period, and Yahwism was a complex religion with indigenous polytheistic cultic activities’.30 We have already seen how this sort of historical analysis has a powerful hermeneutical dimension.31 Deuteronomy’s mono-Yahwism represents a late, minority development in Israel, and it is the achievement of the deuteronomic movement to have re-written history so as to present Israel as a pristine unity, committed to aniconic Yahwism from its earliest existence, having originated outside the land, and thus