Graeber & Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything"[1] pulls the thread a bit about how groups tend to build their identity as oppositional to their neighbors - that a

Graeber & Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything"[1] pulls the thread a bit about how groups tend to build their identity as oppositional to their neighbors - that a tribe who lives next to one known for its ornamentation will tend to develop a culture that spurns such things. This isn't the first thing I've read about some core part of Israelite identity coming as a strong rejection of their neighbors' way of doing things - there was an article here a while back digging into the prohibition against mixed fibers, as well, and an awful lot of the Levitican proclamations seem to be ways to establish a group identity in opposition to the cultures in which the Israelites found themselves embedded in. Even the concept of God - Reza Aslan (yeah yeah) traces the evolution of the concept of a local god of a people to the capital-G God of creation to early Israelites attempts to keep their culture intact in the face of a military defeat by their neighbors. 1: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity-david-graeber/15873078?ean=9781250858801&next=t https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-hi...