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The Hebrew Bible contains numerous injunctions against Israelite involvement in polytheistic worship. While the statements of the prophets and Biblical historiographers speak of rampant polytheism in ancient Israel, and cite disloyalty to YHWH as one of the main factors contributing to the destruction of the nations of Israel and Judah, Biblical texts provides no means of quantifying polytheistic activity. Names provide one of the few means of going beyond the polemic to gauge religious loyalty in Israel. Since ancient Semitic personal names were often sentences, and were often chosen for their meaning, many of them contain the name of a deity, thus providing a means to determine which deities were considered important in a given society. After totaling the number of Israelites (not names) mentioned in the Bible and dividing these according to the major historical periods of ancient Israel, potential theophoric names were collected and analyzed in order to determine the percentage of Israelites who bore probably-Yahwistic and probably-pagan personal names. Of all the Israelites in the Bible with theophoric names from the time of the Judges through the post-exilic period, 95% bore Yahwistic ones and 5% bore pagan ones. These figures closely correspond with statistics calculated using the Israelite epigraphic onomasticon, but contrast markedly with the variety and frequency of various divine names found in personal names from other ancient Near Eastern societies. These data provide the means for gauging Israelite religious loyalty, and they depict a people who were overwhelming loyal to YHWH alone (i.e., were at least Yahwistic monolatrists). The Biblical onomastic evidence, therefore, strongly implies that neither the Biblical polemic against polytheism, nor the general modern scholarly conception of pre-exilic Israelite religious loyalties, reflects religious reality in ancient Israel.
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