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Starting with Moses, all the prophets who scold the Israelites in the pages of the Bible are wholly unsuccessful in persuading them to confine their worship to the God of Israel. Not until the reign of King Josiah in the seventh century B.C.E.—another monarch who was also a fiery religious reformer—was the religion of ancient Israel fully purged of its pagan taint, and only then because Josiah, like Akhenaton, enjoyed the power to make it so.
But Josiah’s war on the gods, like Akhenaton’s, did not result in a lasting victory. When Josiah died in battle against an Egyptian pharaoh, many of the Jews drifted back to their old and easygoing ways of worship, and the prophets resumed their bitter but fruitless complaints.
“What does it matter by which wisdom each of us arrives at truth?” muses Symmachus, a pagan prefect of the fourth century. “It is not possible that only one road leads to so sublime a mystery.”
Monotheism, for example, cruelly punishes the sin of “heresy,” but polytheism does not recognize it as a sin at all. Significantly, “heresy” is derived from the Greek word for “choice,” and the fundamental theology of polytheism honors the worshipper’s freedom to choose among the many gods and goddesses who are believed to exist.
The word derives from the Latin “ paganus ,” which originally referred to a “village-dweller” and carried the sense of a “country bumpkin.” But the word was also used in Roman military circles to mean “civilian” and to distinguish one who is ready to fight in war from someone who stays behind.
According to some scholars, that’s precisely the meaning of “pagan” that inspired its first use by Christians—the Christian rigorists regarded themselves as soldiers, ready to march forth as crusaders in a holy war, and they characterized anyone who refused to take up arms in the service of the Only True God as a civilian, a slacker, a “paganus.”
Ironically, the word “atheist” was first used by pagans to describe Christians because they denied the very existence of the gods and goddesses whom the pagans so revered.
At Akhenaton’s command, the shrines and temples of rival deities were closed, the rituals of worship were suppressed, the statues that symbolized the other divinities were shattered and their names and images were literally chiseled off the stone monuments of ancient Egypt. The high priest of Amon, whose services were no longer needed, was put to work in a stone quarry like a common slave.
Sigmund Freud takes the argument to its furthest reach in Moses and Monotheism by suggesting that Moses himself was a priest in the cult of Aton who converted the Israelites to the new faith after the Egyptians repudiated the dead pharaoh. “The man Moses, the liberator and lawgiver of the Jewish people, was not a Jew but an Egyptian,” proposes Freud. “Moses conceived the plan of finding a new people, to whom he could give the religion that Egypt disdained.”
Some revisionists openly wonder whether the sexual practices of paganism are mostly in the eye of the beholder. They point out that “ qedeshah ,” the Hebrew word that is rendered in conventional Bible scholarship as “temple prostitute,” literally means “a consecrated woman.”
A fresh reading of ancient texts and archaeological evidence leads some recent scholars to believe that a qedeshah was not a sacred whore at all but a midwife, a wet nurse or perhaps a sorceress.
“Tragically,” writes Bible critic Mayer I. Gruber, “scholarship suffered from scholars being unable to imagine any cultic role for women in antiquity that did not involve sexual intercourse.”
Some temples included an oversized model of an ordinary human ear, fashioned out of plaster or clay or stone. Worshippers were invited to whisper their most intimate questions and their most urgent pleas into the ear—and then they hastened back to their homes, to sleep and perchance to dream.
By 97 B.C.E., when the Roman Senate formally adopted a law that criminalized the offering of human victims, animal sacrifice had long before replaced the offering of human flesh and blood to the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome.