Book excerpt: When the New Testament authors wrote their inspired documents, they assumed that their readers were familiar with the customs and controversies of the Jewish tradition. Modern-day readers, however, do not have the luxury of intuitively knowing what the original readers knew. In Customs and Controversies Julius Scott adeptly surveys this body of knowledge. Scott makes readily available what scholarly research and recent archaeology have to tell us about Intertestamental Judaism. He presents up-to-date information on the efforts to reconstruct Old Testament institutions, the scribal traditions, the religious sects (including the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the community of Qumran), as well as Judaism's thinking on such matters as the final age, the kingdom of God, the messianic hope, and the Gentiles.