The world of Abraham, 18th century BC.

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Source: « Histoire universelle des Juifs », Élie Barnavi, Hachette, 1992

Abraham, the father of monotheism, is with Isaac and Jacob one of the three patriarchs who founded the Jewish people. The biblical story of Genesis describes the wanderings of the Patriarchs across the Fertile Crescent, from the mouth of the Euphrates to the land of Canaan. The Bible places the Patriarchs in space but not in time, even if we can assume that Abraham lived in the 18th century. av. AD

Judaism constitutes the first expression of monotheism, but this appearance, far from being sudden, was the result of a slow evolution. Already in Mesopotamia, each state favored one deity among the many that populated its pantheon. In Egypt, the pharaoh Akhenaten (1353-1337 BC) had decided to worship only the god Aten and to do so had launched a vast iconoclastic campaign intended to eradicate all traces of worship of the god Amon. Here we see the outline of a shift towards henotheism, namely the idea that if there are several divinities, one of them is superior to the others.

From henotheism comes monolatry, namely the fact of worshiping only one god without denying that there are others. The development of henotheism stems from a form of nationalization of the gods which was notably encouraged by the Achaemenid Persians within their empire. In the biblical story of the Exodus, the alliance that the prophet Moses concluded with Yahweh was conditioned by the latter on the fact that the people of Israel made him their sole and exclusive god and renounced honoring others, which clearly shows that the existence of other gods is then recognized.

It was only around the 6th century. av. BC that Judaism asserts itself as a monotheism, that is to say that it postulates the existence of a single and universal god and therefore considers any other religious belief to be false. The true innovation introduced by monotheism is not so much the idea of divine unity as that of exclusivity and, with it, of truth.