On several occasions, Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire mentions the Jews' violent antipathy to the idolatry that permeated the world surrounding them. Yet he never seems to have asked himself why many Jews would die rather than pay homage to the Canaanite Ba'al cults or the gods of Greece and Rome.
Obviously this stubbornness owed something to the Jews' belief that the one God, Yahweh, had commanded them not to worship other gods. The Hebrew Scriptures repeatedly emphasize that the divine law has been decreed by a divine sovereign whom the sovereign's servants, Israel, must obey. The book of Deuteronomy's last ten chapters, for example, remind the Israelites that they are required to worship the one true God, warning that the worship of false gods will have terrible consequences.
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