The Formation of Jewish Identity: From Judahites/ Iodaious to “Jewish” ‎throughout‎ the Hellenistic Period‎

Jewish identity of the Second Temple Period, standing on four pillars: ‘one God, one Torah, one Temple (Schwartz 2001) and one household’ (Berlin 2013) has been widely studied, both in textual literary sources as well as in the archaeological record.

In this lecture, I argue that while this ethnic identity was consolidated by the late Hasmonean period, it developed much earlier as part of a wider phenomenon in the region, when the indigenous population reacted to the encounter with foreign population and manners, by the third century BCE. This interaction was expressed differently by the inhabitants of the southern Levant and was the trigger to the formation of ethnic identities – Samaritans, Jews, Idumeans, rooted already in the past.

I claim that the behavioral patterns resulting from this encounter can be traced in the archaeological record and that the peculiar way that led to the Jewish identity of the Second Temple period was distinctive already in the centuries before the Hasmonean and Herodian periods.