The prevalence of all these deities meant that the average town or city was full of reminders of the pagan way of life: temples, shrines and altars; sacred pillars and cult-objects, some shocking to a Jewish conscience; sacred prostitution everywhere; sacrificial animals being taken for slaughter, their meat to be offered for sale in the markets. Pagan religion in one form or another was taken for granted. The Jewish (and then the Christian) protest that there was one god, who required none of these things and indeed hated them, came as a major challenge to a long-established worldview.
