Philo, Herod, Paul, and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish “Monotheism”

Judaizing, Jews, and Gods

In the late first century CE, the emperor Domitian indicted his kinsman Flavius Clemens, Flavius’s wife Flavia Domitilla, and unnamed others for the crime of ἀθεότης, “atheism.” As Cassius Dio explains, these high-ranking Romans were so charged because they had drifted into “Jewish ways” (τὰ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἤθη; Hist. Romana 67.14.1–2).

How did “Jewish ways” constitute “atheism”? After all, Mediterranean culture was very commodious, with outsiders not infrequently adapting and adopting aspects of the social, cultural, and ritual practices of others.¹ True, Greek and Roman cultural patriots deplored the pollutions of foreign rites,² though the record of their disapproval might give us an indirect measure of how common this Mediterranean mixing could be. “Judaizing” in particular, however, as Domitian’s action suggests, seems to have attracted special opprobrium, presumably because it could lead to what we call “conversion.”³ And the problem with male “conversion to Judaism” was that it in principle entailed the radical Judaizer’s renunciation of his own ancestral customs and cult. Juvenal’s Satire 14 gives a perfect snapshot of this progression, wherein the satirist lambasts the Judaizing father who keeps the Sabbath because, eventually, the man’s sons take to circumcision and commit further to other Jewish practices while abandoning Romans ones. Such men, complains Tacitus, desert their native obligations to family, fatherland, and gods (Hist. 5.5.2).⁴ In other words, in the view of such observers as Juvenal and Tacitus, and implicit in Domitian’s accusation, the potential problem with Judaizing and the actual problem with Judaism was the exclusiveness of Jewish belief: Jews were monotheists.

But how “monotheistic” was Jewish “monotheism”? How “exclusively monotheist” were ancient Jews? What, indeed, do we mean when we use “monotheism” as a term of historical description?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “monotheism,” introduced in the 1660s, means the belief that there is only one god. So similarly its cognates: “polytheism” means belief that many gods exist (cf. Philo, Opif. 170–171; Mut. 205); “atheism,” belief that no god exists.⁵ These “theisms,” however, sit athwart the religious sensibility of ancient peoples. The first problem is with the idea of “belief.” The second is with the idea of “only one god.”

“Belief” as moderns construe and enact...