Paul Veyne on the existence of other gods in the Bible

It is less difficult to eliminate a product of the imagination than to deny it. It is very difficult to deny a god, even if it is the god of others. Even ancient Judaism managed it with difficulty; it asserted that foreign gods were not as strong as the national god or else that they were not interesting: disdain or horror, not negation. But to a patriot they amount to the same thing. Do the gods of others exist? Their existence  is of little importance. What matters is that the gods of others are worthless; they are wooden or stone idols who have ears s they cannot hear. These are the gods that people “have not known”; they are the gods “whom he had not given unto them,” repeats Deuteronomy, and the most ancient books are more openly explicitly. When the Ark was placed in the temple of Dagon, the following morning the idol of this Dagon, god of the Philistines, was found face down, prostrate before the god of Israel. The Book of Samuel tells the story, and Psalm 96 will say, “All gods bow down before Yahweh.” One desires to know the gods of other nations only through international dealings. When it is said to the Amorite, “Why would you not possess what Camos, your god, gives you to possess?” it is a way of promising to respect his territory. Nations easily dispense with the nation of true and false, which is practiced or thought to be practised only by certain intellectuals at certain periods of history (Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? [trans. Paula Wissing: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 114-15)