Judaism Is Built Upon the Rubble of Foreign Shrines

 Chris Bennett

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Judaism Is Built Upon the Rubble of Foreign Shrines

People are shocked by viral images of an IDF soldier smashing a statue of Jesus' crucifixion. But the reality is that this sort of action is nothing new to the Jewish religion, in fact, its foundation is built on such desecration of other religions. At the heart of Judaism lies a radical act of rejection: the deliberate dismantling of the shrines and sacred objects belonging to other peoples’ gods. From its earliest legends to its defining biblical reforms, the Israelite tradition repeatedly chose the rubble of rival altars as the foundation for its own monotheistic system. In the Jewish scriptures, this destruction is presented as a necessary step to ensure exclusive loyalty to Yahweh, with no tolerance for competing sacred sites or symbols.

The pattern begins before the nation of Israel even existed. In rabbinic midrash, young Abraham smashes the idols in his father Terah’s workshop, declaring them powerless. That legendary act of iconoclasm is remembered within Jewish tradition as the archetypal break with the gods of others. Abraham’s descendants would carry forward both the willingness to smash and the duty to continue doing so.

In the time of the Judges, the biblical account says God commanded Gideon to tear down his own father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. Gideon obeyed at night, then used the wood from the destroyed Asherah to build an altar to Yahweh. The next morning, when the townspeople demanded his death, his father Joash defended him by asking, “If Baal is a god, let him contend for himself.” From the Jewish perspective, Gideon’s act cleared the way for his leadership by removing the symbols of a rival deity from his own household.

Centuries later, King Hezekiah removed the high places, broke down the sacred pillars, cut down the Asherah poles, and broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made — an object that, according to the text, had become an object of illicit worship. His sweeping reform centralized worship in Jerusalem and eliminated competing shrines across Judah.

Beyond simple demolition, these reforms frequently involved calculated ritual desecration to guarantee that rival holy sites could never be restored or reused. Archaeological excavations at the gate shrine of Tel Lachish have uncovered dramatic evidence from Hezekiah’s reign: the horns of the altars were deliberately smashed, and a stone toilet was installed directly in the holy of holies — a symbolic act of defilement that rendered the entire space permanently unclean. This practice parallels the biblical description of Jehu, who demolished the temple of Baal in Samaria and turned the site into a latrine “to this day” (2 Kings 10:27). Josiah escalated the humiliation further by exhuming bones of idolatrous priests and burning them on their own altars, grinding sacred pillars and Asherim into powder, scattering the dust in streams, and leaving high places as refuse dumps. These were not merely acts of physical destruction but deliberate, ritualized insults designed to pollute and humiliate the sacred spaces of other gods.

The Torah itself commands this stance. Deuteronomy orders the Israelites to tear down the altars, smash the sacred pillars, cut down the Asherim, and burn the carved images of the peoples they dispossess. From the biblical viewpoint, these were instructions for survival and purity in a land filled with other gods and their shrines.

Rabbinic literature upholds the same demand. Tractate Avodah Zarah in the Talmud details how idols and their accessories must be completely destroyed so they cannot be venerated again. The rabbis praised Hezekiah and Josiah as righteous kings while preserving the story of Abraham the iconoclast. In Jewish teaching, denying the reality and power of other gods became a defining mark of Jewish identity.

Even after the Temple was destroyed and Jews were scattered, the principle remained embedded in the tradition. Judaism survived as a portable faith centered on text and law. Within this perspective, the rubble of foreign shrines — both literal and symbolic — provided the cleared ground on which its exclusive monotheism could stand.

From the Jewish perspective, this is why the title rings true: Judaism is built upon the rubble of foreign shrines. In the internal logic of the tradition, the systematic destruction of rival gods’ altars and symbols created the space in which its particular form of monotheism, covenant law, and prophetic vision could develop and endure. Every recitation of the Shema — “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” — carries the cultural memory of hammers striking stone, axes cutting wooden Asherah poles, and altars reduced to dust. That ancient pattern of eliminating rival sacred sites still undergirds the faith’s core insistence on one God with no tolerated competitors.

The story of Judaism is therefore not only one of building altars to Yahweh. It is equally the story of tearing down the sacred places of others. This approach prevailed not because it was morally superior to the religions it displaced, but because the Israelites (and later Jews) achieved the military and political power to enforce their vision while others did not.

Modern Echoes in Christian and Muslim Sites

The same impulse to reject and destroy symbols of rival faiths reappears today in the actions of some Jews when they hold power near Christian and Islamic holy places.

Rabbi Manis Friedman (a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi associated with the Bais Chana Institute of Jewish Studies in St. Paul, Minnesota) has openly expressed these sentiments. Chabad-Lubavitch holds deep influence on Netanayhu and Trump. In the May/June 2009 issue of Moment magazine they ran an "Ask the Rabbis" feature on the question "How should Jews treat their Arab neighbors?" Multiple rabbis from different denominations responded. Friedman's reply (labeled under "Chabad") included this passage:

"I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)."

He continued by arguing that an Israeli prime minister who followed "Old Testament" (Torah) values in this way would deter enemies (e.g., by making them stop using human shields or holy sites for cover), leading to no war at all. He framed it as rejecting "human invention" morality in favor of Torah-based conduct during wartime.

More recently, in April 2026, during Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon, a photograph showed an IDF soldier using a sledgehammer to smash the head off a statue of Jesus on a crucifix in the Christian village of Debel. Separate videos captured Israeli soldiers inside churches mocking Christian rituals and desecrating sacred spaces. These acts were filmed and shared by the soldiers themselves.

In the occupied West Bank, Jewish settlers have carried out repeated “price tag” attacks, burning mosque entrances, spray-painting slogans denigrating the Prophet Muhammad, and vandalizing Islamic holy sites. In Jerusalem’s Old City, ultra-Orthodox Jews have been repeatedly filmed spitting at Christian clergy, pilgrims, and church entrances. Some openly frame these acts as rejection of Christian “idolatry.”

Extremist Jewish groups have also repeatedly attempted to perform animal sacrifice rituals at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound (the Temple Mount), the third-holiest site in Islam, often calling for the eventual replacement of the mosques with a Third Temple.

These incidents reflect a direct continuation of the biblical and Talmudic pattern. What the Torah commanded against Canaanite altars and Asherim is now, in the hands of some religious nationalists and soldiers, turned against crosses, statues of Jesus and Mary, churches, mosques, and Islamic sacred spaces. When Jewish actors gain the upper hand in contested holy land, the ancient practice of clearing rival shrines reemerges — no longer limited to ancient pagan gods, but applied to the sacred symbols of Christianity and Islam as well. The foundational narrative of smashing foreign shrines has survived into the present, shaped by the same exclusive claim that one God leaves no room for others.

This same pattern of iconoclastic destruction and sacred-site appropriation filtered directly into the two other Abrahamic faiths that emerged from the same monotheistic root. Christianity, once it gained imperial power under the Roman emperors, systematically demolished pagan temples across the empire — most famously the Serapeum of Alexandria in 391 CE — and built churches directly atop them, as seen in Rome’s Pantheon and countless sites across Europe and the New World. Islam followed suit: Muhammad’s followers destroyed the pre-Islamic idols in the Kaaba, and later Muslim armies razed or converted Zoroastrian fire temples, Hindu shrines in India, and, in one of the most publicized modern examples, the monumental Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were dynamited by the Taliban in 2001. Mosques were frequently constructed over the ruins of churches, synagogues, and pagan temples, most notably the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex on the site of the former Jewish Temples in Jerusalem and the conversion of Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia into a mosque after 1453. What began as a distinctly Israelite strategy for enforcing exclusive monotheism became a shared Abrahamic inheritance: each new faith, once strong enough, cleared the holy places of its predecessors and rivals in the name of the one true God.

And now these same 3 faiths may lead us into Armageddon.