Judea

Judea is the highland country around Jerusalem and Hebron, and it is the smaller and poorer of the two Israelite kingdoms of the Iron Age. It outlasted the other. Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, and Judah survived as a vassal for well over a century afterwards, which is why the surviving religious literature is Judahite and why the words Jew, Judaism and Judea all come from its name.

The reforms attributed to Hezekiah and Josiah belong to this territory, and they are the point at which a religion of one god among others becomes a religion of one god only, with sacrifice restricted to a single sanctuary in Jerusalem. Whether those reforms happened as described, and how much of Deuteronomy was written to justify them, is a central question of biblical scholarship.

After the exile Judea returned as a temple province under Persian, then Ptolemaic and Seleucid rule. The attempt of Antiochus IV to suppress the cult produced the Maccabean revolt and an independent Hasmonean state, which was then absorbed by Rome. Herod rebuilt the temple on a platform so large that it remains the defining feature of Jerusalem's old city. Two revolts against Rome, in 66 and 132 CE, ended the temple and then the Jewish presence in the region's centre, and forced the religion to reconstitute itself without either.

Judea's most consequential modern discovery came out of caves above the Dead Sea, and it changed what could be known about the religion of the region in the last centuries BCE.

Between 1947 and 1956 scrolls and fragments were recovered from eleven caves near Qumran: copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, a thousand years older than the previously oldest manuscripts, together with commentaries, hymns, a rule for community life, and a document describing a war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. They show a Judaism far more varied than the later rabbinic sources suggest, with a solar calendar in use alongside the lunar one, an intense interest in purity, and a group that considered the Jerusalem temple establishment illegitimate.

The site beside the caves has been interpreted in several ways. Jodi Magness's account of the archaeology supports the identification of the settlement as a sectarian community with the scrolls as its library, probably connected to the Essenes described by Josephus and Philo, while other scholars have argued for a fortified estate, a pottery works or a country villa with the scrolls hidden there from elsewhere.

The scrolls' publication was slow and contested for decades, which generated a substantial literature of suspicion about what was being withheld. The full corpus is now published and available, and the sensational readings have not survived it.