e almost antithetical to the expectations and beliefs of that time which depended upon people conforming to the norms. Open-mindedness was not a virtue, nor was acceptance of other people's beliefs and practices. Instead, other people's beliefs and practices were seen as dangerous. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, for example, there are warnings about the dangers to the Jewish people of bowing to false idols. The very first commandment is that the Jewish people were to have no other God before JHWH.
It is important to recognize that this commandment is not primarily an individual commandment, although it applies to individuals, but a group commandment. It is the group that is bound to keep the commandments as a whole and the group that is required to keep its members in conformity. According to Malina (1981) deviance from the norms of the group was most often interpreted as a failure of the social body. The focus is on keeping harmony within the community as a whole and on living a life that satisfies the requirements of honor.
Of course, there is still room for a position of "live and let live" in which the Jewish people held to their beliefs and practices, while allowing other peoples to hold to theirs. There may be no tolerance within the Jewish community for individual difference, but acceptance that "outsiders" have different beliefs and practices. These are customarily scorned, but tolerated, in the sense that the Jewish community did not attempt to impose its beliefs on others. There was clear understanding, however, that those other groups were outsiders belonging to different gods and that their beliefs and practices were not acceptable to JHWH. In conflicts of cultures, however, the general rule was for the conquerors to impose their beliefs and practices on the conquered (Armstrong, 1993). Rome did not follow this course completely, but their expectation that the Jewish people would recognize Caesar as a god...