To the question Was Jesus God or man?, the Christians therefore answered: both. After 70 AD, their answer was unanimous and increasingly emphatic. Th… - Paul Johnson

The laws were now studied, read aloud, memorized. It is probably from this time that we get the Deuteronomic injunction: ‘These commandments which I give you this day are to be kept in your heart; you shall repeat them to your sons, and speak of them indoors and out of doors, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on the hand and wear them as a phylactery on the forehead; write them up on the doorposts of your homes and of your gates.’5 In exile the Jews, deprived of a state, became a nomocracy–voluntarily submitting to rule by a Law which could only be enforced by consent. Nothing like this had occurred before in history.

The notion of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ was one the Jews adopted before the birth of Christ and always practised even when the community as a whole was distressed.

Isaiah was not only the most remarkable of the prophets, he was by far the greatest writer in the Old Testament. He was evidently a magnificent preacher, but it is likely he set his words down in writing. They certainly achieved written form very early and remained among the most popular of all the holy writings: among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, 23 feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew, the best preserved and longest ancient manuscript of the Bible we possess.216 The early Jews loved his sparkling prose with its brilliant images, many of which have since passed into the literature of all civilized nations. But more important than the language was the thought: Isaiah was pushing humanity towards new moral discoveries.