The Long Way Back to Ourselves

3.10

Monotheism and Its Price

This episode opens with an inscribed pottery shard from a Sinai station, dated to around 800 BCE, blessing its recipient by a god's name alongside a second name read as a goddess or cult object, evidence Israelite religion was not strictly monotheistic. It argues, using a Deuteronomy 32 variant confirmed by a Dead Sea Scrolls manuscript, that an older reading describing a high god assigning peoples to lesser divine beings was altered, tracking a shift toward a claim other gods do not exist. You learn Akhenaten's attempted imposition of sun-disk worship was reversed within two decades and left no successor. Drawing on Egyptologist Jan Assmann, the episode weighs monotheism's price against a polytheistic empire's record of massacres.