I am blogging about David M. Carr’s book, Holy Resilience.
Carr says that the Hasmonean monarchy
. . .though it only existed for a few decades–was the only Jewish institution of the time with the power to enforce the selection of certain biblical books as authoritative and the standardization of the manuscripts of those books. There was no comparable Jewish institution either before or after it (p. 147).
Carr recounted how the Davidic monarchy fell to the Babylonians. After that the Jewish state went away and was replaced during and after the exile by religious institutions alone. But literary works from around -200 (the Dead Sea Scriptures and the Enoch literature) show that there was no unified Judaism.
Now for biblical studies this period has become the focus of scholars who have taken the postmodern turn. They are skeptical of the history of Israel as told in the Bible…
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