Timeline

A timeline of Judaism, from ancient Israel to the present

13 eras, each with its dated firsts. Dates are first datable attestations; each era links to the chapter with the evidence.

  1. c. 1250 – 1000 BCE Chapter 1 Majority view

    Out of Canaan

    Who the first Israelites were, and what happened to the Exodus and the conquest

    Canaan: the central hill country west of the Jordan, with Egypt's eastern Delta and the deserts to the south

    • c. 1208 BCE A people called Israel, named for El. Israel appears as a people in Canaan, not yet a kingdom; its name contains El, the Canaanite high god, not Yahweh. Merneptah Stele: "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not"
    Key takeaways
    • Israel first appears in history c. 1208 BCE, on the Merneptah Stele, as a people in Canaan, not a city or a kingdom.
    • Around 1200 BCE the hill country west of the Jordan filled with small villages, from about 25 sites to about 250, with perhaps 45,000 people; their houses, pots and script are Canaanite.
    • Most archaeologists now think the first Israelites were largely of local origin: Canaanite farmers and herders who settled the highlands as the Late Bronze Age world collapsed.
    • There is no direct evidence for an exodus of a large population from Egypt or for a conquest like the one in Joshua; many scholars allow for a smaller group with an Egypt memory joining early Israel.
    • The Bible itself preserves more than one origin story: an exodus from Egypt, ancestors from Mesopotamia and Aram, and Ezekiel's 'your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite'.

  2. c. 1000 – 750 BCE Chapter 2 Majority view

    Yahweh Among the Gods

    Where Israel's god came from, who stood beside him, and what archaeology says about David

    The southern Levant: the highlands of Israel and Judah, with Moab, Edom and the Sinai desert

    • 12th–10th c. BCE (debated) Yahweh as a god who comes from the southern deserts. Some of the oldest poems in the Bible have Yahweh march out of Seir, Edom and Teman; the date of the poems is disputed. Judges 5:4–5 (the Song of Deborah); Deuteronomy 33:2; Habakkuk 3:3
    • c. 840 BCE Yahweh named as a god. The earliest certain mention of Yahweh comes from Israel's enemy; an Egyptian "Shasu of Yhw" c. 1370 BCE may be related. Mesha Stele: the king of Moab takes "the vessels of Yahweh" from Nebo
    • c. 800 BCE Asherah paired with Yahweh. Blessings invoke Yahweh and "his asherah"; whether that meant the goddess or a cult symbol of hers is debated. Kuntillet ʿAjrud: "Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah"; Khirbet el-Qom
    • early 8th c. BCE Yahweh dominates personal names. Names built on Yahweh outnumber those built on Baal, though a notable minority honour Baal. Samaria ostraca; Hebrew inscriptions and seals
    Key takeaways
    • The earliest dated mention of Yahweh outside the Bible is on the Moabite Mesha Stele, c. 840 BCE; an Egyptian list from c. 1370 BCE names a nomad group, the Shasu of Yhw, which may or may not be connected.
    • Some of the oldest biblical poems have Yahweh march out of the south, from Seir, Edom and Teman, not from the land of Israel.
    • Israel's name contains the god El, not Yahweh. Yahweh and El were probably separate gods who merged; the Bible keeps traces of El's divine council of 'sons of God'.
    • Inscriptions from c. 800–700 BCE bless people 'by Yahweh and his asherah': in at least some circles, Yahweh was worshipped together with a goddess or her sacred symbol.
    • A dynasty called the 'House of David' existed by the mid-ninth century BCE; how large and powerful David and Solomon's kingdom was is one of the most disputed questions in archaeology.

  3. c. 760 – 586 BCE Chapter 3 Majority view

    The Prophets and the Yahweh-Alone Movement

    From Amos to Josiah: how the worship of Yahweh became the demand to worship Yahweh alone

    Israel and Judah under Assyrian and Babylonian power: Samaria, Jerusalem, Lachish and the Judahite hill country

    • c. 760–750 BCE Prophecy collected in books. Prophecy was common across the Near East; what is new is that these prophets' sayings were collected and edited into books. Amos; then Hosea, Isaiah and Micah
    • c. 750–725 BCE Yahweh alone: a demand for exclusive worship. Worship of Yahweh only, without yet denying that other gods exist: monolatry, not monotheism. Hosea 13:4: "you know no god but me"
    • 622 BCE One sanctuary and a book of the law. Josiah's reform centralises sacrifice in Jerusalem and purges Baal and Asherah from the Temple; how far it reached is debated. 2 Kings 22–23; the core of Deuteronomy
    Key takeaways
    • Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, active c. 760–700 BCE, are the first prophets whose words were collected in books; the books themselves were edited and expanded for centuries afterwards.
    • The prophets demanded that Israel worship Yahweh alone. That is monolatry, not yet monotheism: none of them in this period says that other gods do not exist.
    • Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in 722–720 BCE and devastated Judah in 701; Sennacherib's own annals say he shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem 'like a bird in a cage' but do not claim to have taken the city.
    • The 'book of the law' found in the Temple in 622 BCE was probably an early form of Deuteronomy, whose curses and loyalty demands closely follow an Assyrian treaty text of 672 BCE.
    • Josiah's reform banned worship outside Jerusalem and removed Baal, Asherah and the host of heaven from the Temple; how far it reached in practice is debated, and household figurines continued in use.

  4. c. 597 – 539 BCE Chapter 4 Majority view

    Exile and the Birth of Monotheism

    How the destruction of Jerusalem produced a God with no rivals

    Judah, Babylonia and Egypt: Jerusalem in ruins, Judean villages on the canals of southern Mesopotamia, and refugee communities on the Nile

    • 6th c. BCE Sabbath and circumcision as signs of the covenant. Without temple, king or land, portable practices become the marks of belonging; both existed earlier, but not as identity markers. Priestly texts: Genesis 17; Exodus 31:12–17
    • c. 550–539 BCE No god but Yahweh: explicit monotheism. The first statements that other gods do not exist at all come from the exile, after the fall of Jerusalem. Isaiah 45:5–7; Deuteronomy 4:35, 39
    Key takeaways
    • Babylon deported Judah's king and elite in 597 BCE, destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in 587/586, and deported more people in 582; most of the population stayed in the land.
    • Babylonian ration tablets of 592/591 BCE list 'Ya'u-kinu, king of the land of Yahudu': King Jehoiachin, in captivity, receiving oil for himself and five sons.
    • Cuneiform contracts from a Babylonian village called Āl-Yāhūdu, 'Judah-town', dated 572–477 BCE, show exiles keeping Yahweh names for generations while living Babylonian lives.
    • The first clear statements in the Bible that no other god exists come from an anonymous prophet of the 540s BCE whose words were added to the book of Isaiah (chapters 40–55).
    • The Cyrus Cylinder praises Cyrus for returning gods and peoples to their homes but never mentions Judah; whether he had a policy of restoration or the biblical edict is later is debated.

  5. c. 539 – 332 BCE Chapter 5 Majority view

    Persian Yehud and the Making of the Torah

    Cyrus, the Second Temple, Ezra and Nehemiah, a temple in Egypt and a temple on Gerizim

    The Persian province of Yehud around Jerusalem, with Samaria, Babylonia and the Judean garrison at Elephantine in Egypt

    • c. 520 BCE "The satan", an accuser in God's council. Still a role with a definite article, not a name: the accuser acts with God's permission. Zechariah 3:1–2; Job 1–2
    • 5th c. BCE Yehudim: "Jews" as the name of a dispersed people. "Judahite" becomes the name of a people defined by descent and practice, living far from Judah. Elephantine papyri; Esther
    • 5th–4th c. BCE The Torah as a finished, authoritative book. The Torah reaches roughly its final form and is read aloud to the people; the Elephantine Judeans of the 5th century show no trace of it. Nehemiah 8; the shared Samaritan Torah; later the Septuagint
    Key takeaways
    • Persia let Judeans return and rebuild after 539 BCE, but the Cyrus Cylinder never mentions them; the Second Temple was finished around 515 BCE, and Jerusalem stayed a small town of a few hundred to a few thousand people.
    • Most scholars think the Torah reached roughly its final form in the Persian period, the fifth and fourth centuries BCE; why it happened then, under imperial pressure or by an internal compromise, is debated.
    • Judeans at Elephantine in Egypt ran their own temple of YHW in the fifth century BCE, gave money to other gods as well, and never mention Moses, the Exodus or a written Torah.
    • Ezra is remembered as the scribe who read the Torah to the people; his date is uncertain, and some scholars doubt he existed as described.
    • The Samaritans built a temple of Yahweh on Mount Gerizim by the mid-fifth century BCE; they and the Judeans were two branches of the same Yahweh-worshipping heritage, not a pagan sect and a true faith.

  6. c. 332 BCE – 70 CE Chapter 6 Majority view

    Hellenism, the Maccabees and the Second Temple Sects

    Greek rule, a revolt, a new kingdom, rival schools, and the ideas that would shape Judaism and Christianity

    Judea and the Jewish diaspora, from Alexandria to Babylonia and Rome

    • 4th c. BCE Satan as a proper name. An act the older text gives to Yahweh, inciting David's census, is moved to "Satan", now without the article. 1 Chronicles 21:1 against 2 Samuel 24:1
    • 3rd c. BCE Fallen angels as the source of evil. Two hundred angels descend and corrupt humanity: evil comes from them, not from Adam. The Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36)
    • 246–221 BCE A Jewish prayer house (synagogue). The earliest dated synagogue is in Egypt; buildings in Judea and Galilee follow in the 1st c. CE. Schedia inscription, dedicated for Ptolemy III
    • c. 165 BCE Resurrection and judgment of the dead. The first clear biblical promise that the dead will rise; Daniel is also the first biblical book to name angels, Michael and Gabriel. Daniel 12:2
    • December 164 BCE Hanukkah. The rededication of the Temple, kept as an eight-day festival; the oil miracle is first recorded in the Talmud. 1 Maccabees 4:52–59
    • late 2nd or 1st c. BCE "Judaism" as a word. The Greek word first names the Jewish way of life in contrast to Hellenism. 2 Maccabees 2:21, 8:1, 14:38 (Ioudaismos)
    • 2nd–1st c. BCE Satan as leader of the forces of evil. The accuser becomes the commander of "the sons of darkness", the figure the Gospels take for granted. Jubilees (Mastema); Dead Sea Scrolls (Belial)
    • 1st c. BCE An end-time Messiah. "Anointed" becomes the title of an expected end-time figure; expectations varied widely. Community Rule (1QS 9:11); Psalms of Solomon 17
    Key takeaways
    • Greek rule from 332 BCE made Judaism bilingual: the Torah was translated into Greek in Alexandria in the third century BCE, and by the first century CE Jews living outside Judea, many of them Greek-speaking, probably outnumbered those inside it.
    • The Maccabean revolt of 167–164 BCE began with a civil war among Jews over Greek ways and a ban on Jewish practice by Antiochus IV; the Temple's rededication in 164 BCE is the origin of Hanukkah, whose miracle of the oil is first told centuries later.
    • The first clear statement in the Hebrew Bible that the dead will rise to be judged is Daniel 12:2, written c. 165 BCE. Named angels, Satan as God's adversary and an end-time Messiah all take shape in the same centuries.
    • Josephus describes three 'philosophies' among Jews: Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. Most scholars think the Dead Sea Scrolls belonged to a group related to the Essenes, though that link is still debated.
    • Synagogues existed before the Temple fell: a Greek inscription from Jerusalem records one built 'for the reading of the Law and the teaching of the commandments'.

  7. c. 70 – 640 CE Chapter 7 Majority view

    Without a Temple: The Rabbis

    How a small circle of scholars rebuilt Judaism after Rome destroyed its centre

    Judaea and Galilee under Rome and Byzantium; Babylonia under the Parthians and Sasanians

    • c. 70–90 CE Prayer in place of sacrifice. After the Temple burned, daily prayer was modelled on its timetable; fixed wording came centuries later. b. Berakhot 26b; the ʿAmidah attributed to Yavneh (b. Berakhot 28b)
    • c. 200 CE The Oral Torah written down: the Mishnah. Tradition the rabbis traced to Sinai is compiled in Hebrew, much of it about a Temple that no longer stood. The Mishnah, compiled under Rabbi Judah the Patriarch
    • c. 200 CE Jewish status through the mother. In the Bible descent runs through the father; the matrilineal rule is first stated by the rabbis. m. Kiddushin 3:12
    Key takeaways
    • Judaism as practised today, built on prayer, synagogue, Torah study and the Talmud, is largely the creation of the rabbis in the five centuries after the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE.
    • The Mishnah was compiled in Galilee around 200 CE under Rabbi Judah the Patriarch; the Jerusalem Talmud was completed around 400 and the Babylonian Talmud took shape between about 500 and 700.
    • The 'Council of Jamnia' that supposedly closed the Hebrew Bible c. 90 CE is a modern scholarly construction; the rabbis at Yavneh were a small group whose influence grew slowly.
    • Synagogue floors of the fourth to sixth centuries show the sun god Helios and the zodiac, evidence that ordinary Jewish practice was more varied than the Talmud suggests.
    • The rule that Jewish identity passes through the mother is first stated in the Mishnah; in the Bible, children belonged to their father's people.

  8. c. 632 – 1250 CE Chapter 8 Majority view

    Under Islam

    The geonim, the Karaites, Saadia, Andalusia and Maimonides: how Judaism took its medieval shape in the Islamic world

    The Islamic world: Iraq (Baghdad, Sura, Pumbedita), Egypt (Fustat), Palestine, North Africa (Kairouan, Fez) and al-Andalus

    • c. 760s Scripture without the Oral Torah. Karaism rejects rabbinic tradition; Anan's role as founder was enlarged by later accounts. Anan ben David's Book of Commandments
    • c. 860–875 The Talmud as authority everywhere, and a written prayer order. The Babylonian geonim make the Talmud the law of Jews across the Islamic world and send the first complete prayer order to Spain. Seder Rav Amram; geonic responsa
    • c. 1168 A binding Jewish creed. The first rabbinic attempt at binding dogma, disputed from the start, later sung as Yigdal and printed as Ani Maʾamin. Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10: the Thirteen Principles
    Key takeaways
    • Within a century of the Arab conquests, most of the world's Jews lived under Muslim rule, and for the next five centuries the centres of Jewish life were Baghdad, Cairo, Kairouan and Córdoba.
    • The Babylonian geonim, heads of the academies of Sura and Pumbedita (c. 589–1038), made the Babylonian Talmud the law of Jews everywhere by answering letters sent from across the Islamic world.
    • The Karaites rejected the Talmud and read the Bible alone; Saadia Gaon's polemics against them helped define rabbinic Judaism as one side of a debate.
    • Jews adopted Arabic as their everyday and scholarly language: Saadia, Judah Halevi and Maimonides wrote their major prose works in Arabic, usually in Hebrew letters.
    • Maimonides' Thirteen Principles (c. 1168) were the first rabbinic attempt to set out a binding Jewish creed, and they were disputed from the start.

  9. c. 1000 – 1650 CE Chapter 9 Majority view

    Ashkenaz, Sepharad and the Kabbalah

    Rashi, the Crusades, the expulsions, the Zohar and the making of two Jewish worlds

    Latin Europe: the Rhineland, northern France, England, Iberia and Italy; then Safed, the Ottoman Empire and Poland–Lithuania

    • c. 1180–1230 Kabbalah. Jewish mysticism with the sefirot appears in Provence and Castile, not in antiquity as the Zohar claims. Sefer ha-Bahir; Isaac the Blind in Provence; then the Zohar, c. 1280–1300
    • late Middle Ages Bar mitzvah as a ceremony. A boy was legally adult at thirteen in Talmudic law; a public ceremony marking it is attested only late. Ashkenazi custom
    • 1565; 1571 One code of law for Sephardim and Ashkenazim. Printing lets one code, with Ashkenazi glosses, become the reference for both communities. Joseph Karo's Shulḥan ʿArukh with Moses Isserles's glosses
    Key takeaways
    • Ashkenaz (the Rhineland and northern France) and Sepharad (Iberia) were the two great Jewish cultures of medieval Europe; their differences in law, liturgy and outlook still divide Jewish communities today.
    • Rashi of Troyes (1040–1105) wrote the commentaries on the Bible and Talmud that every Jewish student still reads; the first dated printed Hebrew book, in 1475, was his Torah commentary.
    • From the Crusade massacres of 1096 to the Black Death burnings of 1349, Jews in Latin Europe faced new kinds of violence and accusation, beginning with the ritual-murder charge at Norwich in 1144.
    • Jews were expelled from England (1290), France (1306, finally 1394), Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497); most of Europe's Jews ended up in the Ottoman Empire, Italy and Poland–Lithuania.
    • The Zohar presents itself as the teaching of a second-century rabbi, but most scholars date it to late-thirteenth-century Castile and credit Moses de León or a circle around him.

  10. c. 1648 – 1800 CE Chapter 10 Majority view

    False Messiahs, Hasidism and Their Opponents

    From the 1648 massacres and Sabbatai Zevi to the Baal Shem Tov, the tsaddik and the Vilna Gaon

    Ukraine, Poland–Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire, with echoes across the Jewish world from Amsterdam to Yemen

    • 1770s–1780s The tsaddik as mediator for his followers. Formulated by the Maggid's students, not by the Baal Shem Tov himself. Noʿam Elimelekh (1788) and other early Hasidic books
    Key takeaways
    • In 1648–49 Cossack rebels under Bohdan Khmelnytsky massacred Jews across Ukraine. Chroniclers spoke of 100,000 dead or more; a modern demographic study puts the toll at most around 20,000, perhaps half the Jews of the region.
    • In 1665–66 much of the Jewish world believed Sabbatai Zevi of Smyrna was the Messiah. In September 1666 he converted to Islam before the Ottoman sultan, yet some followers kept faith in him for a century and more.
    • Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov (c. 1700–1760), was a real healer and mystic: Polish tax records list a tax-exempt 'Baal Shem' in Międzybóż from 1740 to 1760. He wrote no book, and he did not found an organised movement.
    • Hasidism as a movement was built after his death by the circle of Dov Ber of Mezeritch (d. 1772), with the first Hasidic book printed in 1780 and the doctrine of the tsaddik, the holy leader, at its centre.
    • From 1772 the rabbinic establishment of Lithuania, led by the Vilna Gaon, excommunicated the Hasidim. The bans failed; by the mid-nineteenth century Hasidism was a mass movement and both camps were allied against secular reform.

  11. c. 1750 – 1900 CE Chapter 11 Majority view

    Emancipation and the Modern Movements

    How citizenship split Judaism into Reform, Orthodox and Conservative, from Mendelssohn's Berlin to the Lower East Side

    Germany, France, Hungary and the Russian Empire, and from the 1840s the United States

    • 1795 "Orthodox" as a name for Jews. The label comes from outside, before Orthodoxy organised itself as a movement against Reform. Berlinische Monatsschrift
    • 1810 Reform worship. Reform begins with changes to worship; changes in doctrine follow. Israel Jacobson's service at Seesen: German sermon, organ and choir
    Key takeaways
    • Before about 1800 there was no Reform, Orthodox or Conservative Judaism. The three movements were all answers to one new situation: Jews becoming citizens of European states.
    • Emancipation came with terms. In 1789 a French deputy said Jews must be refused 'everything' as a nation and granted 'everything' as individuals, and Napoleon's Sanhedrin of 1807 declared France the Jews' fatherland.
    • Reform began as changes to worship: a German sermon, an organ and a shorter Hebrew liturgy at Seesen (1810) and the Hamburg Temple (1818). By 1885 American Reform rabbis declared Jews 'no longer a nation, but a religious community'.
    • Orthodoxy is a modern movement too. The word was first applied to Jews in the 1790s, and both the Hatam Sofer's 'anything new is forbidden by the Torah' and Samson Raphael Hirsch's 'Torah with worldly culture' were responses to Reform.
    • The word 'antisemitism' entered politics in 1879, and the pogroms of 1881–82 helped set off a migration of some two million Jews from the Russian Empire, most of them to the United States.

  12. c. 1881 – 1974 CE Chapter 12 Politically contested

    Zionism, the Holocaust and the State of Israel

    How a secular national movement, a genocide and a state changed Jewish religion

    Central and Eastern Europe, Palestine and Israel, and the United States

    • 1862 Settling the land as the start of redemption. A rabbinic argument for settlement decades before Herzl's secular, political Zionism (1896–97). Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, Derishat Tziyon
    Key takeaways
    • Political Zionism was founded by largely secular Jews; in its first decades most Orthodox rabbis and most Reform rabbis opposed it, for opposite reasons.
    • Religious Zionists, organised as Mizrachi from 1902 and inspired by Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, read secular pioneers as unwitting agents of redemption; the Haredi world mostly rejected a state before the Messiah, citing the Talmud's Three Oaths.
    • The Holocaust killed about six million Jews, roughly two-thirds of Europe's Jews, and produced a new body of theology, from Rubenstein's 'death of God' to Fackenheim's '614th commandment'.
    • Israel's founding in 1948 is remembered by Israelis as independence and by Palestinians as the Nakba, the catastrophe, in which about 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled; historians still debate how much was flight and how much expulsion.
    • The 1967 war, and the capture of the Western Wall and the West Bank, gave the state a messianic meaning for many religious Zionists and gave rise to the settler movement Gush Emunim in 1974.

  13. c. 1967 – 2026 CE Chapter 13 Majority view

    Judaism Today

    Denominations, women rabbis, the ultra-Orthodox revival, and who counts as a Jew

    Israel and North America, with France, Britain, Argentina and the wider diaspora

    • 18 March 1922 Bat mitzvah. The first public bat mitzvah in America. Mordecai Kaplan's daughter Judith, New York
    • 27 December 1935 A woman rabbi. Seminaries follow from 1972 (Reform), 1974 (Reconstructionist) and 1985 (Conservative); Orthodoxy remains divided. Regina Jonas, ordained privately in Offenbach
    • 15 March 1983 Jewish status through the father (Reform). American Reform accepts the child of one Jewish parent, father or mother, as presumptively Jewish. Central Conference of American Rabbis resolution
    Key takeaways
    • About 15.7 million people counted as Jews in 2024, more than 45 percent of them in Israel and about 40 percent in the United States; nearly all the growth since 2000 has been in Israel.
    • Judaism today is divided less by doctrine than by how far Jewish law binds: in the US most Jews are Reform or have no denomination, while in Israel Jews sort themselves into secular, traditional, religious and ultra-Orthodox.
    • Women have been ordained as rabbis in the Reform movement since 1972 and the Conservative since 1985; Regina Jonas was ordained privately in Offenbach in 1935. Orthodox women clergy remain contested.
    • Who counts as a Jew is decided differently by Jewish law (a Jewish mother or conversion), American Reform Judaism (one Jewish parent plus identification) and Israel's Law of Return (a Jewish grandparent suffices for immigration).
    • Almost nothing of the religion of the Iron Age survives in practice: no sacrifice, no temple, no priesthood in charge, no goddess. What survives is a name, a text, and a people who read it.