site at the stone quarry and tool production center
excavations at Reina in Lower Galilee. (Samuel Magal/IAA)
So just to give a little benchmark, the first century of the Common Era
is, of course, when Jesus would have lived and when the [Second] Temple
was destroyed, things of that nature. And then when you move backward,
what are some other historical events that people would know about?