Paul W. answered • 04/09/19
Dedicated to Achieving Student Success in History, Government, Culture
Your inquiry contains two separate questions:
What were the beginnings of Judaism? - This is a difficult question to answer because the sources that offer possible answers are not reliable, that is, they most certainly cannot be taken at face value. The sources I'm referring to are, of course, the books that make up the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the 'Old Testament'. To those who subscribe to the Jewish and Christian Faiths, these are Holy Texts; for fundamentalist Christians, they are the literal word of God.
For Historians, however, the books of the Old Testament are a collection of works about the history of the Jewish people written (and likely rewritten) by a diverse number of authors over a period of many centuries, authors who had different agendas they were seeking to satisfy when composing their documents. At least until the Ancient Greek authors, Herodotus and Thucydides, the concept of objectivity in the recording of historical events seems to have been alien to the peoples of earlier civilizations. Instead, the usual purpose in recording historical events was to celebrate the accomplishments of political leaders and / or a particular people / civilization. The approach almost always involved both sins of omission and commission, that is falsification and distortion by omitting critical information and including fictitious information. This, then, is the reason that any attempt to understand the origins of Judaism by relying on the books of the Old Testament is, at best, problematic.
With these caveats in mind, it's not out of the bounds of possibility that the Jewish people and their unique religious Faith may have their origins in the nomadic Semitic tribes who inhabited the countryside of the Ancient Levant. Why a group of nomadic tribes developed a uniquely monotheistic Faith at a time when polytheistic Faiths were the norm is anyone's guess. Of course, we know so little about the time in which a particular group of nomadic Semitic tribes in the Levant grew strong enough to conquer the territory that is today Israel / Palestine that there may well have been other tribes that developed different monotheistic Faiths, religions that simply failed to survive.
As for your second question, did the great Medieval Scholar, Moses Maimonides, compose the books of Moses contained within the Bible? - The simple answer is NO. Even if we ignore the overwhelming evidence for the existence of these books as part of the Pre-Christian Hebrew Bible, when the books of Moses were chosen for inclusion in the Christian Bible at a series of synods (conferences held by leaders of the Church) held in the 4th century, the books of Moses existed nine centuries before the birth of Moses Maimonides.
