This is Western Civilization.
My name is Dr. Long; this video is entitled introduction to world religion and Judaism.
This will be the first video in a series of five videos on world religions.
The purpose of these videos is to give a historical overview of the major world religions as well
as to describe their basic beliefs.
Now scholars take a wide range of views on the origin and development of world religions.
However, this video will – more or less – try to approach each major world religion
the way they would see themselves, a sort of traditional view that each world religion
would see their own beliefs and their own historical development.
Now it is important to understand what world religions believe, as they have played an
important role in shaping history and still play a key role in many societies today.
By definition, world religions are religions that are widespread and have had a great impact
on human history.
In societies in which they are common, world religions have influenced everything from
holidays to diets to views on economics; morality; politics; marriage and sexuality; and views
on the afterlife.
World religions also tend to make universal truth claims.
By their nature, world religions are exclusive, with each one claiming it is the one true
religion and viewing other religions as – at least to one degree or the other – defective
or wrong.
World religions have attracted many adherents because they provide people with answers to
the basic questions about the human condition.
Just to give you a few examples of some major questions that world religions tend to address
– First, cosmic origins; where did this world come from?
Second, what is the purpose of life?
Also, what is right and wrong?
How do I live this life?
Moreover, another question is – how do I deal with the wrong things that I’ve done,
and maybe the guilt that I have in my life?
And another one – why is there suffering and evil in the world, and how do I deal with
it?
And finally, what happens when I die?
And these are just a few questions about the human condition that world religions tend
to approach and give answers to – and obviously each world religion gives different answers
to these sorts of questions.
It is worth noting that these are the sort of questions that have long preoccupied human
beings throughout history and do today – and these are why world religions are so important
– and this is also what makes humans different than the animals.
Animals seem unconcerned about the sort of questions that I just went through – for
example, your cat probably hasn’t lost any sleep wondering about the purpose of life
or the question of evil.
But these are the kind of questions, again, that greatly concern human beings.
So this has been a little introduction to world religions, I now want to turn with the
rest of this video to talk about one of the oldest world religions – namely Judaism.
Judaism is a monotheistic religion, the term monotheism, of course, means belief in one
god.
Monotheism was fairly rare in the ancient world.
Most human beings in ancient civilizations were polytheistic; they believed in multiple
gods and goddesses.
In the ancient world, Judaism was a religion of the Hebrew people.
The Hebrews were a Semitic people and they lived in the Levant.
Most of what we know about the Hebrews and early Judaism comes from the Hebrew Bible,
which Christians also see as scripture and call, the Old Testament, as well as archeology.
The Hebrew Bible contains many books of various genres, books of history, books of prophecy,
books that are poetry – and they were composed over several different centuries with many
different authors, and the Jews believed that these books were inspired by God.
The first five books of the Hebrew Bible are called the Torah, and they take a particularly
great importance within Judaism.
The books of the Hebrew Bible, as I mentioned, had different authors and were preserved over
time in the Jewish community, handed down, and believed to be God’s word.
Jews came to believe that these books had a transcendent purpose and were for all time
in many ways.
Now according to the Hebrew Bible, the history of the Hebrew people and of the Jewish religion
begins with Abraham.
Abraham lived in the Mesopotamian city of Ur, and the book of Genesis – the first
book in the Torah – teaches that God called him to leave Ur and to go to a land that God
would promise him and that He would make his descendants a great people – and the name
for God that the Hebrews would use is Yahweh.
So Abraham, according to the book of Genesis, left Ur, he went to what is now Palestine.
He had a son named Isaac.
Isaac had a son named Jacob – and Jacob’s children, such as Joseph, ended up moving
to Egypt due to a famine.
Now according to the biblical story, several hundred years passed and the Hebrew people,
coming from Abraham – they had moved to Egypt, their numbers had grown – and according
to the Hebrew Bible, they had become slaves in Egypt, and at that point, according to
the book of the Hebrew Bible, God sent a deliverer to them and this was Moses.
Moses was sent to lead them out of slavery in Egypt to a new land, to the land that God
had promised Abraham.
So according to the traditional story, Moses would lead the Hebrew people out of slavery
in Egypt.
He would be given the ten commandments, an ethical code to deliver to the people, and
the ten commandments are broken into two halves – the first four deal with how to relate
to God; the last six, how to relate to fellow human beings.
Moses also gave the Hebrew people an extensive dietary and cleanliness code and together
with the Ten Commandments and the belief in one God – Yahweh – those became primary
characteristics of Judaism as an early religion.
Now after Moses’ death, Moses’ assistant, Joshua, led the Hebrew people in to Canaan,
where they conquered and settled – and the Hebrew people were a farming and herding people,
and at first they were ruled by a series of judges.
However, they also faced challenges from nearby people, who threatened them militarily and
this is particularly the case with a people known as the Philistines – because of that,
they came to have a series of kings that would rule them and sought to organize their military
and protect them.
The first king was Saul, but according to the Bible, Saul was not a very good king.
The next king was David, who according to the Bible, was generally, at least, faithful
to God and was a very strong king.
David’s son and successor was Solomon.
Solomon was known for his wisdom, known for his wealth, and especially known for constructing
a temple to God in Jerusalem, and the temple that Solomon built to God in Jerusalem became
a centerpiece of Jewish religious life.
Now after Solomon, the kingdom that he and his father, David, had built, which was called
the kingdom of Israel, broke up into two separate kingdoms – Israel and Judah – and it’s
from the people of Judah that the name Jew and Judaism would come, for the name of the
Jewish religion.
Now Israel and Judah existed as separate Jewish kingdoms for quite a while, but they would
both later be defeated by large empires in Mesopotamia.
Israel would be defeated by Syria and then Babylon would later defeat Judah, and in both
cases the Jewish people were taken into captivity and slavery into Assyria and to Babylon.
Now this foreign rule and exile were very hard on the Jewish people and very puzzling
to them as they saw themselves as God’s chosen people.
So the question arose ¬– How could this calamity of being conquered, overwhelmed,
enslaved, and deported by a foreign peoples happen to them?
Well, according to the Hebrew Bible, and particularly the books of prophecy – such as the book
of Isaiah, the book of Jeremiah, the book of Ezekiel – the reason for these exiles
at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians was because the Jewish people had mistreated
the poor and had fallen into idolatry of worshipping the gods and goddesses of nearby people.
So exile and deportation, they were interpreted as punishment for their sins, for their wrongdoings
against God and their fellow human beings.
Well despite the difficulties of exile, by 323 BCE, the time of the death of Alexander
the Great, Judaism had become a very distinct religion.
It was monotheistic, worshipping one God – Yahweh; it had a moral code – for instance, in the
Ten Commandments – and this sort of religious belief, believing in one God with a moral
code coming from that God is called ethical monotheism, and this was a huge contribution
of Judaism to world religion – the first religion to really fully develop ethical monotheism.
Well by 323 BCE, as I mentioned, that was the death of Alexander the Great.
After his death, as part of his tremendous conquest of much of the Near East, the homeland
of the Jewish people fell under Greek rule – the Seleucid Dynasty, one of the successor
states to Alexander the Great.
However, the Seleucid attempted to impose their culture and their religion – particularly
Greek polytheism – upon the Jews, and this led to a revolt against them called the Maccabean
Revolt in 167 BCE, and the Jews were successful in maintaining their religion and keeping
their culture and the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah is actually in celebration of the success
of the Maccabean Revolt in preserving Judaism.
After the Seleucids, the Romans came in and the Romans conquered all of the Greek states,
including the Seleucids, and made the Jewish territory part of the Roman Empire.
The Jewish homeland became the Roman province of Judea, and just as the Jews were bothered
by being under Greek rule, they were also not happy under Roman rule, considering the
Romans foreigners and interlopers.
This eventually led to revolt.
In 66 CE, a major Jewish revolt occurred against the Romans.
This was very bloody.
It led to a four-year long war with a number of Roman legions, thousands of Roman troops
sent it to put down this revolt.
The Roman forces were led by Titus, a military commander who later became the emperor of
Rome.
And ultimately, Titus and his Roman forces managed to subdue the Jews, and in 70 CE Titus
led his forces to sack the city of Jerusalem.
Now this was a brutal siege and sack of the city of Jerusalem and this included the destruction
of the temple to God that was the centerpiece of Jewish religious life.
Today the remains of the temple in Jerusalem are the Wailing Wall, which are a key site
of pilgrimage for the Jewish people – but it utterly annihilated the temple to God.
Now there were other Jewish rebellions that followed the siege and sack of Jerusalem,
but all of these were put down by the Romans and ultimately the Romans banished the Jews
from their homeland, and so the Jews were forced to leave and they scattered throughout
the Roman Empire and even beyond it, and this is called the Jewish Diaspora, the scattering
of Jews from their homeland.
After the second century, Jews would live in small communities throughout the Mediterranean
and Mesopotamia.
They would – in the Middle Ages – either live under Christian or Muslim rule, and as
a religious minority they would occasionally face discrimination and persecution, from
time to time.
Now the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the Jewish Diaspora was very traumatic
on the Jewish people, one of the most traumatic events in their history.
Jews would not regain their homeland until 1948, with the creation of the modern state
of Israel.
The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the Jewish Diaspora also greatly changed
the Jewish religion, especially because the Jews would then lack a temple that would be
the center of the religious life and their people would be scattered.
So a new form of Judaism would emerge, and this has been called Rabbinic Judaism; this
is a form of Judaism with a rabbi or a teacher at the center of Jewish religious life, along
with the synagogue, where Jews living in a particular community will gather for worship
and instruction.
So the focus became the teaching of a rabbi, instead of the sacrificial worship in a temple,
which no longer existed.
The focus also became on living an ethical Jewish life and observing Jewish holidays,
with the idea that God will reward the righteous in the next life.
Judaism, however, on the whole is very focused on this life.
There is this notion of a reward of the righteous in the next life, but the overall emphasis
is on living an ethical life in this life.
Now Judaism has always been a small religion.
There are only fifteen-million Jews in the world today.
But as the first form of ethical monotheism and a distinct religion in its own right,
it would have a tremendous influence on other world religions and as we will see, this will
particularly be the case with Christianity, which comes out of Judaism, and Islam, which
would also be likewise, deeply influenced by Judaism.
So I’ll stop with this observation about the long-term influence of Judaism.
Thank you for watching.