Dear Mike,
There are a number of references in the Bible (in the canonical sections of Prophets and Writings) to the effect that the ancient Jews (Judeans) forgot the Torah, or at least some basic commandments thereof. A classical example is the account of the reign of King Josiah of Judah (2 Kings 22-23), which reports a discovery of a "book of the Torah" in the Temple -- discovery which allegedly took the king by surprise and moved him to introduce drastic changes in religious practice of the kingdom of Judah. Since those changes included destruction of all cult sites outside the Jerusalem Temple (even those dedicated to YHWH) and centralization of all worship to YHWH in the Jerusalem Temple, since the centralization of worship is a commandment characteristic only of the book of Deuteronomy (rather than the whole Pentateuch), and since the historical narrative of the Bible itself admits that sacrifices to YHWH were offered outside the central sanctuary prior to Josiah and often does not condemn those sacrifices, modern biblical scholars suppose that "the book of the Torah" allegedly found in the Temple during Josiah's reign was only the book of Deuteronomy, and that the book was actually a pious forgery, composed shortly before its "finding" but attributed to Moses. Whatever one thinks of this hypothesis, the narrative in 2 Kings 22-23 implies that centralization of worship to YHWH was unknown/forgotten prior to Josiah. (In 2 Kings 18:3-4, destruction of bamot -- cultic places outside of the Jerusalem Temple -- is attributed also to Hezekiah, but importantly, that narrative mentions no written source motivating Hezekiah's policies.)
Another important example of the Jews "forgetting" important commandments of the Torah is the narrative of Nehemiah 8, where it says that the commandment of dwelling in booths during the holiday of Sukkot was not practiced from the days of Joshua bin Nun until the public gathering convened in Jerusalem by Ezra and Nehemiah (in the mid-5th century BCE). Interestingly, while the narrative of Nehemiah 8 takes place during the seventh month (Tishre in the current Jewish calendar), and while it presents the Jews as repenting for their sins, this narrative makes no mention whatsoever of the holiday which in the terminology of Leviticus 23:27-28, and of the later Judaism, is the day of atonement -- Yom ha-Kippurim, the 10th of the seventh month. This shows that the author of Nehemiah 8 was not only willing to admit that the commandment of dwelling in booths during Sukkot had not been practiced for centuries, but also was probably ignorant of the Day of Atonement, because at his times such holiday had not yet been introduced.
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