When it comes to the monotheism of the Jews, one hears some amazingly stupid things from atheists. So much so that it’s hard to even rank them. Sometimes it’s not even the conclusion that’s so bad, it’s just the argument for it. In this latter category I rank things like atheists breathlessly saying that the Jews were not originally monotheists and believed that other gods besides Yahweh existed. Yeah, no kidding. But the thing is, they don’t get this from just reading the Torah and noting where it explicitly says this over and over—often as a complaint. Instead, they point to the most untrustworthy records one can image.

I was talking with an atheist the other day who cited the argument he read that there were trading partners who wrote down a few things about the Jews, of which we have a few shards, and they don’t mention the Jews as being strict monotheists. I would have a difficult time imagining worse evidence for something so obviously true. Leaving off that absence in fragmentary records—and all records from the ancient world are incomplete—is not dispositive, these are the records of people I’d never in a thousand years considering going to for an authoritative report on the theology of the Jews. This would be like concluding that not all physicists believe the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics by citing the diary of a used car salesman who sold cars to a few physicists. How does anybody cite this kind of thing with a straight face?

And even weirder, why would anyone cite the diary of a used car salesman that not all physicists believe in the Copenhagen interpretation when one can cite actual physicists saying that they don’t all believe it?

Another weird part of this lunacy is often the claim that Yahweh was originally just a local god who “won.”

That’s not a thing that happens in polytheism. Sure, the gods fight with each other, but that’s to achieve some goal or other, or to punish each other for infidelity, or prettymuch anything else that makes a cool story. They don’t supplant each other like paganism is some kind of version of Highlander where eventually one god cuts off the heads of all the others and gains their powers and in the end there can be only one. That just doesn’t even begin to make sense. It’s like explaining that temperature was thought to be the average kinetic energy of molecules because kinetic energy won out over temperature, but electro-magnetism hasn’t beaten kinetic energy yet, which is why we still have those two. That’s just not how it works at all. Most things in life aren’t a winner-takes-all elimination competition. There’s one president of the United States because he used to be a governor, but then Washington DC conquered the states and killed all the governors and the governor of Washington DC became President! Not how it happened, but at least that kind of thing can happen. Eventually the personification of rain came to supplant the personification of the sea so that people stopped believing in the sea—that’s just not how things work.

Then there’s the version where Yahweh was a purely local god who the Jews still worshipped during the Babylonian captivity so they had to explain why they’re still worshipping him even though they’re now hundreds of miles away from where he lives so they claimed he’s the uncreated creator of all that is and so is universal.

Right.

The sky god was universal. And the earth goddess. And the sea god. There were lots of universal (or at least non-local) gods in the ancient world. And wouldn’t it have been a little simpler for Yahweh to… walk to Babylon? Why universalize him rather than just… move him?

What’s weird to me is how absurd these theories are. I’m not saying that one cannot come up with a plausible secular story, but it’s really weird to me how often the secular stories atheists propose are preposterously dumb.