I told you that you don't have a separate group of Edomites that remained Edomites and suddenly got the name "Jew" later. You had Edomites that became (a minor) part of the Judahites by conversion and assimilation, and you had the remaining Idumaeans who disappeared from history after the war of 66-73. After losing the Temple there were only Judahites left. Some Judahites were Amoraim (the writers of the Talmud) and some were Christians. This difference was not ethnic but sectarian just like any other prior sects in Judaism. They were all Judahites and used the same mishna. The Christians didn't write down the mishna and adapted their oral traditions into the written decisions of the councils (starting with Peter at Jerusalem, which is judged very mishnaically with reference to the Laws of Noah); the Amoraim did write down their version of the mishna and their commentary and debates on it (the Talmud). The same Judahite Amoraim were called Judaeus in Latin and were the same ones shortened to Ju in 900s France. There was no Edomite people between 73 and 900 to suddenly emerge in France, there were just the Amoraim, who traced their lineage to the Judahites that lived before 70.
So the continuous polity that has called itself Judean and Ju all this time is the same people, even if they once had an influx of Edomites that did not change their base polity, commitment to Torah, or naturalization rules. The Jews don't get to say America is a black nation just because we've had a much longer influx of blacks than the Judeans did of Edomites, do they?
Stephen Wise is inventing words as there was no "Hebrewism" or "Ebraismos" in 538 BC and if we were to retroactively name it that name would be invalid because Edomites were Hebrews (sons of Eber) also. What they called it was elder tradition, Mosaic law, and in Greek Ioudiasmos or Judaism. It would be accurate to give it the retroactive name Yahwism. Further, he doesn't speak of an event that changed one to another but a millennium-long process of one expression becoming another (until the adoption of the Talmud after 500 AD). Well, during this millennium as he knows, the expression of Yahwism also yielded the Way, Messianism, Christianity. Both branched and became separate geographically and culturally. So in Jesus's day both he and all the Judeans (Judahites) kept the same dynamic Yahwism and argued over its direction. None of the Judeans continued to identify as Edomite; like Herod the Great, their children were recognized as birth Jews with naturalized Edomite heritage, and the objection that they were not Jews at all was popularly rejected. There was no Edomite people or nation identified as such that kept Yahwism or what Wise calls "Hebrewism".
The people who returned from Babylon were not Edomite but Judahite, including specifically Zerubbabel of the Davidic line. They followed the same religion, rebuilding a temple in the same place, and Nehemiah and Ezra established the elder tradition based on the same Torah and open Writings and Prophets as before. If there had been a separate "Hebrewism" at this time parallel to the elder tradition, there would have to have been a separate people who held it, but they don't exist. Also, my fren, you're just wrong to say there were rabbis or Talmud in 538 BC; there were no rabbis until the first century AD, and there was no Talmud until after 500 AD, although the generic word "talmud" for study was used (but not to mean a core of oral tradition, which instead came to be called mishna by Jesus's day). Anyone of standing could contribute to elder tradition, and Jesus learned from the example of Rabbis Hillel and Shammai in particular, who were noted for their hundreds of internal disagreements; there was no one tradition, there was a pattern of recognizing all deliverers of tradition and judging them, and that's what Jesus did as well, placing his judgments sometimes in agreement with and sometimes in disagreement with tradition (Matt. 23:3).
There is no evidence of two separate people called "Israelites" and "Judahites" (seeing as all Judahites are sons of Israel), who had two different religions and identities in the same land for 600 years, who never intermixed, who both had pedigrees from Judah meaning there was no way to distinguish them ethnically and yet who in this hypothesis were perfectly distinguished. No, one evidence is that there was a separate people already, Samaritans, over that period who was clearly distinguished from Judahites, and who did keep separate from intermarriage, and where we do have plenty of evidence of separation of culture despite similar tradition; none of that exists for this theory of Hebrewists and Judaists. Further, among the Judahites, we have a continuous testimony of teachers carrying on the same polity even though it typically resolved itself into two parties of elder tradition (the Zugoth), led by the Nasi and the Abbethdin who operated together to lead the one Sanhedrin. These two parties could be considered conservative and liberal, culminating in Hillel and Shammai and arising as the Pharisee and Sadducee (lead) parties. This division also exists and has nothing to do with a separate people from the Judeans that would still be called "Israelites". The Sadducees died with the temple and the Pharisees participated in the split of Rabbinical Jews and Christians, some Pharisees (Joseph, Nicodemus, Gamaliel, Paul) siding with the Christians and some (Johanan ben Zakkai) siding with the nascent rabbinical movement. It is facile to take a rabbinical statement about a millennium-long transition and to treat it as speaking of two separate peoples all that time instead of a single chain of tradition among a single people (without reference to same chain informing the Messianic branch).
TLDR 1: You are perpetuating a narrative that has no basis in historical facts and that posits a distinction within a people for 600 years that does not exist. Your theory was already tried here again this month and found wanting.
If you were to speak of the Edomite influence in Judaism, that exists just as it would also in Christianity, because the Edomite influx informed both. There is no separate Edomite people that suddenly got called "Ju" in 900s France, as if the continuous people that were called Judaeus in Latin for the millenium before that, the Talmudists who had Judahite genealogy, didn't deserve that title.
Now I didn't say you don't get to call out the likes of Epstein for calling himself Jewish. By all means expose all satanists and cabalists with no need to reference ethnicity. So there's no need to read me as saying that. What I did say is that we don't have the right to say that the whole group who identifies as Jews and Judahites today, who still often have genealogies going back to Judah and Levi, don't have the right to the name "Jews". If we say that, we affirm that outsiders get to decide names rather than insiders, and that would give the Jews logical rights to say we're not Americans but unnaturalized immigrants are the true Americans. Every people-group gets rights to self-determination and to decide who is one of them by immigration processes. Your argument amounts to saying the Judahites were too stupid to manage their own immigration process to maintain their identity, and we get to say from outside who the "true" and "false" Judahites were because their immigration decisions on the ground, when they knew the requirements of circumcision, count for nothing. It sounds like a very Jewish and subversive argument, frankly.
TLDR 2: I write because I have data and I earnestly want to know if my data is wrong. This theory has reared itself on Scored repeatedly, always without evidence, and so my honest quest for evidence remains. A discontinuity of people is not evinced by one millennial rabbinical view of process. Instead, the history shows one people of Judah who have been influenced and intermarried successively with Egyptians, Babylonians, Edomites, and Khazarians, and others, but who maintained their unity and polity the whole time. If an influx of immigrants gives outsiders the right to declare a polity to have broken, then the American polity would be no more; but as long as Americans uphold the same Constitution they remain the original America. The same is true of Judahites upholding the same Torah.
I told you that you don't have a separate group of Edomites that remained Edomites and suddenly got the name "Jew" later. You had Edomites that became (a minor) part of the Judahites by conversion and assimilation, and you had the remaining Idumaeans who disappeared from history after the war of 66-73. After losing the Temple there were only Judahites left. Some Judahites were Amoraim (the writers of the Talmud) and some were Christians. This difference was not ethnic but sectarian just like any other prior sects in Judaism. They were all Judahites and used the same mishna. The Christians didn't write down the mishna and adapted their oral traditions into the written decisions of the councils (starting with Peter at Jerusalem, which is judged very mishnaically with reference to the Laws of Noah); the Amoraim did write down their version of the mishna and their commentary and debates on it (the Talmud). The same Judahite Amoraim were called Judaeus in Latin and were the same ones shortened to Ju in 900s France. There was no Edomite people between 73 and 900 to suddenly emerge in France, there were just the Amoriam, who traced their lineage to the Judahites that lived before 70.
So the continuous polity that has called itself Judean and Ju all this time is the same people, even if they once had an influx of Edomites that did not change their base polity, commitment to Torah, or naturalization rules. The Jews don't get to say America is a black nation just because we've had a much longer influx of blacks than the Judeans did of Edomites, do they?
Stephen Wise is inventing words as there was no "Hebrewism" or "Ebraismos" in 538 BC and if we were to retroactively name it that name would be invalid because Edomites were Hebrews (sons of Eber) also. What they called it was elder tradition, Mosaic law, and in Greek Ioudiasmos or Judaism. It would be accurate to give it the retroactive name Yahwism. Further, he doesn't speak of an event that changed one to another but a millennium-long process of one expression becoming another (until the adoption of the Talmud after 500 AD). Well, during this millennium as he knows, the expression of Yahwism also yielded the Way, Messianism, Christianity. Both branched and became separate geographically and culturally. So in Jesus's day both he and all the Judeans (Judahites) kept the same dynamic Yahwism and argued over its direction. None of the Judeans continued to identify as Edomite; like Herod the Great, their children were recognized as birth Jews with naturalized Edomite heritage, and the objection that they were not Jews at all was popularly rejected. There was no Edomite people or nation identified as such that kept Yahwism or what Wise calls "Hebrewism".
The people who returned from Babylon were not Edomite but Judahite, including specifically Zerubbabel of the Davidic line. They followed the same religion, rebuilding a temple in the same place, and Nehemiah and Ezra established the elder tradition based on the same Torah and open Writings and Prophets as before. If there had been a separate "Hebrewism" at this time parallel to the elder tradition, there would have to have been a separate people who held it, but they don't exist. Also, my fren, you're just wrong to say there were rabbis or Talmud in 538 BC; there were no rabbis until the first century AD, and there was no Talmud until after 500 AD, although the generic word "talmud" for study was used (but not to mean a core of oral tradition, which instead came to be called mishna by Jesus's day). Anyone of standing could contribute to elder tradition, and Jesus learned from the example of Rabbis Hillel and Shammai in particular, who were noted for their hundreds of internal disagreements; there was no one tradition, there was a pattern of recognizing all deliverers of tradition and judging them, and that's what Jesus did as well, placing his judgments sometimes in agreement with and sometimes in disagreement with tradition (Matt. 23:3).
There is no evidence of two separate people called "Israelites" and "Judahites" (seeing as all Judahites are sons of Israel), who had two different religions and identities in the same land for 600 years, who never intermixed, who both had pedigrees from Judah meaning there was no way to distinguish them ethnically and yet who in this hypothesis were perfectly distinguished. No, one evidence is that there was a separate people already, Samaritans, over that period who was clearly distinguished from Judahites, and who did keep separate from intermarriage, and where we do have plenty of evidence of separation of culture despite similar tradition; none of that exists for this theory of Hebrewists and Judaists. Further, among the Judahites, we have a continuous testimony of teachers carrying on the same polity even though it typically resolved itself into two parties of elder tradition (the Zugoth), led by the Nasi and the Abbethdin who operated together to lead the one Sanhedrin. These two parties could be considered conservative and liberal, culminating in Hillel and Shammai and arising as the Pharisee and Sadducee (lead) parties. This division also exists and has nothing to do with a separate people from the Judeans that would still be called "Israelites". The Sadducees died with the temple and the Pharisees participated in the split of Rabbinical Jews and Christians, some Pharisees (Joseph, Nicodemus, Gamaliel, Paul) siding with the Christians and some (Johanan ben Zakkai) siding with the nascent rabbinical movement. It is facile to take a rabbinical statement about a millennium-long transition and to treat it as speaking of two separate peoples all that time instead of a single chain of tradition among a single people (without reference to same chain informing the Messianic branch).
TLDR 1: You are perpetuating a narrative that has no basis in historical facts and that posits a distinction within a people for 600 years that does not exist. Your theory was already tried here again this month and found wanting.
If you were to speak of the Edomite influence in Judaism, that exists just as it would also in Christianity, because the Edomite influx informed both. There is no separate Edomite people that suddenly got called "Ju" in 900s France, as if the continuous people that were called Judaeus in Latin for the millenium before that, the Talmudists who had Judahite genealogy, didn't deserve that title.
Now I didn't say you don't get to call out the likes of Epstein for calling himself Jewish. By all means expose all satanists and cabalists with no need to reference ethnicity. So there's no need to read me as saying that. What I did say is that we don't have the right to say that the whole group who identifies as Jews and Judahites today, who still often have genealogies going back to Judah and Levi, don't have the right to the name "Jews". If we say that, we affirm that outsiders get to decide names rather than insiders, and that would give the Jews logical rights to say we're not Americans but unnaturalized immigrants are the true Americans. Every people-group gets rights to self-determination and to decide who is one of them by immigration processes. Your argument amounts to saying the Judahites were too stupid to manage their own immigration process to maintain their identity, and we get to say from outside who the "true" and "false" Judahites were because their immigration decisions on the ground, when they knew the requirements of circumcision, count for nothing. It sounds like a very Jewish and subversive argument, frankly.
TLDR 2: I write because I have data and I earnestly want to know if my data is wrong. This theory has reared itself on Scored repeatedly, always without evidence, and so my honest quest for evidence remains. A discontinuity of people is not evinced by one millennial rabbinical view of process. Instead, the history shows one people of Judah who have been influenced and intermarried successively with Egyptians, Babylonians, Edomites, and Khazarians, and others, but who maintained their unity and polity the whole time. If an influx of immigrants gives outsiders the right to declare a polity to have broken, then the American polity would be no more; but as long as Americans uphold the same Constitution they remain the original America. The same is true of Judahites upholding the same Torah.