The kingdoms of Israel and Judah inherited the religious pluralism of their Canaanite past. In shrines from Dan in the north to Beersheba in the south, altars, figurines, and incense stands reveal a world of many divine presences, Yahweh, Baal, Asherah, and a host of local patrons.1 Yet out of this diversity grew a new and audacious idea: that one god alone was worthy of worship. This transformation from polytheism to monolatry, the worship of one god without denying the existence of others, marks one of the most decisive theological shifts in world history.

The polytheistic inheritance

The early Israelite cult did not differ sharply from its Canaanite neighbors. Yahweh was addressed with the same titles once given to El and Baal: “rider on the clouds,” “god of hosts,” “judge of all the earth.” Household shrines yielded female figurines representing fertility goddesses; the blessing formulas on the Kuntillet ʿAjrud and Khirbet el-Qōm inscriptions invoke **“Yahweh and his Asherah.”**2

This was not “idolatry” in its own context. Ancient religion assumed that divine power was manifold and localized, each place, clan, or realm had its own patron. The crucial difference between Israel and its neighbors was not what gods they worshiped, but how those gods were understood: Yahweh’s relationship with Israel was covenantal, binding deity and people in mutual obligation rather than ritual exchange.

Political centralization and the single shrine

As monarchy matured, kings sought to consolidate both power and worship. Royal ideology portrayed Yahweh as king of heaven mirrored by his earthly regent. Centralization of cult served administrative needs, control of priesthoods, taxation, and pilgrimage, but it also reshaped theology. The notion that Yahweh’s name dwelt in one chosen sanctuary emerged first in the north, where Jeroboam I established state shrines at Bethel and Dan to rival Jerusalem.3 Later Judahite writers inverted this precedent, insisting that only Jerusalem was legitimate.

Archaeology confirms widespread local shrines well into the eighth century. High-place altars (bamot) at Arad, Beersheba, and Lachish show that polycentric worship persisted.4 The push toward single-shrine orthodoxy therefore reflects ideological reform rather than long-standing practice.

Prophets and moral monotheism

The great innovation came not from priests but from prophets. In the ninth and eighth centuries, figures such as Elijah, Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah re-imagined Yahweh not merely as Israel’s national god but as the moral ruler of the world. They denounced the worship of Baal as betrayal, yet their true target was social injustice: exploitation of the poor, corruption in the courts, hollow ritual.5 For them, Yahweh’s uniqueness was ethical before it was metaphysical, he alone demanded righteousness.

Hosea’s marriage metaphor, depicting Israel as an unfaithful spouse, captured this new intimacy between deity and people. Amos declared that Yahweh’s judgment extended beyond Israel to all nations, implying universality. Isaiah’s early oracles linked divine holiness to justice: “The earth is full of His glory.”6 These prophetic voices did not yet deny other gods’ existence, but they relegated them to irrelevance. The center of gravity had shifted irreversibly toward monolatry.

Crisis and reform

The Assyrian expansion of the eighth century catalyzed theological consolidation. Facing imperial power, Judah’s kings sought unity through faith. The reform attributed to Hezekiah (late 8th c.) reportedly abolished local shrines and centralized worship in Jerusalem (2 Kings 18:4). Archaeological layers show many high-places dismantled about this time, lending partial support.7 The Assyrian threat made loyalty to one god both political and spiritual necessity.

A century later, under Josiah (late 7th c.), the discovery of a “book of the law” in the Temple, identified by modern scholars with an early form of Deuteronomy, became the charter for radical monolatry.8 Its theology is unmistakable: one sanctuary, one law, one God who “alone is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath.” The book’s insistence that Israel’s fortunes depend solely on obedience to this covenant marks the birth of a Deuteronomistic worldview.

Theology in text

The compilation of Deuteronomy and the historical books (Joshua–Kings) by exilic editors in the sixth century transformed history into theology. The disasters of Assyria and Babylon were explained not as divine defeat but as covenantal discipline, proof that Yahweh alone ruled. Earlier pluralism was recast as sin; faithfulness to one God became Israel’s defining virtue. This was still monolatry, not yet philosophical monotheism, but the path was clear.

Legacy

By the time of the Babylonian Exile, the language of the prophets and the reforms of Josiah had fused into a coherent creed: Yahweh alone was God, the rest were “no gods.” From this conviction would arise the fully developed monotheism of Second Isaiah (“I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god,” Isa 44:6). The movement from polytheism to monolatry thus spanned centuries, driven not by abstract speculation but by lived history, war, exile, and the moral imagination of prophets who re-interpreted catastrophe as revelation.

• 1. Beth Alpert Nakhai, Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel (Boston: ASOR, 2001), 137–146.
• 2. J. T. Milgrom, “The Asherah of Yahweh,” Biblical Archaeologist 45 (1982): 1–10.
• 3. Nadav Naʾaman, “Jeroboam and the Foundation of the Northern Kingdom,” Biblica 93 (2012): 183–203.
• 4. Zeʾev Herzog, “The Temple of Arad and the Arad Shrine,” Israel Exploration Journal 18 (1988): 2–22.
• 5. Shalom M. Paul, Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 93–99.
• 6. John Barton, The Theology of the Book of Amos (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 41–52.
• 7. Avraham Faust, “Judah, the Assyrian Empire, and the Local Shrines,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 356 (2009): 37–49.
• 8. Bernard M. Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (Oxford: OUP, 1997), 3–14.