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Here are all the essential elements of conversion to Judaism: belief in God, circumcision, and joining the house of Israel. I shall discuss each of these elements separately.
polytheistically add the God of Israel to their list of gods. This is not conversion.
According to rabbinic law, transmitted in the name of authorities who lived in the second century CE, a convert must also be immersed in water (in Christian terminology, be baptized) and must offer a sacrifice at the temple.
According to rabbinic law, then, in the Second Temple period the ritual requirements for conversion were three: circumcision, immersion, and sacrifice.
no text from the Second Temple period knows of immersion and sacrifice as rituals of conversion.
A Greek writer living about the year 100 CE also is aware that converts to Judaism are baptized (or does the writer have Christian Jews in mind?).
Was there a rite of passage by which a woman born a gentile became a Jew? Apparently not.
Marriage with a Jew was the de facto equivalent of conversion for a woman.
Rabbinic texts of the second and third centuries are the earliest references to conversion rituals for women.
The convert is equal to the native-born Jew “in all respects,” the rabbis say.
Some Jews even engaged in missionary work.
Several writers from the city of Rome refer to the eagerness of Jews to win gentiles to their side, if not for religious conversion, then at least for political and social support.
Hadrian’s edict against circumcision, one of the causes (or consequences) of the Bar Kokhba war, was rescinded by the following emperor, but only for native Jews. It was now a violation of law for a gentile to be circumcised.
In the eyes of the ancients, the essence of religion was neither faith nor dogma, but action.
In antiquity a contemplative person who sought systematic answers to questions about the nature of the gods and their involvement in human affairs would have studied philosophy, not “religion.”
In the fifth century BCE, some Sophists argued that the gods did not really exist but were invented by humans to promote fear in the masses and thereby maintain social order.
Radical belief (or disbelief) did not make them heretics.
the boundary line between Judaism and polytheism was determined more by Jewish observances than by Jewish theology.
“Judaism” designates the sum of all those practices and manners that make Jews distinctive, if not downright peculiar.
Not a single tractate of either the Mishnah or the Talmud is devoted to a “theological” topic.
Maimonides (1138–1204) formulated a creed for Judaism as well.
Ancient Judaism had no creeds.
Perhaps the Shema would have been thought of this way.
worship of God (through sacrifice, prayer, and the study of Scripture),
“whole-burnt offering” (sometimes known by its Greek designation, “holocaust”),
The rabbinic term is “the service of God in the heart.”
the fixity and regularity that characterized the sacrificial system gradually came to characterize prayer
The “Psalms scroll” from Qumran contains excerpts from our book of Psalms, rearranged for liturgical use, as well as several hymns that were not incorporated in our book of Psalms.
A writer of the second century BCE admires the remarkable silence that prevailed in the temple as the priests scurried about, performing their sacred tasks.
According to the Qumran Psalms scroll, King David composed 364 hymns to accompany the daily Tamid (Num. 28:1–8) and 52 hymns to accompany the weekly Sabbath sacrifice.
First, the priests, immediately after bringing the sacrifice and before offering the incense, would pray on behalf of the nation and then recite the Shema (Deut. 6:4–9) and the priestly benediction (Num. 6:24–
The temple did indeed become a “house of prayer” (Isa. 56:7).
By the third century BCE, Diaspora Jews began to build special proseuchai, which literally means “prayers” but probably should be translated “prayerhouses.”
five passages in the Psalms state that prayer is superior (40:6–9 [7–10]; 51:17 [19]; 69:30–31 [31–32]) or equal (119:108; 141:2) to the sacrificial cult.
They declared that every Jew must pray twice daily (morning and afternoon), since prayer corresponded to the Tamid sacrifices (Num. 28:1–8) and was no less obligatory than the Tamid itself.
It was not until the early Middle Ages that the rabbis standardized the language of virtually all the prayers.
In Second Temple times, sacrificial worship had fixed form and fixed content. Prayer, at least in the broad reaches of society, did not.
For the Jews of Qumran, the analogy of prayer to sacrifice was the result of their studied rejection of the Jerusalem temple and its sacrificial cult; for the rabbis after 70 CE, the analogy of prayer to sacrifice was the result of the destruction of the temple.
communal prayers of the protorabbinic circles of Judea in the first century CE.
The Shema consists of three paragraphs (Deut. 6:4–9; 11:13–21; Num. 15:37–41)
core ideas
Yup, that would be “theology” by definition.
one teacher
Uh… that’d be Jesus!
benedictions are a quintessentially Jewish mode of worship that was adopted by Christianity
the idea that humans pray along with the angels is implicit in the Qumran Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice.
The main petitionary prayer of the rabbis of the second century is the Shemoneh esreh, literally, “The Eighteen,”
The Hebrew text of Ben Sira incorporates a hymn that seems to be an early version of many of the benedictions.
Rabban Gamaliel (about 90 or 100 CE) edited a benediction asking God to frustrate heretics
Scriptural study. Priestly prayer in the temple featured the recitation of the Ten Commandments and the Shema; communal prayer outside the temple also included the study of Scripture, notably the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy). This practice is based on the idea that God can be worshiped through the study of his revealed Word.
Ben Sira (Sir. 38:34–39:1) extols “the one who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High!” and “seeks out the wisdom of all the ancients.”
The cycle of readings in first-century Judea (if indeed there was a cycle) is unknown to us.20
For the benefit of those who did not know sufficient Hebrew, the text was translated into the vernacular, Aramaic in Babylonia and parts of the land of Israel, Greek in the Greco-Roman Diaspora and parts of the land of Israel.
