🌍 World Religions — Unit 2: Judaism

Orientation

We begin our survey of the world's religions with Judaism, and we begin here for a reason that has nothing to do with alphabetical order. Judaism is not simply one religion among many that a Christian happens to study. It is the soil Christianity grew out of. Jesus was a Jew. Every one of His first disciples was a Jew. The Hebrew Scriptures arose within Israel and Judah and the Jewish covenantal tradition, for a Jewish audience, in a Jewish context. Paul, writing to the Romans about his own kinsmen according to the flesh, listed with something close to awe everything that belonged to them: "the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came" (Romans 9:4–5). When Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well that "salvation is of the Jews" (John 4:22), He was not being polite. He was stating a plain historical and theological fact that every Christian pastor needs to understand before he understands almost anything else about his own faith.

And yet Judaism today is not simply "the Old Testament without the New." It is a living, developing religious tradition that has continued for two thousand years since the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70 — two thousand years during which it necessarily had to answer, without a Temple, without a priesthood, and without a sacrificial system, questions that the Torah itself had assumed would always be answered through that Temple, that priesthood, and that sacrificial system. Understanding how Judaism answered those questions, and where its answers diverge from what Christians believe those same questions require, is essential both for accurate scholarship and for faithful, respectful evangelism among Jewish people — a task the New Testament treats as far from finished (Romans 11:25–26).

I. Israel's Election and the Shema

At the center of Jewish identity, then and now, stands a single confession recited daily by observant Jews for over three thousand years: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!" (Deuteronomy 6:4). This declaration, known simply as the Shema after its opening Hebrew word, is not merely a statement of monotheism in the abstract philosophical sense. It is a covenantal claim: this God, and no other, is Israel's God, and Israel belongs to Him in a way no other nation does. The verses that follow the Shema — "you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength... you shall teach them diligently to your children" (Deuteronomy 6:5–7) — bind that theological confession directly to daily life, to the household, and to the raising of the next generation. This is worth pausing over, because it explains something a Gentile Christian can easily miss: for a Jewish person, religious identity and ethnic identity are not two separate categories that happen to overlap. They are, in the traditional understanding, a single inheritance passed down through the covenant God made first with Abraham (Genesis 12:1–3; 17:1–14), then renewed and expanded through Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David.

That covenant carries with it the doctrine theologians call Israel's election — the conviction, rooted throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, that God chose this particular people, not because of any merit in them, but according to His own sovereign purpose. "The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the LORD loves you" (Deuteronomy 7:7–8). This election was never intended by God to be an end in itself. From the beginning, the promise to Abraham included the whole world: "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). Israel was chosen not to be hoarded but to be a light — "I will also give You as a light to the Gentiles, that You should be My salvation to the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 49:6), a verse the New Testament explicitly applies to Christ (Acts 13:47), and rightly so, because Jesus is the fulfillment of exactly what Israel's calling always pointed toward.

II. The Hebrew Scriptures and the Rise of Rabbinic Judaism

Jewish tradition organizes what Christians call the Old Testament into three sections known collectively by the acronym Tanakh: the Torah (the five books of Moses), the Nevi'im or Prophets (including both the historical books like Joshua and Judges, which Jewish tradition calls the "Former Prophets," and the familiar prophetic books like Isaiah and Jeremiah, the "Latter Prophets"), and the Ketuvim or Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and the remaining books). This is the same collection of books Christians recognize as the Old Testament canon, though arranged in a different order, ending not with Malachi but with 2 Chronicles.

For most of Israel's history, the Temple in Jerusalem stood at the center of religious life. It was there that the sacrifices prescribed in Leviticus were offered, there that the high priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year on the Day of Atonement, there that pilgrims gathered for the great feasts. When the Roman general Titus destroyed that Temple in A.D. 70, crushing the Jewish revolt that had begun four years earlier, Judaism faced an unprecedented crisis. The entire sacrificial system commanded in the Torah for the atonement of sin had, quite suddenly, no physical location where it could be carried out. This was not a minor administrative inconvenience. It struck at the heart of how a Jewish person could be reconciled to God.

Out of this crisis rose what scholars call Rabbinic Judaism, shaped decisively by the Pharisaic tradition that had already existed alongside the Sadducees and other groups in Jesus' own day. The rabbis who survived the Temple's destruction, most famously gathered under the leadership of Yohanan ben Zakkai at the academy of Yavneh, began the long work of reconstructing Jewish religious life around three pillars that did not require a Temple: prayer, the study of Torah, and deeds of loving-kindness. Over the following centuries, the oral traditions and legal interpretations these rabbis developed were eventually written down as the Mishnah (compiled around A.D. 200) and then expanded with extensive commentary into the Talmud (completed in two versions, the Jerusalem Talmud and the much larger Babylonian Talmud, by roughly A.D. 500). For traditional Judaism ever since, the Talmud stands alongside the Tanakh as an essential, authoritative guide for interpreting and applying the written Torah to actual life — a body of interpretation many Christians have never even heard of, yet one that shapes the daily practice of most religious Jews far more directly than the Torah's bare text does on its own.

III. Major Branches of Judaism Today

Contemporary Judaism is not a single, uniform tradition, and a pastor who assumes every Jewish person he meets holds identical beliefs will quickly find himself mistaken. Orthodox Judaism holds that the Torah, both written and oral, was given by God to Moses at Sinai and remains fully binding today; Orthodox Jews maintain traditional practice regarding the Sabbath, dietary law (kashrut), and daily prayer with the greatest consistency. Conservative Judaism, which emerged in nineteenth-century Europe and grew large in America, affirms the authority of Jewish law but holds that it may develop and adapt over time in response to changing circumstances. Reform Judaism, the oldest of the modern movements, treats Jewish law as a valuable ethical and spiritual heritage rather than a binding legal code, emphasizing personal autonomy in religious practice and, historically, a strong emphasis on social justice as the heart of Jewish ethical teaching. Reconstructionist Judaism, a smaller and more recent movement, understands Judaism primarily as an evolving religious civilization rather than a revealed system of law. Beyond these organized movements, a very large number of Jewish people worldwide identify as secular or cultural Jews — connected to Jewish identity, history, and community, sometimes deeply so, without holding to traditional theological beliefs at all.

This diversity matters enormously for pastoral ministry. An Orthodox Jewish neighbor and a secular Jewish coworker may share almost nothing in common religiously beyond ancestry and a general sense of Jewish identity and history. A pastor who addresses either one as though he were addressing the other will very quickly lose credibility and, worse, will fail to actually communicate the gospel in terms that connect with what that particular person actually believes and cares about.

IV. What Jews Believe: God, Torah, and the Messiah

Judaism and Christianity share an enormous amount of common ground that a Christian pastor should never minimize: belief in one God, the Creator of heaven and earth; the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures as God's revealed word; a moral law rooted in that revelation; and the conviction that history is moving toward a divinely appointed goal. Where the traditions diverge most sharply is precisely where Christianity claims its central and non-negotiable truth: the identity of the Messiah.

Judaism has historically expected a Messiah — a specially anointed, human deliverer descended from David who would restore Israel, gather the exiles, rebuild the Temple, and usher in an age of universal peace and knowledge of God (drawing especially on passages like Isaiah 11:1–10 and Ezekiel 37:24–28). What traditional Judaism has not generally expected, and largely does not accept, is that this Messiah would be divine, that He would die an atoning death for sin, or that He would come twice — once in humility, suffering rejection, and again in glory and power. The very passages Christians read as clear prophecy of Jesus — Isaiah 53's suffering servant, Psalm 22's description of pierced hands and feet, Daniel 9's timeline for "Messiah the Prince" — have each generated centuries of Jewish interpretation identifying their subject as the nation of Israel itself, or a righteous sufferer of a different kind, rather than as a single individual who is both divine and human.

Equally significant is the question of atonement itself. Since the Temple's destruction eliminated the sacrificial system Leviticus describes as God's appointed means of atonement — "it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul" (Leviticus 17:11) — rabbinic Judaism developed alternative theological answers: prayer, repentance, and charitable deeds are now understood by most branches of Judaism to accomplish what sacrifice once did, particularly around the observance of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A Christian engaging thoughtfully with a Jewish friend will want to gently press exactly this point: the Torah itself insists that blood alone atones for sin, and no rabbinic tradition, however ancient or well-intentioned, can supply what the Torah says only blood can supply. This is precisely where the book of Hebrews addresses a Jewish-Christian audience directly, showing at length how Jesus fulfills, rather than abolishes, the entire sacrificial system Moses established (Hebrews 9:11–14, 10:1–14).

V. Engaging Jewish Neighbors and Friends with the Gospel

Paul's own heart toward his kinsmen should shape every Christian's posture here: "my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved" (Romans 10:1), a desire so strong that Paul says he could wish himself accursed and cut off from Christ for their sake (Romans 9:3). This is not the language of contempt, nor is it the language of indifference dressed up as tolerance. It is the language of urgent love for people who, Paul insists, remain "beloved for the sake of the fathers" even where they have not yet believed (Romans 11:28), and regarding whom Paul explicitly warns Gentile believers against arrogance: "do not boast against the branches... if God did not spare the natural branches, He may not spare you either" (Romans 11:18–21).

Practically, this means a pastor engaging a Jewish neighbor or friend should resist two equal and opposite errors. The first error is a kind of theological carelessness sometimes called supersessionism or replacement theology taken to its worst extreme — treating the Jewish people as though God's promises to them have simply expired and been transferred wholesale to the church, with nothing further owed to Israel as a people. Romans 11 will not permit that reading; Paul explicitly denies that God has cast away His people (Romans 11:1–2) and insists that "all Israel will be saved" in God's own appointed time (Romans 11:26). The second error, just as damaging, is a squeamishness about evangelism itself — the mistaken idea that, because of the special history and suffering of the Jewish people, Christians should simply leave Jewish people alone religiously, as though Jesus were somehow not necessary, or not intended, for Jewish salvation. Nothing in the New Testament supports this. Paul went to the synagogue first in city after city (Acts 13:5, 14, 46; 17:1–2), and the gospel he preached there was addressed to Jews as Jews, appealing directly to the Hebrew Scriptures they already held sacred.

In practice, this means a pastor should learn to speak with Jewish neighbors from within their own Scriptures rather than around them — pointing to Isaiah 53, to Daniel 9, to the Passover lamb of Exodus 12, to the blood-atonement theology of Leviticus 17, and showing how each finds its answer in Jesus of Nazareth. It means honoring, rather than dismissing, Jewish history, suffering, and the genuine devotion many Jewish people bring to God even without yet knowing Christ. And it means never forgetting Paul's own confession, that the gospel is "to the Jew first and also for the Greek" (Romans 1:16) — not a formula assigning Jewish people to a religious category safely outside the reach of the gospel, but a reminder of exactly where, historically and theologically, the good news of Jesus Christ first began.

— Dr. Wayne Cook
Chapala Theological Seminary

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