While Zoroastrianism emerged in the greatest empire of its time, Judaism, the Middle East’s other ancient monotheistic tradition, was born among one of the region’s smaller and, at the time, less significant peoples—the Hebrews. Their traditions, recorded in the Hebrew scriptures, tell of an early migration from Mesopotamia to Canaan under the leadership of Abraham. Those same traditions report that a portion of these people later fled to Egypt, where they were first enslaved and then miraculously escaped to rejoin their kinfolk in Palestine. There, around 1000 B.C.E., they established a small state, which soon split into two parts—a northern kingdom called Israel and a southern state called Judah.

In a region politically dominated by the large empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia, these tiny Hebrew communities lived a precarious existence. Israel was conquered by Assyria in 722 B.C.E., and many of its inhabitants were deported to distant regions, where they assimilated into the local culture. In 586 B.C.E., the kingdom of Judah likewise came under Babylonian control, and its elite class was shipped off to exile. “By the rivers of Babylon,” wrote one of their poets, “there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion [Jerusalem].” It was in Babylonian exile that these people, now calling themselves Jews, retained and renewed their cultural identity, and later a small number were able to return to their homeland. A large part of that identity lay in their unique religious ideas. It was in creating that religious tradition, rather than in building a powerful empire, that this small people cast a long shadow in world history.

From their unique historical memory of exodus from Egypt and exile in Babylon, the Hebrews evolved over many centuries a distinctive conception of God. Unlike the peoples of Mesopotamia, India, Greece, and elsewhere—all of whom populated the invisible realm with numerous gods and goddesses—Jews found in their God, whom they called Yahweh (YAH-way), a powerful and jealous deity, who demanded their exclusive loyalty. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”—this was the first of the Ten Commandments. It was a difficult requirement, for as the Hebrews turned from a pastoral life to agriculture, many of them were attracted by the fertility gods of neighboring peoples. Their neighbors’ goddesses were also attractive, offering a kind of spiritual support that the primarily masculine Yahweh could not. Foreign deities also entered Hebrew culture through royal treaty obligations with nearby states. Thus the emerging Hebrew conception of the Divine was not quite monotheism, for the repeated demands of the Hebrew prophets to turn away from other gods show that those deities remained real for many Jews. Over time, however, the priesthood that supported the one-god theory triumphed. The Jews came to understand their relationship to Yahweh as a contract or a covenant. In return for their sole devotion and obedience to God’s laws, Yahweh would consider the Jews his chosen people, favoring them in battle, causing them to grow in numbers, and bringing them prosperity and blessing.

Unlike the bickering, arbitrary, polytheistic gods of Mesopotamia or ancient Greece, who were associated with the forces of nature and behaved in quite human fashion, Yahweh was increasingly seen as a lofty, transcendent deity of utter holiness and purity, set far above the world of nature, which he had created. But unlike the impersonal conceptions of ultimate reality found in Daoism and Hinduism, Yahweh was encountered as a divine person with whom people could actively communicate. He also acted within the historical process, bringing the Jews out of Egypt or using foreign empires to punish them for their disobedience.

Furthermore, for some, Yahweh was transformed from a god of war, who ordered his people to “utterly destroy” the original inhabitants of the Promised Land, to a god of social justice and compassion for the poor and the marginalized, especially in the passionate pronouncements of Jewish prophets such as Amos and Isaiah. The prophet Isaiah describes Yahweh as rejecting the empty rituals of his chosen but sinful people: “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, says the Lord…. Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, … cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice; correct oppression; defend the fatherless; plead for the widow.”16

Here was a distinctive conception of the Divine—singular, transcendent, personal, ruling over the natural order, engaged in history, and demanding social justice and moral righteousness above sacrifices and rituals. This set of ideas sustained a separate Jewish identity in both ancient and modern times, and it was this understanding of God that provided the foundation on which those later Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Islam were built.

Jewish understanding of the natural world likewise informed all three religious traditions. The Jewish scriptures pronounced the world of nature as real and positively valued, not simply an illusion or a distraction from spiritual concerns, as in some versions of Hindu or Buddhist thinking. The first chapter of Genesis ends with God’s review of his creation: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.” Moreover, the material world disclosed or revealed something of the divine mystery. The writer of the Psalms affirmed that “the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork.” Much later, the Quran echoed this understanding: “There are signs in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the alternation of night and day for people of understanding.” Finally, Jewish tradition made human beings the stewards of creation. They were to “have dominion … over all the earth,” even as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were instructed “to till it and keep it.” The Jewish teacher named Jesus affirmed this view of the world in the famous Lord’s prayer: “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”