For Western culture, Judaism was a foundational historical example as well as a religion. In that regard, Johnson's central thesis is that the books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Jeremiah, illustrate the gradual emergence of a philosophy that was distinctively Jewish but that also became distinctively Western. The major development was monotheism, which permeated the West, in part a reaction to and departure from Asian/Egyptian polytheism. Related to this is the perception by the Jews of a moral-ethical universe deriving from the power of the one god: "The discovery of monotheism, and not just of monotheism but of a sole, omnipotent God actuated by ethical principles and seeking methodically to impose them on human beings, is one of the great turning-points in history, perhaps the greatest of all" (Johnson, 1987, p. 30).
The legacy of monotheism was the principal tenet of Judaism that was absorbed (although reconfigured) by Christianity. No less significant was the heritage of Jewish texts. In that connection, Campbell (1964) cites Mohammed's famous description of the Jews as the people of the book. The written Hebrew record corresponds to a strong and highly consistent oral tradition among the Hebrew generations (Campbell, 1964). The series of books that comprise the Hebrew Bible recorded for Hebrew posterity their experience of being human that reached meaning by their relationship to God.
Although religious practice among Jews may take a variety of forms, all Jews share beliefs that are articulated (however differently interpreted) in the core texts. The Torah comprises the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. The Talmud the "authoritative religious document of Judaism" (Hiesberger, et al., 1995, p. 438), containing interpretation (the Mishnah) and interpretation of interpretation (the Gemara) of Jewish doctrine and religious praxis, the Talmud is part of what is ...