However, this way had become normative among the religious, in part because of the particular circumstances facing Judaism in the Roman period and because of the particular intensifications of Torah that had established holiness as the exclusive way of being rightly related to God and as a blueprint for society. But as the normative way, this way cut off large numbers—perhaps most—of the Jewish people from a relationship to God and was responsible for the division within the people of God between the righteous and the outcast.
