The son of Jesse, anointed by Samuel to become king in place of Saul; he killed Goliath; his sons Amnon, Absalom, Adonijah, and Solomon fought to follow him on the throne; he is associated with the biblical psalms and is credited with politically and militarily uniting the ancient Israelite confederation into a centralized kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital; he created the largest empire Israel ever knew; David is said to have planned for the Temple which his son and successor Solomon built. See Chapter 8, Chapter 8.
(Hebrew yom kippur) The one day each year when special sacrifices were made by the high priest for the sins of the people; only on this day the high priest entered the Most Holy Place of the temple to sprinkle blood on the ark of the covenant to reconcile Israel with God (Leviticus 16). See Chapter 4.
Also termed the Day of the LORD, the day God battles his enemies; derives from the holy war tradition and was cited by Amos, Joel, Obadiah, and Zephaniah. See Chapter 13.
A collection of scrolls dating to the first century B.C.E. found in caves near the Dead Sea; they are generally thought to be linked with the settlement at Qumran, and with a Jewish religious group called the Essenes. See Conclusion.
(Greek for "ten words") Refers to laws collected into a group of ten; The Decalogue is the Ten Commandments received by Moses on Mount Sinai (Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:1-21); the cultic decalogue is found in Exodus 34.
Pertains to writings regarded as Scripture by some (particularly by Christian groups) but not contained in the Hebrew Bible. Also see Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.
A reform of Judah's religious institutions carried out by Josiah in the seventh century B.C.E.; the book of Deuteronomy is closely associated with this initiative.
(abbreviated DH; sometimes called the Deuteronomic history) The body of material which consists of the introduction to Deuteronomy (chapters 1-4) and Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings; it is an extended review of Israel's history from the conquest under Joshua through the destruction of 587 B.C.E. written from the perspective of principles found in the book of Deuteronomy. See Part 2, Chapter 5.
The fifth book of the Torah/Pentateuch; many modern scholars consider it to be part or all of a scroll found during a reform of the temple and its institutions carried out by Josiah in 622 B.C.E. See Part 1.
(Greek for "scattering") The technical term for the dispersion of the Jewish people, a process which began after defeats in 721 and 587 B.C.E. and resulted in the growth of sizable Jewish communities outside Palestine; the terms diasora and dispersion are often used to refer to the Jewish communities living among the gentiles outside the "holy land" of Canaan/Israel/Palestine. See Chapter 16.
Scholarly hypothesis suggesting that the Torah/Pentateuch was not the work one author, such as Moses, but is a composition based on four documents from different periods: J (the Yahwist) from about 950 B.C.E., E (the Elohist) from about 850, D (Deuteronomy) from about 620, and P (the Priestly document) from about 550.450 J and E were combined around 720, D was added about a century later, and P about a century after that, giving final shape to the Torah. See Part 1.
