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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.