In this study, John J. Collins argues that Judaism was conceived by the authors and earliest interpreters of the Torah. Many readers of this journal will not find that position especially controversial. The novelty of Collins’ treatment is in his engagement of a now decade-old trend in biblical scholarship predicated on distinguishing between the “Jews” and “Judeans” in the context of pre-Christian antiquity. Those ancient persons who identified as Judeans originally understood that name as an ethnic distinction referring to people who lived or whose ancestors lived in the land of Judea. The name did not take on its now familiar religious valence until early Christian theologians twisted its meaning to create “Judaism” as a negative antipode of Christianity. Hence, Judeans were not “Jews” until their unwitting subjection to the domineering Christian construction of Judaism during the late ancient period. Countering that argument, Collins submits that Judaism and its attendant discourse of Jewish identity connote a culture both religious and ethnic in its character. His objective here is to show that that was the case since the people of Judah, the namesake of the Jews, first undertook their collective enterprise centuries before the emergence of Christianity.

Collins traces the origin of Judaism as a distinctive modality of group identification to the composition of the Torah. He accounts that landmark event as a centuries-long process that began with the composition of Deuteronomy in pre-exilic Judah and ended with the compilation of the proto-Pentateuchal canon in post-exilic Judea. The result was a synthesis of variegated narrative traditions relating to the origins of the Jewish people along with equally diverse collections of ethical and ritual laws meant to govern an idealized society devoted to the worship of their ancestral deity, Yahweh. Although the collected books of Moses did not at first function as an authoritative code of conduct for all the people its authors and editors presumed to address, their textualization provided a common and communicable source of cultural identification for those in Judea and abroad who would presume to identify with the bygone nation of Israel and its revitalized cult. As knowledge of the Torah gradually spread, some Jews undertook to observe the Torah's legislation to its fullest extent of their abilities. Others observed only some of the Torah's laws, whether for ignorance of its contents, for lack of conviction, or because circumstance allowed them to do so much. Some Jews invented laws upon laws, whether out of fear of misinterpreting the words of Moses or because they believed they possessed exclusive knowledge of divine regulations not recorded in the Torah. Albeit, therefore, to variegated results, Jews invariably considered the Torah a document of foremost religious significance to their national collective.

Collins’ account of the diversity of the Torah's reception during the Second Temple period is dazzling in its breadth. He visits some familiar witnesses—Ezra, Ben Sira, the Maccabees, the Pharisees and Sadducees—men renowned, sometimes less than accurately, as models of Jewish piety during the Second Temple period (539 BCE–70 CE). He devotes equal attention to those whose adherence to the Torah's legislation ranged from casual to fanatical—the obscure sages behind the Bible's wisdom literature, the authors of the esoteric Enoch literature, the Essenes, and the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Fittingly, Collins ends his tour with the apostle Paul, whose letters tell of his deeply conflicted relationship with the Torah. To Collins, Paul's design to relieve followers of Jesus of what he saw as the Torah's restrictive ritual obligations would prove a major factor in Christianity's emergence as a religion distinct from Judaism.

Little of the evidence that is presented here will come as news to specialists in the discipline of biblical research. Yet Collins’ masterful elucidation of the many and diverse materials he mobilizes on behalf of his argument makes this book a valuable resource for readers mulling the semantics of Jewish identity during the Second Temple period. Collins’ work thus succeeds not only as an accessible overview of the composition and early reception of the Torah but as a necessary call to common sense as to the misguided premise that Judaism was born of Christianity rather than Christianity of Judaism.