The Jews’ hostility to idolatry, however, also reflected their radically different conception of God and his relation to the material world, a conception that the philosopher and theologian Claude Tresmontant explored in the 1950s and 1960s. He pointed out that because of their understanding of a transcendent Creator, the Jews recognized that the entities worshipped by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans were not what they proclaimed them to be. Idols, the Jews insisted, had no real existence. To ascribe divinity to physical elements such as water, emotions such as envy, or practices such as war was literally non-sense for the Jews.

For the same reason, the Israelites considered it ridiculous to regard rulers, alive or dead, as gods. Man, they believed, had been created by a demanding but loving and good God in his image. Tresmontant stresses the contrast with those Near Eastern mythologies that presented man as the result of “a process in which wicked deeds mingled with acts of generation.”

The Jews also believed that the material world was not evil or beset by demonic contests. “The physical universe,” writes Tresmontant, “is the first thing to be created, and God declares that it is very beautiful and very good.” This universe is presented in the Hebrew Scriptures as ultimately permeated with order—not chaos and incomprehensibility. Much of this universe was thus understandable by the human beings made by this God in his image and similarly suffused with his order.

This belief in a good and ordered world challenged the supposition of the surrounding religions that the material world itself is malevolent—a view that was not clearly rebutted by Greek philosophers such as Plato. The Hebrews insisted that this material world was made for man and that its goodness would unfold under his cultivation.

This Jewish emphasis on the order built into a created world of which man is the apex had two critical consequences. First, Judaism’s audacious confrontation of idolatry and pagan mythology was a powerful affirmation of man’s rationality. Tresmontant explains:

Here we have an intellectual revolution, a liberation, an act of free thought, a rejection of myth, and an effort to use reason, undoubtedly the most important that the human race has known in all its history. When the prophets of Israel bitterly rebuke pagan idolatry, they are doing something strictly rational. When they refuse to sacrifice human children to idols or to myths, they carry their work of the use of reason into practical human conduct…. The inspiration which has led to this intellectual revolution … is not something dictated from without on a servile human instrument. It is a revolution that works from within, and which starts to create a new, holy, reasonable humanity ….

The Jews’ liberation of human reason from mythology and nature-worship amounted to one of humanity’s most powerful “enlightenments.” The Hebrew prophets were not philosophers as the Greeks understood this term, yet they played a major role in opening the human mind to objective reality. Several centuries later, Paul would tell Greeks and Romans that idolatry was a sign of ignorance and stupidity because a god made by human hands could be no god at all.

But what is especially important is the timing of these Jewish insights. As the legal philosopher John Finnis points out, “the Jewish people’s accomplishment” of “reaching their settled and superior understanding of the universe’s origins and natural intelligibility” occurred “centuries earlier than the Greeks reached their own standard and inferior understanding.”