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Chronologically, the first one is the small indie adventure game The Shivah. This was the first commercially released game of developer Dave Gilbert, who has since then gone on to found the adventure game publishing company Wadjet Eye Games, which released many titles to critical acclaim. The Shivah is a down-toearth detective story with a present-day setting. It features a mostly Jewish cast and a protagonist who’s a rabbi. Rabbi Russell Stone is an angry, bitter man in charge of a run-down synagogue and an alienated congregation. A former member dies in strange circumstances and leaves the rabbi a significant sum. The police show up and Rabbi Stone has to do some sleuthing himself to prove his innocence. Lead developer Dave Gilbert is Jewish, and he drew inspiration for the story from his own background. The rabbi belongs to the Conservative movement -- this might make his role and activities easier to comprehend for a secular audience. Dave Gilbert himself is not religious; maybe that’s why Rabbi Stone is more reminiscent of a secular person’s idea of a rabbi than an actual rabbi, regardless of denomination. Yet he is still an interesting character, and the tension between his cynical outlook and his religious lifestyle keeps the story engaging. There is also an amount of humor, mostly
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One of the most prominently Jewish-themed games does not even feature a Jewish protagonist.
arising from the Jewish custom of answering a question with a question. This is taken to its logical extreme: Monkey Island-style dialog combat with a rabbinical flavor.
Divine names E-l Sha-ddai: Ascension of the Metatron is as different from The Shivah as possible. It’s a big-budget action game for consoles and it was developed by a Japanese team led by Takeyasu Sawaki. He wasn’t motivated by a personal connection; the idea was floated by the publisher’s UK office. (The game’s intro sequence states “This video game was inspired by ancient religious texts and has been designed, developed and produced by a multicultural team of various faiths and beliefs.”)
The game was in fact inspired by the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal work from antiquity. While the complete text of the Book of Enoch is only available in Ge’ez, many scholars assume it was originally written in Hebrew or possibly Aramaic. In any case, it is a Jewish religious work, though it is theologically very distant from present-day normative Judaism. The plot focuses on Enoch (Chanoch in Hebrew), the protagonist of the eponymous book who also makes a very brief appearance in the Hebrew Bible. While he is not Jewish per se -- he lived before Judaism came into being -- he is described in the biblical text as a “righteous man”, and one of the patriarchs; as such, an