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In this post, Dan Kohanski tackles a foundational question in the study of ancient Judaism: Were the Israelites always monotheists—and if not, how did monotheism evolve over time? It’s a fascinating, historically grounded look at how the idea of “one God” developed across centuries of Israelite and Jewish history.

Read on and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

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The Evolution of Jewish Monotheism[1]

Monotheism—the idea that there is one and only one divine Being in the universe—is the underlying foundation of Judaism. Jews reaffirm this twice a day by reciting the Shema, the basic statement of the Jewish faith: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” This belief is said to have started with Abraham and established for all by Moses at Sinai as one of the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other Gods besides Me” (Ex. 20:3). But is this really the way it happened in history, even in Biblical history? I suggest that the idea of monotheism evolved only gradually among the ancient Israelites, and even after it was generally accepted by their descendants the Jews, it was not completely so until Roman times.[2] Here then is a scenario that, to my mind, describes this evolution.

In the beginning, the Israelites were polytheists just as all their Semitic kinfolk and Canaanite neighbors were. They may have had a smaller pantheon than some of the others, but we do have archeological and Biblical records of El, Baal, Moloch; Ashtoreth, Milcom, Chemosh (1 Kings 11:33); and “the gods of Aram” (Judg. 10:6), among others, all in addition to Yahweh. The book of Kings records how Manasseh “rebuilt the high places [to other gods] that Hezekiah his father had torn down” (2 Kings 21:3). Then another king, Manasseh’s grandson Josiah, tore them down again (2 Kings 23:4). Then Josiah’s son Jehoahaz “did evil in the eyes of the Lord[3] as all that his fathers had done” (2 Kings 23:32). Chapter 17 of 2 Kings—which was written by members of the court of the southern kingdom of Judah—record how the destruction of the northern kingdom was brought about “because the Israelites had offended the Lord their God . . . and they had feared other gods” (2 Kings 17:7-8). Robert Alter comments on this passage that “it is notable that all the transgressions are cultic—there is no mention of ethical failings or injustice.”[4] None of this reads like a record of a people much impressed by Yahweh’s demands at Sinai.

At most, it shows a tendency toward henotheism—we have only one god for us, but other nations have their gods. In Judges, Jephthah argues with the Amorites: “Do you not take possession of what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? And all that the Lord our God has given us to possess, of that we shall take possession” (Judg. 11:24-25). Another way the Israelites saw Yahweh was as the chief among the gods and the judge of the other gods as, for example, “God takes His stand in the divine assembly, in the midst of the gods He renders judgment” (Ps. 82:1).

Then there is the political aspect of the religion. The headquarters of the Yahwist cult was the Temple in Jerusalem, which was also the capital of the kingdom of Judah. The Yahwists tried to influence the Judahite kings to minimize and if possible eliminate the competing cults of Baal and the others. They were spectacularly successful with Josiah, and spectacularly unsuccessful with Manasseh, and they also seem to have gradually won at least partial adherence from the general Judahite population. But in the days of the First Temple, the Yahwist cult takes a stand closer to henotheism than monotheism, as we see with Psalm 82 and Psalm 97, for example. After the prophet Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal in a magic contest, he proclaimed about Yahweh: “this day let it be known that You are God in Israel” (1 Kings 18:36) —in Israel, but not necessarily elsewhere. (It is also noteworthy that, while 400 prophets of Asherah were also present at the contest (1 Kings 18:19), Elijah never challenged them, only ordering that the “prophets of Baal” (1 Kings 18:40) be seized and slaughtered.)

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There are a few hints in some older texts of a belief in Yahweh as the one and only god of all. When the prophet Elisha cured the Aramean general Naaman of a skin disease, the general exclaimed, “Now I know that there is no god in all the earth except in Israel” (2 Kings 5:15). When the Assyrians were massing to destroy Jerusalem, King Hezekiah prayed to Yahweh saying, “You alone are God of all the kingdoms of the earth” (2 Kings 19:15). Some of the First Temple period prophets, Amos in particular, made similar claims. But, as Hezekiah’s own son Menasseh proved, Yahwist monotheism, or even Yahwist henotheism, did not have a strong hold on the Israelites.

Then came the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple of Yahweh, and the Babylonian exile. This could have been a death blow to the cult of Yahweh—the Babylonians, who worshipped Marduk, had the destroyed the sacred sanctuary of the Israelite god. Didn’t this mean Marduk was more powerful than Yahweh? The answer that the prophets came up with is that Yahweh hadn’t allowed Marduk’s worshippers to destroy his own house; he had ordered them to do it, and he did so in order to punish the Israelites for continuing to worship other gods.[5] Jeremiah, writing at the time of the destruction, has Yahweh announce that “I Myself have given all these lands into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar My servant. . .” (Jer. 27:6). Furthermore, Yahweh is about to “make [Judah] a horror for all the kingdoms of the earth because of Menasseh son of Hezekiah, for what he did in Jerusalem” (Jer. 15:4). In Römer’s explanation, the destruction of Yahweh’s Temple “clearly signifies that Yahweh’s power is not limited to his own people; he is the master even of the enemies of Judah.”[6]

This attempt to explain the national catastrophe in a way that would preserve Yahweh’s status as the god of the Israelites has had a number of significant consequences, principally in reinforcing the idea that that natural disasters and defeat in war are God’s way of punishing us for something we did or didn’t do. But the more immediate consequence, for my purposes, is that it gave historical as well as theological grounding to Yahwist monotheism. Yahweh was no longer just the God of Israel, he was the god even of Israel’s enemies, the god even of nations that had never heard of Israel. Second Isaiah, writing around the time the exile ended, made this explicit: “I am the first and I am the last,” says Yahweh to Isaiah, “and apart from Me there is no God” (Isa. 44:6).[7]

But this is not the end of the story. Almost four hundred years after Isaiah’s proclamation of Yahweh as the only God forever, the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV put this proposition to the test, by ordering his Jewish subjects in Judea to worship a statue of a god (probably Zeus) that he had set up in Jerusalem, in the Temple itself, in 167 BCE. The story of the Maccabean revolt against this idolatry is well-known, celebrated each year in the minor festival of Hannukah. What is less well-known is that some Jews went along with Antiochus’s demands. “All the Gentiles accepted the command of the king. Many even from Israel gladly adopted his religion; they sacrificed to idols and profaned the sabbath” (1 Macc. 1:43, NRSV translation). Maccabean propaganda may have exaggerated the numbers, but if there were no basis in fact for this claim, it would not have passed muster. Mattathias and his sons had to flee into the hills and conduct a guerilla war against the Seleucids, indicating there was not a widespread willingness to take up arms against apostasy.

Contrast that hesitancy with the reaction a little more than a hundred years later when the Romans tried to impose a similar idolatry on Judea. Josephus tells how Pontius Pilate, around the year 30 CE, brought “Caesar’s effigies” into Jerusalem, “whereas our law forbids us the very making of images.” For many days, the people petitioned Pilate to remove them, but he refused. When Pilate threatened to send his soldiers out among the protestors, the Jews then “threw themselves on the ground, and laid their necks bare, and said they would take their death very willingly, rather than that the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed.” This (says Josephus) so impressed Pilate that he backed down and had the images removed (Josephus, Ant. 18.55-59). The belief in Yahweh alone had finally taken hold.

But even then, it was not a complete monotheism. For one thing, while the Jews hoped that “in the end of days” all nations would come to worship Israel’s god, they never (with perhaps one or two exceptions) attempted to impose this belief on any non-Jew. They even attended (as spectators, not as worshippers) various Roman ceremonies honoring the state gods. They probably did so for practical political reasons, but in any event, they went.[8] It would fall to Christians, in their takeover of the Roman Empire, to use its mechanisms to enforce their version of monotheism (or an outward acceptance of it, at least) over its domains.

Alter, Robert. 2019a. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation and Commentary. (3 vols.) New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Cohen, Shaye J. D. 2000. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Fredriksen, Paula. 2022. “Philo, Herod, Paul, and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish ‘Monotheism.’” In Harvard Theological Review 115:1 (2022), 23–45.

Josephus, Flavius. The Complete Works. William Wriston, translator. (1737). Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1998.

Karagiannis, Christos G. 2019.  “The Time of the Establishment of Biblical Monotheism.” In International Journal of Orthodox Theology 10:2 (2019),  184–98. www.academia.edu/40933541/

Römer, Thomas C. 2017. “Le Problème du Monothéisme Biblique.” In Revue Biblique Vol1 124:1, 12–25. www.academia.edu/33110406/

[1] This article is derived from my book, A God of Our Invention (Apocryphile Press, 2023).

[2] The Israelites were the tribes that settled in Canaan and eventually coalesced into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Jews (from the word, “Judah”) are the descendants of the remnants of the kingdom of Judah who went into exile in Babylon and there formed what became the Jewish religion. There is a continuing debate among scholars as to exactly (or even approximately) when to start calling them “Jews.” See especially Shaye J. D. Cohen (2000, 69–106).

[3] “The Lord” is the standard English translation of “Yahweh” (the most likely pronunciation of the Hebrew YHVH).

[4] Alter (2019, 2:582n7). All translations of Scripture are Alter’s except as noted.

[5] I am indebted to Karagiannis and to Römer for this argument.

[6] Römer (2017, 22) [my  translation from the French].

[7] This is my translation. Alter renders ומבלעדי u’mibaladai (“apart from Me”) as “besides Me.” But this is the same way he translates על־פני ‘al-panai in Exodus 20:3, and I believe it’s important to show that Isaiah is using different language.

[8] See, e.g., Fredriksen (2022, 28-29).

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