https://www.timesofisrael.com/bad-judea ... nt-israel/
The article is mainly about the archaeology related to Jewish observance of the Torah dietary commands. That the command not to eat pork was clearly observed according to the lack of such remains in the relics, the equally prohibited consumption of scale-less/finless "fish" was, in reality, not evident at all. Judeans everywhere ate lots of them.
There are all sort of debates ongoing about how this situation could have come to be. However, be that as it may, I think the most interesting thing said by the author of the article, Amanda Borschel-Dan, is this:
For a while now I have suggested that Judaism as a belief system had "re-fashioned" itself in Hasmonean times. This is very interesting, not whether ancient Jews had a different definition of what qualified as a "scale-less fish" or whatever.Birth of a religion
In [Ariel University’s Dr. Yonatan] Adler’s upcoming 2022 book from Yale University Press on the Origins of Judaism, he will discuss more fully when the religion as a practice was born. Spoiler: It’s centuries later than when the Torah was redacted.
“We don’t have evidence for any of these [Torah] practices or prohibitions prior to the second century before the common era, that is to say from the period of the Hasmonean Dynasty,” said Adler. “We do not have any evidence that the Judean masses, that your regular every day Judean you would have met on the street of Jerusalem, prior to the middle of the second century BCE had any knowledge of the Torah and or that he observed the rules of the Torah.”
Adler is the first to emphasize the archaeology maxim that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
“Judaism could have begun before the mid-2nd century,” he said, but the lack of evidence currently makes that conjecture. “It could have emerged during the long Hellenistic period — sometime during this time is the best time to be seeking the emergence of Judaism.”
Shades of Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible by Russell E. Gmirkin © 2017 – Routledge
DCH