The cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia alike revolved around monotheistic religions. This created severe social hierarchies in which those connected with god, or those humans considered "divine" had almost absolute power within the civilization. Although the Jewish religion evolved around the worshiping of one single god, Yahweh, the common suffering that was endured by the Israelites on their migration back to their homeland led by Moses, created a sense of unity that led to a more homogenous equality among all of the people of the Jewish faith. The strong union of all people of the Jewish is further shown by the fact that, despite the diaspora that occurred after the Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 721 BCE, the Jews remained, and still remain, connected through synagogues and social functions. In this regard, the conquests of both the Babylonian and Assyrian empires and their eventual defete of the Israelite kingdom was not a detriment to the Jewish community. Instead, it strengthened Judaism as it spread it both regionally and globally while the common traditions of the faith were still maintained.
The ambiguity of history that is shown through the lense of the Hebrew Scriptures is another important key feature of Judaism as it showed the relationship between the Jewish faith and other cultures. The Hebrew Scriputes were compilations of materials that originated from different groups, like the Mesopotamians, and common themes of strength, order, and the importance of religious ceremonies can be seen in both the these scriptures and the earlier legal document of the Mesopotamians, the Code of Hammurabi. Despite the fact that Greek myths attempted to explain the mysterious of nature and life, it was the speculations of human minds that lead to constructive inferences being made. While religion in other prior cultures had answered the fundamental questions of what a good life meant and how is nature was constructed, Greco-Roman philosophy contributed to the pontification about and discussion of these questions. Through observation of the natural phenomena around them and not the spiritual world, Greco-Roman philosophers presented rational explanations of the world and its scientific order without the operation of gods or religion to explain the existence of humans. In this way, power derived from scientific and not divine thought.
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