How do we answer scholars who claim Judaism has its roots in paganism and that the Old Testament Jews were originally polytheists?
A viewer asks how to answer scholars who claim that Judaism had its roots in paganism and that Old Testament Jews were initially polytheists.
Answer
This is the standard theory among secular scholars, and it exists because they need to explain why Judaism stands out so far above every other ancient religion, something even God noted in Deuteronomy 4 and 5, where he tells Israel the nations will marvel at the perfection of their laws. The secularist cannot accept that Judaism was catered to by God from the start as the most mature, God-like religion, so instead he says the Jews got their material from earlier cultures, the Mesopotamians, during the Babylonian captivity around 500 BC. The claim is that they copied Mesopotamian religion, made their God Jehovah look better than Marduk, and reworked stories like the Babylonian Enuma Elish into their Genesis. So they deny that the Jews wrote and preserved their own documents from Adam, Seth, Enosh, and the patriarchs down to Moses; everything supposedly had to come from the pagan Mesopotamians, which is why they say Judaism is rooted in paganism. But note that the oldest surviving copy of the Enuma Elish they prize is from about the twelfth century BC, after Moses. They are pressed to these conclusions because the alternative is admitting that the very God who inspired the Pentateuch originated and preserved it, and then they would have to serve that God. Sadly, most Catholic scholars in the seminaries and universities believe the secular story today, because most of them have lost the faith.