This is interesting.

[velvetpage]

This article posits that the religion of the Jews as laid out in Deuteronomy was actually the second, bastardized version of the faith, and that the older one survived in a few isolated pockets and contributed a great deal to the apocalyptic pre-Christian tradition.

Comments

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Looks like it's in support of the LDS idea of the Mormons as a lost tribe.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

While I'm not a big fan of LDS generally, this particular article seems to do a decent job of pulling together things I'd vaguely known before, giving them a context I was never able to put to them.

I'm going to do more research into this, I hope.

[rallymama.livejournal.com]

It's no secret in Jewish scholarly circles that the book of Deuteronomy was written at Josiah's behest, then claimed to have been "found". This was done to support reforms that Josiah felt were necessary to combat significant cultural and religious assimilation of the Hebrews into the larger society around them.

That article left me vaguely uncomfortable. Should I have time and energy someday, I'd like to compare the author's claims agains the notes in my Torah. I feel like she's avoiding a large arm of existing scholarship in order to support her claim - but, I suppose she'd feel the same way about the authors of my texts!

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was aware of that too, though a fair number of Protestant ministers I've come across seem to take Josiah's reforms at their face value, as having re-discovered Deuteronomy instead of inventing it.

I suppose the real question then is whether Josiah's reforms were a return to something that had been lost (as in, a move away from encroaching cultural assimilation, which seems to be the mainstream view in both Judaism and more scholarly branches of Christianity) or whether they were a fabrication only loosely based - or not based at all - on anything that came before. This article is claiming the latter, and that the religion which was supplanted was the one that was revealed to earlier Israelites, thereby making it more valid than Josiah's version. There's also the possibility that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, lost amid the factions that fought about the reforms. (I have little doubt that Josiah's reforms did result in one of the earliest spreads of the Jewish diaspora, simply because all massive and probably violent reforms have that effect. It fits with what I know of human nature and history in other areas for that to have happened.)

I would be very interested to read your take on it, should you get around to that comparison. If I don't comment on it, please direct my attention to it by commenting in my journal - it's not uncommon for me to skip or skim stuff in my friends list when I'm busy.