“Elijah approached the people and said, ‘How long will you not decide between two choices? If the Lord is the true God, follow him, but if Baal is the true God, follow him!'”
1 Kings 18:21
Genesis records the first known monotheist in history, the Patriarch Abraham. He dwelt here when the land was called Canaan. A thousand years later the land came to be named after Abraham’s grandson Israel. At this time the prophet Elijah was sent to warn Abraham’s descendants to be true to the one God of Israel.
Abraham was a pastoralist, shepherding his flocks and herds across the land in search of good pasture. But his descendants, a couple hundred years removed from slavery in Egypt and the trek through the Wilderness of Sinai had settled down to work the land. Observation of their pagan neighbors sacrificing to the local deity named Baal began to give the Israelites ideas. Farming was hard work and there were never any guarantees. Sudden storms in the Spring, droughts, heat waves could all destroy a season’s crop. So why not take out an insurance policy in the form of a sacrifice to your neighbor’s God? Perhaps it could help? How could it hurt matters? It was into this ambiguous, muddled scenario that Elijah the Prophet approached the assembled Israelites with absolute and complete faith in the idea of the one God, the God of Israel. We understand by this story that even 1000 years after the idea of monotheism is introduced into history not all of the people’s of the Earth are convinced of the existence of only one God, serving a small nation apart.