Understanding Your Place in Gods Kingdom: Your Original Purpose for Existence

We would gain a physical body. We would experience both joy and sorrow, and we would make choices that would shape our eternal character. This time on earth is both a classroom and a test, and only we can determine how well we perform. The goal of our earthly test is to return to our Heavenly Father as a more intelligent, more mature, and more compassionate being—to be more like Him. Each life on earth is unique, and each one of us will experience life a little differently.

Some lives include physical challenges; all involve temptations and difficulties of one kind or another. We each have specific strengths and weaknesses, and our Father knows us well. He knows how we can best grow from our experiences, and He gives us commandments to enable us to reach our potential. Heavenly Father provides us with scriptures and prophets to teach us of His plan.

His commandments provide the pattern for how we should live to become more like Him. God is there to comfort us when we speak with Him in prayer. We may not choose the experiences we are given in our lives, but we do choose how we respond. We can be angry, refusing to move forward and stagnating in our progress. Or we can choose to use our experiences to become more compassionate, more purposeful, and wiser. As we learn about God and come to understand His purpose for us, we become more responsible for our choices.

The more we know, the more He expects us to do our best and to help others do better too. He sent us to earth with family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers so that we might both take and teach lessons about life at every turn. It is our choice to help or to hinder, to learn or to leave things undone. It is our choice to prove that we can become more like Him.

When we better understand why we are here and what we are working to achieve, we can make choices that will make our Heavenly Father proud, make our lives more purposeful, and ultimately help us return to His presence. Phone include area code. The author considered the Temple of Solomon to be the cult site chosen by God, according to Deuteronomy, chapter 12, the existence of which rendered all other sites illegitimate. Every king of Judah is judged according to whether or not he did away with all places of worship outside Jerusalem. The date of this criterion may be inferred from the indifference toward it of all persons prior to Hezekiah —e.

In the mid-8th century the writings of the classical prophets, starting with Amos , first appeared. These take in the people as a whole, in contrast to Kings; on the other hand, their interest in theodicy the problem of reconciling the presumed goodness of God with the existence of evil in the world and their polemical tendency to exaggerate and generalize what they deem evil must be taken into consideration before accepting their statements as history per se see also evil, problem of. The distaff side of the royal household perpetuated, and even augmented, the pagan cults.

King Asa reigned c. Foreign cults entered the north with the marriage of King Ahab reigned — bce to the Tyrian princess Jezebel died c. Jezebel was accompanied by a large entourage of sacred personnel to staff the temple of Baal and Asherah that Ahab built for her in Samaria , the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel. Such must have been the view of the prophets, whose fallen were the first martyrs to die for the glory of God. To judge from the stories of Elisha , devotion to the cult of Baal existed in the capital city, Samaria , but was not felt in the countryside.

In popular consciousness these men were wonder-workers—healing the sick and reviving the dead, foretelling the future, and helping to find lost objects. To the biblical narrator, they witnessed the working of God in Israel. The fact that prophecy of success could turn out to be a snare is exemplified in a story of conflict between the prophet of doom Micaiah 9th century bce and unanimous prophets of victory who lured King Ahab to his death.

By the mid-8th century, one hundred years of chronic warfare between Israel and Aram had finally ended—the Aramaeans having suffered heavy blows from the Assyrians. The well-to-do expressed their relief in lavish attentions to the institutions of worship and to their private mansions. But the strain of the prolonged warfare showed in the polarization of society between the wealthy few who had profited from the war and the masses whom it had ravaged and impoverished. Dismay at the dissolution of Israelite society animated a new breed of prophets—the literary or classical prophets, the first of whom was Amos 8th century bce , a Judahite who went north to Bethel.

The point that apostasy would set God against the community was made in early prophecy ; the idea that violation of the social and ethical injunctions of the covenant would have the same result was first proclaimed by Amos. Amos almost ignored idolatry , denouncing instead the corruption and callousness of the oligarchy and rulers. He proclaimed the religious exercises of such villains to be loathsome to God; on their account Israel would be oppressed from the entrance of Hamath to the Dead Sea and exiled from its land.

The westward push of the Neo-Assyrian empire in the mid-8th century bce soon brought Aram and Israel to their knees. The northern kingdom sought to survive through alliances with Assyria and Egypt; its kings came and went in rapid succession. As a result, in his view, all authority had evaporated: The monarchy was godless, putting its trust in arms, fortifications, and alliances with great powers.

Salvation , however, lay in none of these but in repentance and reliance upon God. Judah was subjected to such intense pressure to join an Israelite-Aramaean coalition against Assyria that its king Ahaz 8th century bce instead submitted to Assyria in return for relief. Ahaz introduced a new Aramaean-style altar in the Temple of Jerusalem and adopted other foreign customs that are counted against him in the Book of Kings.

It was at this time that Isaiah prophesied in Jerusalem see also Isaiah, Book of. Then the nations of the world, which had been subjugated by Assyria, would recognize the God of Israel as the lord of history. A renewed Israel would prosper under the reign of an ideal Davidic king, all humanity would flock to Zion the hill symbolizing Jerusalem to learn the ways of YHWH and to submit to his adjudication, and universal peace would prevail see also eschatology. The prophecy of Micah 8th century bce , also from Judah, was contemporary with that of Isaiah and touched on similar themes—e.

Unlike Isaiah, however, who believed in the inviolability of Jerusalem, Micah shocked his audience with the announcement that the wickedness of its rulers would cause Zion to become a plowed field, Jerusalem a heap of ruins, and the Temple Mount a wooded height. A heightened concern over assimilatory trends resulted in his also outlawing certain practices considered legitimate up to his time.

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Thus, in addition to removing the bronze serpent that had been ascribed to Moses and that had become a fetish , the reform did away with the local altars and stone pillars, the venerable patriarchal antiquity of which did not save them from the taint of imitation of Canaanite practice. Similarities between Deuteronomy and the Book of Hosea lend colour to the supposition that the reform movement in Judah, which culminated a century later under King Josiah , was sparked by attitudes inherited from the north. When Sennacherib appeared in the west in , the rebellion collapsed; Egypt sent a force to aid the rebels but was defeated.

His kingdom overwhelmed, Hezekiah offered tribute to Sennacherib; the Assyrian, however, pressed for the surrender of Jerusalem. In despair, Hezekiah turned to the prophet Isaiah for an oracle. The king held fast, and Sennacherib, for reasons still obscure, suddenly retired from Judah and returned home. For the present, although Jerusalem was intact, the country had been devastated and the kingdom turned into a vassal state of Assyria.

During the long and peaceful reign of Manasseh in the 7th century bce , Judah was a submissive ally of Assyria. Judah benefitted from the increase in commerce that resulted from the political unification of the entire Middle East. The prophet Zephaniah 7th century bce attests to heavy foreign influence on the mores of Jerusalem—merchants who adopted foreign dress, cynics who lost faith in the power of YHWH to do anything, and people who worshipped the pagan host of heaven on their roofs see also Zephaniah, Book of.

The royal sanctuary became the home of a congeries of foreign gods; the sun, astral deities, and Asherah the female fertility deity all had their cults alongside YHWH. The countryside also was provided with pagan altars and priests, alongside local YHWH altars that were revived. No prophecy is dated to his long reign.

The young king of Judah, Josiah reigned c. First came the purge of foreign cults in Jerusalem under the aegis of the high priest Hilkiah; then the countryside was cleansed. Anxious to abide by its injunctions, Josiah had the local YHWH altars polluted to render them unusable and collected their priests in Jerusalem. To seal the reform, the king convoked a representative assembly and directed it to enter into a covenant with God over the newfound Torah.

For the first time, the power of the state was enlisted on behalf of the ancient covenant and in obedience to a covenant document. It was a major step toward the establishment of a sacred canon. Josiah envisaged the restoration of Davidic authority over the entire domain of ancient Israel, and the retreat of Assyria facilitated his ambitions—until he became fatally embroiled in the struggle of the powers over the dying empire.

His death in was doubtless a setback for his religious policy as well as his political program. Yet there is stronger indication of private recourse to pagan cults in the worsening political situation. Their mood finds expression in the oracles of the prophet Habakkuk in the last years of the 7th century bce see Habakkuk, Book of.

Despite these expectations of salvation, the situation grew worse as Judah was caught in the Babylonian-Egyptian rivalry.

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For the prophet Jeremiah c. His pre-reform prophecies denounced Israel as a faithless wife and warned of imminent retribution at the hands of a nameless northerner. After Nebuchadrezzar II reigned c. Jeremiah now proclaimed a scandalous doctrine of the duty of all nations, Judah included, to submit to the divinely appointed world ruler, Nebuchadrezzar, as the only hope of avoiding destruction; a term of 70 years of submission had been set to humiliate all nations beneath Babylonia.

Jeremiah also had a message of comfort for his hearers. He foresaw the restoration of the entire people—north and south—under a new David. And since events had shown that human beings were incapable of achieving a lasting reconciliation with God on their own, he envisioned the penitent of the future being met halfway by God, who would remake their nature so that doing his will would come naturally to them. Although Jeremiah offered hope through submission, Ezekiel prophesied an inexorable, total destruction as the condition of reconciliation with God.

The majesty of God was too grossly offended for any lesser satisfaction. The survival of the religious community of exiles in Babylonia demonstrates how rooted and widespread the religion of YHWH was. Abandonment of the national religion as an outcome of the disaster is recorded of only a minority. There were some cries of despair, but the persistence of prophecy among the exiles shows that their religious vitality had not flagged. The Babylonian Jewish community, in which the cream of Judah lived, had no sanctuary or altar in contrast to the Jewish garrison of Elephantine in Egypt ; what developed in their place can be surmised from new postexilic religious forms: The absence of a local or territorial focus must also have spurred the formation of a literary centre of communal life—the sacred canon of covenant documents that came to be the core of the present Pentateuch.

Observance of the Sabbath —a peculiarly public feature of communal life—achieved a significance among the exiles virtually equivalent to all the rest of the covenant rules together. Notwithstanding its political impotence, the exile community possessed such high spirits that foreigners were attracted to its ranks, hopeful of sharing in its future glory. This moment marks the origin of conversion to Judaism for distinctly religious reasons rather than for reasons of politics, culture, or nationalism. The idea was destined to play a decisive role in the self-understanding of the Jewish martyrs persecuted by the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes reigned — bce —as recounted in the Book of Daniel —and later again in the Christian appreciation of the death of Jesus.

After conquering Babylonia, Cyrus allowed those Jews who wished to do so to return and rebuild their Temple.

Although some 40, eventually made their way back, they were soon disillusioned and ceased their rebuilding as the glories of the restoration failed to materialize and as controversy arose with the Samaritans , who opposed the reconstruction. The Samaritans were a Judaized mixture of native north Israelites and Gentile deportees settled by the Assyrians in the erstwhile northern kingdom. A new religious inspiration attended the governorship of Zerubbabel 6th century bce , a member of the Davidic line, who became the centre of messianic expectations during the anarchy attendant upon the accession to the Persian throne of Darius I bce.

The prophets Haggai and Zechariah understood the disturbances as heralds of the imminent overthrow of the Persian empire, as a worldwide manifestation of God, and as a glorification of Zerubbabel see Haggai, Book of ; Zechariah, Book of. The labour was resumed and completed in , but the prophecies remained unfulfilled. Zerubbabel then disappears from the biblical narrative, and the spirit of the community flags again. The anxiety that underlay this mood produced a hostility to strangers and encouraged a lasting conflict with the Samaritans, who asked permission to take part in rebuilding the Temple of the God whom they too worshipped.

The Jews rejected the Samaritans on ill-specified but apparently ethnic and religious grounds: Nonetheless, intermarriage between the two peoples occurred, precipitating a new crisis in , when the priest Ezra arrived from Babylon, intent on enforcing the regimen of the Torah. By reviving ancient laws excluding Canaanites and others and applying them to their own times and neighbours, the leaders of the Jews brought about the divorce and expulsion of several dozen non-Jewish wives and their children. Tension between the xenophobic and xenophilic in postexilic Judaism was finally resolved some two centuries later with the development of a formality of religious conversion, whereby Gentiles who so wished could be taken into the Jewish community by a single, simple procedure.

The decisive constitutional event of the new community was the covenant subscribed to by its leaders in , which made the Torah the law of the land. The charter required the publication of the Torah, which in turn entailed its final editing—now plausibly ascribed to Ezra and his circle. The survival in the Torah of patent inconsistencies and disagreements with the postexilic situation indicate that its materials were by then sacrosanct , to be compiled but no longer created.

But these survivals made necessary the immediate invention of a harmonizing and creative method of textual interpretation to adjust the Torah to the needs of the times. Thus, the publication of the Torah as the law of the Jews laid the basis of the vast edifice of Oral Law so characteristic of later Judaism.

Concern over observance of the Torah was raised by the stark contrast between messianic expectations and the harsh reality of the restoration. Thus, the Book of Malachi , named after the last of the prophets, concludes with an admonition to be mindful of the Torah of Moses. As time passed and messianic hopes remained unfulfilled, the sense of a permanent suspension of normal relations with God took hold, and prophecy died out.

God, it was believed, would some day be reconciled with his people, and a glorious revival of prophecy would then occur. For the present, however, religious vitality expressed itself in dedication to the development of institutions that would make the Torah effective in life. The course of this development is hidden from view by the dearth of sources from the Persian period. But the community that emerged into the light of history in Hellenistic times had been radically transformed by this momentous, quiet process. Contact between Greeks and Semites goes back to Minoan and Mycenaean times and is reflected in certain terms used by Homer and other early Greek authors.

It is not until the end of the 4th century, however, that Jews are first mentioned by Greek writers, who praise them as brave, self-disciplined, and philosophical. After being conquered by Alexander the Great bce , Palestine became part of the Hellenistic kingdom of Ptolemaic Egypt, the policy of which was to permit the Jews considerable cultural and religious freedom.

When in Palestine was conquered by King Antiochus III reigned — bce of the Syrian Seleucid dynasty, the Jews were treated even more liberally, being granted a charter to govern themselves by their own constitution—namely, the Torah. Greek influence, however, was already apparent. Some of the 29 Greek cities of Palestine attained a high level of Hellenistic culture.

The mid-3rd century- bce Zenon papyri, which contain the correspondence of the business manager of a high Ptolemaic official, present a picture of a wealthy Jew , Tobiah, who through commercial contact with the Ptolemies acquired a veneer of Hellenism, to judge at least from the pagan and religious expressions in his Greek letters.

His son and especially his grandsons became ardent Hellenists. By the beginning of the 2nd century, the influence of the Hellenistic Age in Judaea was quite strong; indeed, it has been argued that, if the Seleucids had not forcibly intervened in Jewish affairs, Judaean Judaism would have become even more syncretistic than Alexandrian Judaism. The apocryphal writer Jesus ben Sirach so bitterly denounced the Hellenizers in Jerusalem c. In the early part of the 2nd century bce , Hellenizing Jews took control of the high priesthood itself.

As high priest from to , Jason established Jerusalem as a Greek city, with Greek educational institutions. His ouster by an even more extreme Hellenizing faction, which established Menelaus died bce as high priest, occasioned a civil war in which Menelaus was supported by the wealthy aristocrats and Jason by the masses. The extreme tactics employed by the Hasmoneans in their struggle with Hellenizing Jews, whose children they forcibly circumcised , indicate the inroads that Hellenism had already made. On the whole, the chief supporters of the Hellenizers were members of the wealthy urban population, while the Maccabees were supported by the peasants and the urban masses.

Yet there is evidence that the ruthlessness exhibited by the Hasmoneans toward the Greek cities of Palestine had political rather than cultural origins and that in fact they were fighting for personal power no less than for the Torah. Indeed, some of the Jews who fought on the side of the Maccabees were idol worshippers.

In any event, the Maccabees soon reached a modus vivendi with Hellenism: Greek influence reached its peak under King Herod I of Judaea reigned 37—4 bce , who built a Greek theatre, amphitheatre, and hippodrome in or near Jerusalem. During the Hellenistic period the priests were both the wealthiest class and the strongest political group among the Jews of Jerusalem. The wealthiest of the priests were the members of the Oniad family, who held the hereditary office of high priest until they were replaced by the Hasmoneans; the Temple that they supervised also functioned as a bank, where the wealth of the Temple was stored and where private individuals also deposited their money.

From a social and economic point of view, therefore, Josephus is justified in calling the government of Judaea a theocracy. The Hasidim joined the Hasmoneans in the struggle against the Hellenizers, though on religious rather than political grounds. Josephus held that the Pharisees and the other Jewish parties were philosophical schools, and some modern scholars have argued that the groupings were primarily along economic and social lines; but the chief distinctions among them were religious and go back well before the Maccabean revolt. To associate the rabbis with urbanization seems a distortion.

The chief support for the Pharisees came from the lower classes, whether in the country or in the city. The chief doctrine of the Pharisees was that the Oral Law had been revealed to Moses at the same time as the Written Law. In their exegesis and interpretation of this oral tradition, particularly under the rabbi Hillel 1st century bce —1st century ce , the Pharisees were flexible, and their regard for the public won them considerable support.

They believed in the providential guidance of the universe, in angels, in reward and punishment in the world to come, and in resurrection of the dead, all of which were opposed by the Sadducees.

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However, in finding a modus vivendi with Hellenism, at least in form and in terminology, the Pharisees did not differ greatly from the Sadducees. Indeed, the supreme council of the Great Synagogue or Great Assembly of the Pharisees was modeled on Hellenistic religious and social associations. Because they did not take an active role in fostering the rebellion against Rome in 66—70 ce , their leader, Johanan ben Zakkai , obtained Roman permission to establish an academy at Yavneh Jamnia , where in effect the Pharisees replaced the cult of the Temple with a regimen of study and prayer.

The Sadducees and their subsidiary group, the Boethusians Boethosaeans , who were identified with the great landowners and priestly families, were more deeply influenced by Hellenization. The rise of the Pharisees may thus be seen, in a sense, as a reaction against the more profound Hellenization favoured by the Sadducees, who were allied with the philhellenic Hasmoneans. From the time of John Hyrcanus the Sadducees generally held a higher position than the Pharisees and were favoured by the Jewish rulers. They similarly rejected the inspiration of the prophetic books of the Bible, as well as the Pharisaic beliefs in angels, rewards and punishments in the world to come, providential governance of human events, and resurrection of the dead.

Proselytes converts to Judaism, though not constituting a class, became increasingly numerous in Palestine and especially in the Diaspora the Jews living beyond Palestine. Scholarly estimates of the Jewish population of this era range from , to 5,, in Palestine and from 2,, to 5,, in the Diaspora , the prevailing opinion being that about one-tenth of the population of the Mediterranean world at the beginning of the Christian era was Jewish. Such numbers represent a considerable increase from previous eras and must have included large numbers of proselytes.

In a probable allusion to proselytism, in bce the Jews of Rome were charged by the praetor with attempting to contaminate Roman morals with their religion. The first large-scale conversions were conducted by John Hyrcanus and Aristobulus I , who in and bce , respectively, forced the people of Idumaea in southern Palestine and the people of Ituraea in northern Palestine to become Jews. Outside the pale of Judaism in most, though not all, respects were the Samaritans , who, like the Sadducees, refused to recognize the validity of the Oral Law; in fact, the break between the Sadducees and the Samaritans did not occur until the conquest of Shechem by John Hyrcanus bce.

On the one hand, the picture of normative Judaism is broader than at first believed, and it is clear that there were many differences of emphasis within the Pharisaic party. On the other hand, supposed differences between Alexandrian and Palestinian Judaism are not as great as had been formerly thought. In Palestine, no less than in the Diaspora, there were deviations from Pharisaic standards. Despite the attempts of the Pharisaic leaders to restrain the wave of Greek influence, they themselves showed at least superficial Hellenization.

In the first place, as many as 2, to 3, words of Greek origin are found in the Talmudic corpus, and they supply important terms in the fields of law, government, science, religion, technology, and everyday life, especially in the popular sermons preached by the rabbis. When preaching, the Talmudic rabbis often gave the Greek translation of biblical verses for the benefit of those who understood only Greek.

The prevalence of Greek in ossuary burial inscriptions and the discovery of Greek papyri in the Dead Sea caves confirm the widespread use of Greek, though it seems few Jews really mastered it. Talk either Hebrew or Greek. Many of the anecdotes told about the rabbis have Socratic and Cynic parallels. There is evidence of discussions between rabbis and Athenians, Alexandrians, Roman philosophers, and even the emperor Antoninus Pius reigned — ; despite all of these discussions, only one rabbi, Elisha ben Abuyah early 2nd century , appears to have embraced gnosticism , accepting certain esoteric religious dualistic views.

Again, the parallels between Hellenistic rhetoric and rabbinic hermeneutics are in the realm of terminology rather than of substance, and those between Roman and Talmudic law are inconclusive. Part of the explanation of this may be that, although there were 29 Greek cities in Palestine, none was in Judaea , the real stronghold of the Jews.

Until its destruction in 70 ce , the most important religious institution of the Jews was the Temple in Jerusalem the Second Temple, erected — bce. Although services were interrupted for three years by Antiochus IV Epiphanes — bce and although the Roman general Pompey —48 bce desecrated the Temple in 63 bce , Herod lavished great expense in rebuilding it.

The high priesthood itself became degraded by the extreme Hellenism of high priests such as Jason and Menelaus , and the institution declined when Herod began the custom of appointing high priests for political and financial considerations. That not only the multitude of Jews but the priesthood itself suffered from sharp divisions is clear from the bitter class warfare that ultimately erupted in 59 ce between the high priests on the one hand and the ordinary priests and the leaders of the populace of Jerusalem on the other. Although the Temple remained central in Jewish worship, synagogues had already emerged as places for Torah reading and communal prayer and worship during the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century bce , if not even earlier.

In any case, in the following century Ezra stood upon a pulpit of wood and read from the Torah to the people Nehemiah. Some scholars maintain that a synagogue existed even within the precincts of the Temple; certainly by the time of Jesus , to judge from the references to Galilean synagogues in the Christian Scriptures, synagogues were common in Palestine. Hence, when the Temple was destroyed in 70, the spiritual vacuum was hardly as great as it had been after the destruction of the First Temple bce.

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The chief legislative, judicial, and educational body of the Palestinian Jews during the period of the Second Temple was the Great Sanhedrin council court , consisting of 71 members, among whom the Sadducees were an important party. In addition, there seems to have been a Sanhedrin, set up by the high priest, which served as a court of political council, as well as a kind of grand jury. During the Hellenistic-Roman period the chief centres of Jewish population outside Palestine were in Syria, Asia Minor , Babylonia, and Egypt, each of which is estimated to have had at least one million Jews.

The large Jewish community of Antioch —which, according to Josephus, had been given all the rights of citizenship by the Seleucid founder-king, Seleucus I Nicator died bce —attracted a particularly large number of converts to Judaism. In Antioch the apocryphal book of Tobit was probably composed in the 2nd century bce to encourage wayward Diaspora Jews to return to their Judaism.

As for the Jews of Asia Minor, whose large numbers were mentioned by Cicero —43 bce , their not joining in the Jewish revolts against the Roman emperors Nero reigned 54—68 ce , Trajan reigned 98— , and Hadrian reigned — would indicate that they had sunk deep roots into their environment.

In Babylonia in the early part of the 1st century ce , two Jewish brothers, Asinaeus and Anilaeus, established an independent minor state; their followers were so meticulous in observing the Sabbath that they assumed that it would not be possible to violate it even in order to save themselves from a Parthian attack. In the early 1st century ce , according to Josephus, the royal house and many of their entourage in the district of Adiabene in northern Mesopotamia were converted to Judaism; some of the Adiabenian Jews distinguished themselves in the revolt against Rome in The largest and most important Jewish settlement in the Diaspora was in Egypt.

There is evidence papyri of a Jewish military colony at Elephantine Yeb , Upper Egypt , as early as the 6th century bce. These papyri reveal the existence of a Jewish temple—which most certainly would be considered heterodox—and some syncretism mixture with pagan cults.

Alexandria , the most populous and most influential Hellenistic Jewish community in the Diaspora, originated when Alexander the Great assigned a quarter of the city to the Jews. Until about the 3rd century bce the papyri of the Egyptian Jewish community were written in Aramaic ; after that, with the exception of the Nash papyrus in Hebrew, all papyri until ce were written in Greek. Similarly, of the Jewish inscriptions from Egypt, all but five are written in Greek. The process of Hellenistic acculturation is thus obvious. The most important work of the early Hellenistic period—dating, according to tradition, from the 3rd century bce —is the Septuagint , a translation into Greek of the Hebrew Scriptures, including some works not found in the traditional Hebrew canon.

As revealed in the Letter of Aristeas and the works of Philo and Josephus, the Septuagint was itself regarded by many Hellenized Jews as divinely inspired. The translation shows some knowledge of Palestinian exegesis and the tradition of Halakhah the Oral Law ; but the rabbis themselves, noting that the translation diverged from the Hebrew text, apparently had ambivalent feelings about it, as is evidenced in their alternate praise and condemnation of it, as well as in their belief that another translation of the Scriptures into Greek was needed.

The fact that the temple at Leontopolis in Egypt was established c. It is significant that the Palestinian rabbis ruled that a sacrifice intended for the temple of Onias might be offered in Jerusalem. The temple of Onias made little impact upon Egyptian Jewry, as can be seen from the silence about it on the part of Philo, who often mentions the Temple in Jerusalem. The temple of Onias, however, continued until it was closed by the Roman emperor Vespasian reigned 69—79 ce in The chief religious institutions of the Egyptian Diaspora were synagogues.

As early as the 3rd century bce , there were inscriptions mentioning two proseuchai , or Jewish prayer houses. In Alexandria there were numerous synagogues throughout the city, of which the largest was so famous that it is said in the Talmud that he who has not seen it has never seen the glory of Israel. In Egypt the Jews produced a considerable literature most of it now lost , intended to inculcate in Greek-speaking Jews a pride in their past and to counteract a sense of inferiority that some of them felt about Jewish cultural achievements.

In the field of history, Demetrius near the end of the 3rd century bce wrote a work titled On the Kings in Judaea ; perhaps intended to refute an anti-Semitic Egyptian priest and author, it shows considerable concern for chronology. In the 2nd century bce a Jew who used the name Hecataeus wrote On the Jews. Cleodemus Malchus , in an attempt to win for the Jews the regard of the Greeks, asserted in his history that two sons of Abraham had joined Heracles in his expedition in Africa and that the Greek hero had married the daughter of one of them.

On the other hand, Jason of Cyrene c. In addition, 3 Maccabees 1st century bce is a work of propaganda intended to counteract those Jews who sought to win citizenship in Alexandria. The Letter of Aristeas , though ascribed to the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus — bce , was probably composed by an Alexandrian Jew about bce to defend Judaism and its practices against detractors.

Egyptian Jews also composed poems and plays, now extant only in fragments, to glorify their history. Philo the Elder c.

Understanding Your Place in God's Kingdom: Your Original Purpose for Existence

At about the same time, a Jewish poet wrote a didactic poem, ascribing it to the pagan Phocylides , though closely following the Bible in some details; the author disguised his Jewish origin by omitting any attack against idolatry from his moralizing. A collection known as The Sibylline Oracles , containing Jewish and Christian prophecies in pagan disguise, includes some material composed by a 2nd-century- bce Alexandrian Jew who intended to glorify pious Jews and perhaps win converts. What drove him to plant new Jesus communities in city after city, and how did people respond to his message?

The Book of Psalms. The book of Psalms is the largest collection of poetry in the Bible. The Psalms are an invitation to a literary temple where you can meet with God and hear the entire biblical storyline retold in poetic form. The Way of the Exile. Following Jesus in the 21st century means learning the way of the exile. In this video, we will explore the complex identity of God displayed in the storyline of the Bible, and surprise!

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Presence of God October 10, by Amber Dillon. September 26, by Zachariah Zienka. The opening chapters of Genesis shook the ancient world with a bold claim. All humans are made in the image of God. But on the way to these beloved texts you come across strange scenes like Jeremiah smashing jars before an audience and Ezekiel baking bread over human waste yes, poop.