This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Pirkei Avot opens with a chain: Moses received the Torah at Sinai and handed it to Joshua, who handed it to the elders, who handed it to the prophets, who handed it to the Great Assembly. That single sentence carries an enormous amount of institutional weight for a body about which almost nothing independent survives. Rabbinic tradition credits the Great Assembly with closing the biblical canon, composing the core wording of the Amidah, the central prayer of Jewish worship recited three times daily, and generally standing at the exact hinge between the era of prophecy and the era of rabbinic interpretation that followed it.
Modern historians read that same claim more skeptically, and the skepticism is not really about whether Jews in the early Second Temple period had leaders. They plainly did, Ezra and Nehemiah chief among them, and something like a return to Torah observance plainly happened after the Babylonian exile. The doubt is about whether a single, continuous, 120 member body did all of the specific things later tradition credits it with, or whether generations of gradual liturgical and canonical development got folded backward into one tidy origin story once later rabbis needed an authoritative source to point to.
Both readings can be true about different things at once, which is part of why the disagreement has not resolved. Something real almost certainly stood behind the name. Exactly how organized it was, how long it lasted, and how much of what it is credited with actually happened inside it rather than around it over a much longer stretch of time, is where the argument still lives.