it is possible that the lost books found under the palace at the time of, I think, Joash, were the originals and they'd been using other copies before rediscovering them.
That is part of the event I referred to.
The new interpretations of scripture threatened civil war and so a blended compromise was negotiated.
The Yahweh priesthood claimed to have found in a secret archive within Solomon's temple a scroll signed by Moses -- a document to become known as the Book of the Covenant. How a work of such importance as Moses' scroll had been lost or misplaced and forgotten for the two hundred years since the building of Solomon's temple, remains a mystery. King Josiah treated the scroll as genuine. He supported the Yahwist priests, and he complained that previous generations had not listened to Yahweh. ...
The Torah did not effectively exist before this time.
The big innovation of the babylonian branch of Judism was that there was only one god, instead of their god being supreme among the others.
It was common among people to believe in numerous gods, and apparently, prior to their exile, worshipers of Yahweh had seen their god as superior to other gods but also as one of many gods. In other words, they believed that the gods that other people worshipped were indeed gods rather than just imagination -- as expressed in Exodus 15:11, Exodus 18:11 and Deuteronomy 10:17. NOTE Gods as mere imagination was not an easy concept during the Stone Age or thereafter. The worshipers of Yahweh, moreover, had seen Yahweh as other peoples saw their gods: as territorial, as ruling from a place. But now, in Babylon, they heard derision spoken against Yahweh and they responded defensively. Was not Yahweh, they asked, the god who had formed and made the earth? They concluded that rival gods were false and that Yahweh was the only true god. A late entry in the Book of Isaiah, amid descriptions of the captives in Babylon, would state the issue of Yahweh and other gods differently than is expressed in Deuteronomy: "There is no other god besides me...," it reads. "There is none but me." (Isaiah 45:21.)
Here the real seeds of the conflict become apparent.
Ezra is sent from Babylon to take charge in Jerusalem and
he feels that he represents Judism. Of course the people who have been living in Judea all that time think that they represent it too, even more.
According to the Old Testament, Ezra and a following of eighteen hundred males moved to Judah. And what Ezra found must have been far from what he had expected, for when he arrived he tore at his hair, his beard, his garment, his robe, and he sat down appalled. He found that the Hebrews of Judah had not separated themselves from other peoples and that they had been practicing "abominations."
Ezra wanted to separate the worshipers of Yahweh from foreign influences and to advance their identity as a community of worshipers of Yahweh. He called the people of Jerusalem to assemble, and he told the assembly that new demands would be put upon them. Judah was to become a Yahwist state and its people to be considered one people. Ezra commanded that no one could marry any of the foreign women and that any man who had already married such a woman must expel her from his house.
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