you’re trying to sell a tribe of Bronze Age shepherds on monotheism . . . you begin with, ‘Okay, chaps, there’s lots of different gods, but if you go all in with this one particular god, you’re signing on to a winning squad, you’re going to defeat the other tribes and control more grazing land.’ Which works, because they have an orderly sheep-based economy in which the rules of the game are clear and everyone can agree on basic ideas such as ‘If our animals eat more grass we have a better time of it.’ But those people, the people across the river, are in a very unsettled state and nothing
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