this book tells the story of the emergence of judaism out of its biblical roots, a story that took well over a thousand years to run its course. When this book begins there is no “Judaism” and there is no “Jewish people.” By the end, the Jews and Judaism are everywhere in the Roman Empire and beyond, more or less adjusted to the rise of Christianity and ready to absorb the sudden appearance of yet another new religion called Islam.

It may be useful to provide a few words of introduction about the name Judaism itself. This book will begin with the religious beliefs and practices of a set of ancient tribes that eventually combined to form a nation called the Children of Israel. Each tribe lived in a territory that was called by its tribal name: the land of Benjamin, the land of Judah, and so on. According to the biblical narrative, these tribes organized and maintained a unified kingdom for most of the tenth century BCE, but then the single tribe of Judah was separated from the others in a kingdom of its own, called the Kingdom of Judah (in Hebrew yehudah) to distinguish it from the larger Kingdom of Israel to its north. Thus the name Israel was essentially a national or ethnic designation, while the name Judah simultaneously meant a smaller ethnic entity, included within the larger one, and the land where that group dwelt for hundreds of years.