How Did the Jews Become Monotheists?

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A remarkable feature of ancient Judaism is its monotheism. While the great civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Levant maintained elaborate pantheons of gods, the Israelites eventually came to insist that only one God existed.

How radically unusual this was one can see by contrasting it with the religious cultures of the great civilisations of later antiquity: the Greeks and the Romans.

Why did this happen? Was there something about their origins as pastoral herders that encouraged such a belief?

The first surprise is that the Israelites were almost certainly not monotheists before 1000 BCE. Their religion developed out of the polytheistic culture of Canaan, with its family of gods: El, Baal, Asherah and others. Archaeological evidence, including eighth-century BCE inscriptions apparently associating Yahweh with Asherah (Asherah was an important mother goddess in the ancient Canaanite religion, and may once have been regarded as the consort - effectively the wife - of Yahweh by some early Israelites).

Early Jewish religious practice was considerably less orthodox than the later biblical tradition would have us believe.

We need to distinguish three stages: polytheism, acknowledging several gods; monolatry, worshipping one god exclusively while allowing that others might exist; and monotheism, denying the existence of any other gods.

The First Commandment - "You shall have no other gods before me" - expresses monolatry rather than necessarily asserting monotheism. Much of the Old Testament can be read as a sustained campaign to establish Yahweh's exclusive worship against the persistent attraction of other deities.

Why should this campaign have succeeded?

Initially, the process was probably associated with ethnic and political consolidation. Peoples throughout the ancient Near East possessed national gods: the Moabites had Chemosh, the Israelites Yahweh. Exclusive loyalty to Yahweh helped distinguish Israel from its neighbours.

There were political interests involved too. Religious centralisation strengthened Jerusalem's monarchy and priesthood at the expense of provincial shrines and their competing establishments. The reforms attributed to King Josiah in the seventh century BCE, suppressing alternative cults and concentrating worship in Jerusalem, illustrate the point. Religious exclusivity and political authority reinforced each other.

But this still leaves the central puzzle. Other peoples had national gods without concluding that competing gods were imaginary. Why did the Israelites take that additional step?

The decisive development may have been the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 BCE. Jerusalem was destroyed, the Temple demolished, and much of the political and religious elite deported to Babylon.

In the conventional ancient Near Eastern understanding, such a catastrophe might signify that Babylon's gods had defeated Yahweh.

The Jewish religious thinkers produced a radically different interpretation.

Yahweh had not been defeated. He had deliberately permitted Judah's destruction as punishment for its disobedience.

This was a theological masterstroke. What appeared to demonstrate the impotence of Israel's God became evidence of his sovereignty. If Yahweh could command the armies of foreign empires, then his authority extended far beyond Israel. He was not simply a national patron but ruler of the entire world.

The transition is explicit in the exilic writings of Isaiah: "I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God" (Isaiah 45:5).

Here, at last, is unambiguous monotheism.

There was also a powerful sociological consequence. A people deprived of sovereignty, territory and Temple could nevertheless preserve its identity through scripture, covenant and religious law. Its God was no longer confined to a particular sanctuary or dependent upon the survival of a particular kingdom.

Pastoral origins may have contributed something to the earlier development of Yahweh worship. But nomadic societies are by no means necessarily monotheistic. The pre-Islamic Arabs, for example, worshipped numerous gods.

An illuminating comparison is Akhenaten's Egypt, where an attempt to establish exclusive worship of the solar deity Aten around 1350 BCE collapsed after the pharaoh's death. Egypt's established priesthood and traditional cults returned.

The contrast is striking. Egyptian religious exclusivism was imposed from above by a powerful ruler - and disappeared when his authority vanished. Jewish monotheism, on the other hand, crystallised among a defeated people and became the means of preserving its identity without political power.

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Note: How numerous were the Israelites at the dawning of their group identity? We are talking about tens of thousands of people, not hundreds or a few thousand. By approximately 1000 BCE, a reasonable archaeological estimate for the population of the emerging Israelite communities is 50,000–60,000 people, distributed among several hundred small settlements. These were generally agricultural and pastoral communities, living in relatively simple houses, growing grain and olives and keeping sheep, goats and cattle.

The important qualification is that these people did not necessarily constitute a unified nation, nor would every inhabitant have possessed a clear, exclusive Israelite identity.

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