Judaism is not just a religion

The following is an excerpt from the ebook I am a Hebrew, which is available on Amazon. Just go to your country's Amazon website and type in the search box: "I am a Hebrew".

Judaism

The average secular person's idea of Judaism could make him/her think that the Hebrew Bible, being the foundational scripture of the faith, is a book of laws. We constantly hear about Jewish law and about what's allowed and what's forbidden for a Jew. But the truth is that the current form of Judaism is based more on the relatively late Jewish scriptures - The Mishna (finalized around 3rd century CE) and The Talmud (finalized 6th - 8th century CE), rather than the Bible itself.

Indeed, the Hebrew Bible itself, for all its hundreds of pages, hardly deals with law. The vast majority of the first half, from the book of Bereshit (Genesis) to the book of Melakhim (Kings) is a type of story: First about a family, then about tribes and finally about a kingdom.  Then from the book of Isaiah to the book of Malachi we find the words of men who lived in the kingdom. These include their moral preaching to the people of the kingdom, their prophecies about great disasters the people would face in the near future and about the good things that would happen to them in the distant future. After this come books of prayer and lamentation such as Tehilim (Psalms) and Eikha (Lamentations), books of moral advice such as Mishlei (proverbs), philosophy books such as Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) and more books written as a type of story such as Ruth, Daniel, Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah. The last book, Divrei Hayamim (chronicles), shortly repeats the main story about the times of the kingdom.

All the books in the Hebrew Bible involve the idea of God, but unlike Christianity or Islam, the main issue in the Hebrew Bible is not the relationship between God and the individual person, but between God and the tribe. The tribe, not the individual, is the main character in the Hebrew Bible.

The believing Jew reads the Hebrew Bible as a story about his ancestors. His ancestors came out of Egypt, where they were called "The people of the children of Israel", and came into the land of Canaan, which would later be called "The land of Israel" after themselves. When in the land they established an independent kingdom which broke off into two separate kingdoms: the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah. At the end of the main story, the kingdoms are destroyed by the great empires of the time. The Assyrian empire destroyed the kingdom of Israel and its capital Samaria:

"Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years.In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria"

A while later the Babylonian empire destroyed the kingdom of Judah and its capital Jerusalem:

"At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up against Jerusalem, and the city was besieged […] And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valor, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land […] Now the rest of the people that were left in the city, and the fugitives that fell away to the king of Babylon, with the remnant of the multitude, did Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carry away"

If the Hebrew Bible would have finished there, then perhaps the Jewish reader wouldn’t have received such a strong tribal message from it. The fact that he believes that his ancestors lived as an independent people in the past, wouldn't necessarily mean anything about his Jewish identity in the present. But apart from the story itself, the Hebrew Bible also gives the Jewish reader a framework through which the story receives its full meaning. One of the things that make up this framework is the prophecies of consolation.