They were a living protest against superstition and religious materialism.

An extraordinary movement of ideas, ending in the most opposite results, made of them, at this epoch, the most striking and original people in the world.
Their dispersion along all the coast of the Mediterranean, and the use of the Greek language, which they adopted when out of Palestine, prepared the way for a propagandism, of which ancient societies, divided into small nationalities, had never offered a single example.
Up to the time of the Maccabees, Judaism, in spite of its persistence in announcing that it would one day be the religion of the human race, had had the characteristic of all the other worships of antiquity, it was a worship of the family and the tribe.

The Israelite thought, indeed, that his worship was the best, and spoke with contempt of strange gods; but he believed also that the religion of the true God was made for himself alone.

Only when a man entered into the Jewish family did he embrace the worship of Jehovah.[1] No Israelite cared to convert the stranger to a worship which was the patrimony of the sons of Abraham.

The development of the pietistic spirit, after Ezra and Nehemiah, led to a much firmer and more logical conception.