The Bible and Mythological Polytheism

The Ukrainian-born historian of ancient Israel Yehezkel Kaufmann immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1928. He taught at the Reali School in Haifa for more than twenty years and then, in 1949, was appointed professor of biblical studies at the Hebrew University, where he trained a generation of biblical scholars. While he was a master of modern biblical criticism, he was critical of its Christian biases, especially its tendency to downplay the originality of Israelite religion. This is one of the central motifs in his eight-volume history of Judaism from biblical antiquity to the Second Temple (1937–1957), of which there is only a one-volume condensed translation (1960).