hollis (they/them) currently studying classics and archaeology.
reading about roman religion and attitudes towards religion is very interesting cause they would just, like, look at other polytheistic religions and go “oh sick we’re doing a temple to that one too” so you get temples to isis and cybele and all but they just Did Not Get judaism at all. like it was just so completely alien to how roman religion worked that it baffled them for centuries.
Like, I’m going to preface this with the fact that what I know about Judaism is from world religion classes and the internet so correct me if I get some stuff wrong.
Romans did not understand why Jews took their religion so seriously. In Rome religion was very transactional: you sacrifice these things on this day and the harvest will be okay. You could write funny poems and plays about the gods getting into shenanigans or fucking your wife and it was whatever. The gods didn’t give a shit. So when Jewish people told them that they could not worship any god but theirs it was just really confusing. Like, what? Your god’s going to get mad because you sacrificed a pig to Demeter?
Romans also just did not Get the idea that a god did not have any physical form. Like, fine, you can worship your guy. But what does he look like? Gods could be intangible and invisible, but they always had some sort of physical representation. Every temple had a cult statue which worked as a sort of intermediary when you did sacrifices. That statue was Jupiter or Minerva or Venus. The Romans just kind of decided that the Jewish people did have a statue of their god in Holy of Holies in Judea but it was a mystery cult type deal so Romans couldn’t enter.