Episode Details

Was this religion dropped onto a unified nation that had just marched out of Egypt, or did both the nation and its religion evolve over the course of millennia?

We’ve been looking at hominids over the past couple hundred thousand years, paying particular attention to the evolution of cognitive abilities which contributed to the emergence of a religious streak: external agency detection, assigning intention and purpose (“promiscuous teleology”), and religious thinking (perception of the future; belief in an afterlife; creating statues/idols; music).  They migrated out of Africa and established religions every where they went around the globe: we have remnants of these at Stonehenge, the Aztec/Mayan ruins, temples in South Asia, markings on cave walls as far east as Australia and as far west as North America.

But their first steps out of Africa took them into the region we now call Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. This is where we find the earliest human writings (Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets) and the oldest temple structures (Gobekli Tepe; pyramids of Egypt), complete with religious stories and myths. From these and other artifacts, we can piece together the world’s earliest religions: Babylonian, Egyptian, Zoroastrian … and Judaism.

Today, we’ll talk to Dr. Aren Maeir, a world-leading archaeologist who works in the sands of modern day Palestine, about the emergence and evolution of Judaism and the people who created that religion.

Or did you think that Yahweh dropped the religion of Judaism on some of those early people at the foot of Mount Sinai?

The archaeological evidence tells us that Israel did not emerge from Egypt as a unified nation. It did not conquer Canaan through the major battles described in the Old Testament. It did not worship one God … Yahweh … exclusively. Instead, that early nation of Israel comprised a mixture of people groups  — including

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