ABSTRACT
Judaism differed from the other religions of the pre-Christian Roman Empire above all in one respect-the Jewish God was believed to demand the exclusive obedience of his Jewish worshippers, such that cult paid to any other divinity was treachery. This attitude was almost incomprehensible to polytheists, who responded to such deliberate snubbing of powerful forces sometimes with admiration but often with disgust at what they termed ‘atheism’.1
