The Portrayal of Pagan Worship in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism

How did Jews in the ancient world depict the practices of their pagan contemporaries? In this study, Jesse Mirotznik investigates the portrayal of pagan worship in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish literature. Scholars have assumed that the portrayals in these corpora are consistent over time. Mirotznik, however, shows that there is a fundamental discontinuity between earlier and later portrayals of pagan worship. In the Hebrew Bible, these forms of worship are, for the most part, simply assumed to be sincere. By contrast, in ancient Jewish texts from the 2nd century BCE and onward, such worship is increasingly presented as insincere, performed only instrumentally in the service of an ulterior motive. While the worshipers of other gods seem genuine in their devotion, as these texts contend, they too must recognize the folly of such worship. Mirotznik thus introduces the concept of “Bad Faith” as a lens through which to understand rhetoric about the Other.