Official Religion and Popular Religion in Pre-Exilic Ancient Israel

The Bible and Interpretation

bibleinterp.com

Yehezkel Kaufmann’s eight-volume Religion of Ancient Israel, begun in 1937 and completed in 1956, is a classic that continues to entice (and enrage) biblical scholars to this very day. The Russian-born professor of Bible at Hebrew University (who passed away in 1963) surely advanced one of the most counter-intuitive hypotheses in the history of modern biblical scholarship. His central thesis was that the ancient Israelites were never a polytheistic, mythological, non-exclusively-God-of-Israel worshiping people. A thesis rendered all the more remarkable since the very words of the Hebrew Bible seem to indicate that at many points in their history the Israelites were a polytheistic, mythological, non-exclusively-God-of-Israel-worshiping people.