Word: sums
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...Josiah, too, driven by a zero-sum worldview in which the worshippers of gods other than Yahweh looked like enemies...
...flip side is that perceptions of a zero-sum dynamic - of a game in which one side will win and one side lose - can foster intolerance of other religions and their gods. Indeed, a close look at the Bible shows how this worldview helped move Israel from the polytheism of Solomon's time toward monotheism - a monotheism that (contrary to the standard story of Christians and Jews) doesn't seem to have taken root until the middle of the first millennium B.C.E...
Among the earliest of these prophets is Hosea, who is thought to have written in the 8th century B.C.E. Rejecting a Solomonic view - that immersion in the larger world could make Israel richer - Hosea insists the game is zero-sum: when Israel "mixes himself with the peoples ... foreigners devour his strength." Hosea's suspicion of the foreign isn't surprising. Israel, a small nation in a tough neighborhood, often did get pushed around...
...long as polytheism reigned, there were lots of those prophets. At one point, Israel contained "400 prophets of Asherah" and "450 prophets of Baal," the Bible reports darkly. Josiah's cleansing of the Temple was good strategy in a zero-sum game: the less influence these prophets had, the more...
...Babylon after conquest by the neo-Babylonian Empire. In passages from Isaiah that are thought to have been written during the exile, Yahweh says unequivocally, "Besides me there is no god." Does this extreme intolerance of other gods - the denial of their very existence - flow from a zero-sum view of Israel's environs...