In the first part of this book, we will examine texts predicating the numeral “one” of nouns for God, gods, or the divine. I will demonstrate that, although the idea that the traditional deity of one people was the only God among its region’s pantheon that exists had developed by the middle of the first millennium BCE, expressing this idea by stating that “God is one” does not emerge before the second century BCE. We will begin in this chapter by examining “God is one” from its earliest beginnings: first in ancient Egypt, where third-millennium inscriptions praise the Egyptian sun god, “Greetings, sole one who constantly endures every day”; and then in the rise of YHWH as the proper name of Israel’s God, of whom the Bible declares, “YHWH is one.” Yet these early texts intend only to praise these deities, not to deny the existence of others.

Chapter 3 begins the introduction to Jan Assmann through material that is shared between him and Girard: Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. This text stepped into a multi-century discourse that tried to abolish the monotheistic distinction between “Israel” vs. “Egypt.” But, contrary to simplistic readings of Freud as the enemy of religion, he ultimately argues (with mixed veracity) that monotheistic intolerance is a beneficial “progress in intellectuality.” This introduces much of Assmann’s topics: that is, comparing monotheism between Akhenaten and Egypt, Moses and Israel, and theorizing monotheism’s relationship to violence and politics.

Chapter 5 uses those terms to describe, through Assmann, a case study of polytheistic political theology in Egypt. This will help illustrate how polytheism (or better, “cosmotheism”) may be understood as rooted in the “victim mechanism,” in Girard’s terms. This puts to rest naïve notions of polytheism’s putative “tolerance,” seeing it more subtly as a socio-political force that “contains” violence, and an invitation to examine biblical monotheism.