The world was populated with gods. This is why it made no sense to ancient people—apart from Jews—to worship only one God. Why would you worship one god? There were lots of gods, and all of them deserved to be worshiped. If you decided to start worshiping a new god—for example, because you moved to a new village and wanted to pay respect to its local divinity—that did not require you to stop worshiping any of the other gods. If you decided to perform a sacrifice to Apollo, that didn’t stop you from also offering a sacrifice to Athena, or Zeus, or Hera. This was a world of lots of gods and lots
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