ABSTRACT
As is generally known, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the three classic, historically related monotheistic religions. The earliest document of these religions is the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament. This book, or rather collection of books, presents the exclusive worship of but one god as the foundation of Israel’s religious history. While some Israelites, according to the Bible, may have courted or actually practised polytheistic worship, it was always beyond dispute that Israel should have only one god. Ever since Abraham or at any rate since Moses, Israelite religion was based on one commandment: ‘You shall have no other gods besides the Lord.’ Impressive in its simplicity though it is, this self-presentation has increasingly become doubted by historical scholarship. Today, most scholars agree that the simplistic idea of monotheism as the primordial fact of Israel’s religion cannot stand up to critical scrutiny. They have realized that as a document of religious propaganda, the Bible cannot be used as an immediate source for the reconstruction of the true course of Israel’s religious history. It was precisely the Bible’s repeated insistence on the main commandment – ‘You shall have no other gods besides the Lord’ – that made scholars doubt its historical accuracy. The very necessity for the inculcation of the monolatric principle makes one hesitate to accept that the ancient Israelites took it for granted. Rather, plausibility rests with the assumption that the exclusive worship of the one god was devised by a minority of prophets, promoted by a programmatic movement, and eventually, after a long historical process, established as a general rule.1
