On Pagan Judaism, Part 1
The Tradition of Refusal
For a couple millennia now, Judaism has been understood as a monotheistic religion. The original monotheistic religion, even. The antithesis to polytheistic paganism. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding. The idea of monotheism in general, and its application to Jewish tradition in particular, is a terrible simplification.
Biblical scholars, especially those devoted to the historical critical method that attempts to reconstruct the conditions of the Bible’s composition, know very well that Judaism evolved out of Near-Eastern polytheism, from which it passed through a long period of monolatry (the attitude that many gods may exist, but only one should be worshiped by us), toward an eventual declaration that other gods were not only unworthy, but also non-existent. A monotheistic attitude clearly emerges at a certain point in the history of Judaism, but why should we take as essential the monotheism where the tradition supposedly ended, while we take as incidental the polytheism where it began? What if we shifted our frame of reference? What if, instead of defining Judaism by how it left the polytheistic world behind, we looked again at Jewish tradition as a product of its historical context, a context that was thoroughly pagan?
The Biblical narrators repeatedly admonish the Israelites to obey their priests and their god. But the people repeatedly disobey. Time and again the Bible tells us that the people of Israel are sacrificing to other gods alongside their sacrifices to YHWH and building poles to honor of Asherah, who was apparently treated by many as the female consort of YHWH.
The Bible tells us that all these worshipers of other gods are doing wrong; it announces that YHWH has set out a series of demands for exclusivity of worship, which the people are ignoring. But why do we accept that Jewish tradition is only the tradition that was approved by these anti-pagan narrators, and not also the tradition of the masses of Israelites that these narrators condemned? Why do we take it to be only the tradition of the few who obeyed the jealous commandments, and not also the tradition of the many who refused?
We know that the ancient Israelites’ cultic practice was much like the practice of other peoples around them. Like others, they acknowledged and worshiped many gods, but they expressed a tendency to favor one god, who they thought also favored them. Only in the course of many centuries did Israelites begin to distinguish themselves by a marked exclusivity in their worship, and even then the transformation was far from smooth. As the Bible itself tells us, every turn to mono-cultic discipline was met with intense resistance. For hundreds of years after the Biblical narrators have already declared YHWH to be the one legitimate god, Israelites are still busy worshiping others alongside Him. By the time a concerted effort is finally made to enforce pure monotheism, with the strident haranguing of the prophets and the Book of Kings, the grand narrative arc of the Hebrew Bible is nearly finished, ready to give way to poetic and reflective books, self-contained stories, afterthoughts and epilogues.
To a significant degree, monotheism arrives where the Hebrew Bible ends. The main narrative arc concludes with the conquest of Judah, later called Judea, and the Judahite elites’ deportation to Babylon. Since Near Eastern gods were supposed to protect their people’s, such a calamity naturally demanded a reassessment of Judahite cultic thought. They could have determined that their god had proven weak or unreliable; they could have turned to more successful gods. Instead, they declared that it was not their god who was at fault, but they themselves, who had angered their god and made him right to send the conquerors their way. They preserved the honor of their ideas by wallowing in the guilt of their past deeds.
This is typically considered the great turning point, when Jewish tradition distinguished itself definitively from the other traditions of the region, which after national catastrophes eventually gave up on their national gods. Yet even this move to attribute misfortune to one’s own god’s anger, rather than the god’s weakness, has pagan precedent. The Mesha Stele, a 9th century BCE monument erected in Moab, southeast of Judah, appears to tell how the Moabites were defeated by Israel not because Israel had the better god, but because the Moabites’ god Chemosh chose to punish his own people.
The crucial difference was that the Moabites quickly turned their situation around, beat back their enemies, and preserved their old cultic system in their old land. The intellectuals of Judah were taken far away, separated from the other gods of Canaan and from the masses who had adored them. They were also surrounded by the unfamiliar gods of their new environment, and they learned to concentrate their attentions on the one god who they believe to be really theirs.
And so at last, as the Israelites from the land of Judah become the exile community called Judahites or Jews, they declare their cultic tradition’s unique ability to be to survive catastrophe, because it is the antithesis of the surrounding paganisms. They declare that the others’ gods simply come and go, because their divine authority rests only on the might of their people, but the god of the Jews is eternal, growing in power when His people become powerless. But even at this moment, He only becomes a unique god by virtue of existing among other gods: His importance is affirmed when his worshipers no longer command a kingdom that controls a Temple, but instead need a god sturdy enough to survive without a home and rugged enough to secure his people’s independent existence without any government to support them. Jewish monotheism is firmly established by becoming pagan in a new way: by being the other to other people’s gods.
Canaanite Theology
In 1928, a peasant struck his plow into a slab of stone in the countryside near Latakia on the northern Syrian coast. When he cleared the stone away, it revealed an ancient tomb. Word got out, archaeologists hurried to the site, and in the surrounding area they uncovered the library of a temple in the long-buried city of Ugarit, containing clay tablets from 1400 to 1100 BCE. They were inscribed with cuneiform letters in a language still unknown to the modern world, but after scholars determined that it was closely related to Aramaic and Hebrew, they deciphered it. The tablets told the story of the Canaanite pantheon, and especially of a god named Baal.
Readers of the Bible might recall this name. Baal appears there repeatedly as an evil or false god, YHWH’s leading rival for the Israelites’ attentions. Since then decline and end of Baal worship in the Eastern Mediterranean region in the period after the conquest of Judah and Israel, all that we knew about Baal for some two and a half millennia came from these anti-Baal polemics. Now, at last, we can read Baal’s side of the story. That is, the side told by the supporters of Baal in one of the many communities throughout the region that worshiped him—or, more precisely, that worshiped one or another version of him, since in a context where gods changed from place to place, similar divine epithets could be applied to multiple gods.
We see, in the Ugaritic legends, how this god of storms and weather rose up to subdue Yam, the god of the sea, thus taming the powers of nature and protecting the livelihood of the port city that honored him. For the record, Baal’s nemesis Yam also appears in the Bible, where his name is now understood simply as the Hebrew word for Sea. Even when his divinity was removed by layers of reinterpretation, his name remained as an abstraction—and so the Israelites’ Lord is said to “dry up the sea” [Is. 51.9–10] and “break up the sea” [Ps. 74.13–17, Job 26.12–13]. Very likely, these lines once told of YHWH doing battle, like Baal, with Yam, breaking him, taming him, keeping him off the land. After Baal defeats his rival, the feat brings him such renown that he earns the right to his own house of worship, and he challenges the god El, who sits at the head of the Ugaritic pantheon.
One is tempted to read this as a “typical” collection of polytheistic myths. Gods come and go, do battle, some win, some lose. The narrative perspective takes sides, to be sure, but the favored god lays no claim to metaphysical exclusivity. The rise of Baal appears contingent, applicable only as long as he defends his position against the machinations of the still-existing gods around him. Yet something atypical could be happening here, in the mytho-theology (the divine mythos and logos, or narrative and discourse) of Ugarit. Atypical in the sense that every pagan tradition is atypical.
Modern Western readers have a tendency to read all polytheisms as theologically equivalent, and to read all monotheisms as distinct. This is a somewhat logical result of the monotheistic tendency to form doctrines and dogmas that distinguish themselves from one another, in contrast to the fundamental tolerance of polytheisms, which easily absorb otherness into themselves. But every polytheism is polytheistic differently. Each develops its own theology, its own ideas of how the abstractions called gods interact and structure the minds of women and men. And we can speculate that if Ugarit had had more time—or if more of its writings were preserved—we might see how it distinguished itself from other systems of thought, developing its specific perspective on the power to harness the elements and subdue the sea, and (as we see in other Ugaritic stories) save humanity from ever-lurking death.
At the same time, the early stories of the Bible are not as atypical as we tend to believe. In many ways, they parallel the stories of Baal: they tell of the rise of a single god to prominence above other gods. In the beginning, before Eve and Adam eat the forbidden fruit, the serpent tells them, “you will be like gods” (Gen. 3.5), and after they commit the act their god says, “man has become like one of us” (Gen. 3.22). Already from the start, the leading god has competition, from a serpent—not called a god, but acting very much like the demi-divine demons of Eastern Mediterranean myth—and from humans, who struggle throughout the rest of the Bible to come to terms with their status as inferiors to a god who nonetheless acknowledges that humans have something godly in them.
When the Israelites find themselves in Egypt, their god proves his power against the ineffectual Egyptian gods. The text does not tell us explicitly that the Egyptians’ gods exist, but neither does it deny their existence. They do not appear in person, but then neither does the Israelites’ god. The Israelites special relationship to their god is not metaphysical, but practical and social. They are supposed to worship him because he can do things for them, and because he “chose” to come to them, and because they agreed to work with him. As Baal did for the Ugarites, he showed them his merit and they built him a home, first in a desert tent, later in a house of stone.
The Hebrew Bible is full of passages that acknowledge the existence of multiple gods. But monotheistic readers have gotten good at ignoring them or finding complex interpretations to get around them. In Psalm 82 (in the New International Version), we read, “God presides in the great assembly; / he renders judgment among the ‘gods’” (Ps. 82.1). He tells them, “you are all sons of the Most High. / But you will die like mere mortals.” (82.6). Here the Israelites' god declares his rising power; he declares that the other gods are on their way out. But that is in the future of a clearly polytheistic present tense. One can turn this, like all theology, into metaphor, but it is an originally pagan metaphor.
In Deuteronomy, we read (according to the translation of the Jewish Study Bible) that “the Most High [Elyon] gave nations their homes / And set the divisions of man, / He fixed the boundaries of peoples / In relation to Israel’s numbers” (Deut. 32.8). As commentators point out, this makes little sense. Why would god divide all the peoples of the world according to how many Israelites lived in their own land? Even if we suppose this to mean that every people should be the same size (which is not stated anywhere else), what does this have to do with where the nations reside and where the boundary lines between them are drawn?
In fact, Biblical scholars have reason to believe that the original text was much more straightforward. In the Septuagint (the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) and in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the same line reads differently: the highest god “fixed the boundaries of peoples / According to the sons of El”—that is to say, not according the sons of Israel but according to the sons of the god named El. And in the pantheon of ancient Canaan and Israel, the sons of El are also gods. In other words: each nation was given its own god and given a place to settle that was presided over by that god. This was a notion typical of the period when the text was written, but incomprehensible to later scribes, who could only understand the polytheistic meaning as a mistake.
When the Israelites escape Egypt and enter Canaan, they find everyone worshiping these gods there. Quite a few more conflicts are required before the god named YHWH definitively prevails as top god, and then sole god. YHWH only definitively prevails when His people are most severely defeated and their history is reread (especially in the Book of Kings) as a history controlled by their god alone, whose power lies not only in championing the Israelites against other peoples with other gods, but also in sending other peoples to punish the descendants of Israel for their sins.
Even the Israelites’ singular god is multiple, bearing multiple names, which likely referred originally to multiple gods, above all to one named by variants of “El” and another named “YHWH.” Only in the dramatic moment when Moses encounters the burning bush on Mount Horeb does the text make the claim—clearly meant to be a shocking revelation in its narrative context—that the god called El or Elyon or El Shaddai or Elohim is really named YHWH. YHWH, a god of this mysterious name, is in fact the god that you, the addressees of the text, thought was another. The names that you thought were many are actually the same (Ex. 3.6). This revelation of divine singularity can only come as a surprise because its addressees think that there are many gods. The surprise of the one is powerful because it collects and contains the many.
The Novelty of Israel
My point is not that the Israelites’ intellectual tradition and its Jewish continuation were unoriginal. Their tradition did stand out from that of their neighbors, just as every neighboring tradition must have stood out from theirs.
First, a faction of Israelite and Judahite intellectuals developed the idea that their god forbade all worship of idols. This had the effect, among other things, of gradually transferring the material locus of cultic practice from a visible figure of a god to the absent center of a smoky tent or temple and, finally, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem’s great Temple, to stories and abstractions contained in a book.
Second, the authors of this book not only told their readers to worship one sole god, but also enjoined them to tell stories only about one god. Or, more precisely, only one god would appear directly as a character on the narrative stage. All the other gods, even when their existence seems to be accepted, appear offstage (mentioned as objects of worship), or anonymously (like the “god,” clearly not identified with YHWH, who attacks and wrestles with Jacob on a riverbank), or in the form of natural phenomena (like Yam as the ordinary sea), or as minor angels or demons (who are never main characters). As a result, new narrative space is opened for people.
Humans play almost no explicit role in the Baal Cycle of Ugarit. Although the battle between Baal and Yam is about the Ugaritic people’s struggle with the sea, the people remain offstage, allowing the gods to represent their concerns. The Bible, by contrast, is mostly about people. With most of the gods cleared away, the humans can “be like gods.” In the Biblical rendering, the kind of story that in other traditions might have been told as affairs of gods are told here as affairs among people, with only occasional divine intercession. In the beginning, god (Elohim or YHWH) interacts with them a great deal. But he withdraws as the narrative progresses, and by the time the Israelites enter Canaan in the Book of Joshua, god is entirely offstage, speaking almost exclusively through prophets, obscure signs and confusing acts of history, leaving humans to argue over what god really wants and means. In this way, mytho-theology turned into history.
But Judaic monotheism only took this humanistic turn halfway. Although humans were condemned to leave the protection of Eden, they were not entirely on their own. They became bound to a god, who protected them but also restricted them. The language of the covenant between the Israelites and YHWH is the language of servitude. The Israelites, in agreeing to the covenant, gain the favor of the world’s allegedly most powerful lord, and in exchange they become his vassals. This is not wholly metaphysical enslavement (it is not grounded in eternal and essential differences between humans and god). Because it is a covenant, it can be broken. But as long as the Israelites are protected by YHWH, they are not free, and whenever they free themselves by breaking the covenant, YHWH rains punishment on them with a fury worse than that of the sternest slave master, sending dogs after his escapees.
In polytheism, people have the freedom to choose among gods, breaking and remaking covenants as they choose. In a completed humanism, people make covenants only with other humans or human institutions that they recognize as human-made things. The claim of monotheism is that people have nowhere else to go and had better settle for god’s terms. Polytheism presupposes a plurality of social arrangements, with each people arranging its own affairs with its own god or gods. Completed humanism likewise presupposes a plurality of arrangements, because the key figure is not an abstract Man engaged with a single God, but manifold forms of humanity. Monotheism sets up a recurring struggle between god and people, who continually choose to accept or rebel against god’s terms.
Even on this point, Jewish tradition remains somewhere between pure polytheism and absolute monotheism. Jewish tradition does invoke a god who is the sole and unconditional master of the whole universe and of abstract humanity, but the same tradition also invokes a particular god with a proper name, YHWH, who makes a covenant with a concrete group of people, the children of Israel. The subjects of this covenant continually struggle to uphold their end of the agreement and to remind their god to uphold his. The crucial—and fundamentally undecided—moment of Jewish thought comes right here, where the unitary ontology of an abstract Man and a purely monotheistic god has not yet solidified and there is still room for breaking covenants, for reflecting on the possibilities that might be offered by other gods, if any were on offer. The ethical power of this moment comes not from the monotheism that was beginning to claim absolute authority, but from the residual paganism that still infuses Jewish tradition with indeterminacy, compelling people to think of their covenants as contingent deals that can be made and unmade.
Joe Grim Feinberg
Beloved author of A Demonology of Desires.
Joe Grim Feinberg is a writer and social theorist based in Prague. His academic work explores folklore, national narratives, and the cultural-historical formation of political subjectivity. His literary work reworks old folk traditions--like ghost stories. Feinberg's novel A Demonology of Desires was published in 2025 by Sul Books.