The introduction of monotheism among the Jews was, in other words, a means of rationalizing Israel’s catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Babylonians. The crisis of identity posed by the Babylonian Exile forced the Israelites to reexamine their sacred history and reinterpret their religious ideology. The cognitive dissonance created by the Exile required a dramatic, hitherto unworkable religious framework to make sense of the experience.
