Biblical Evidence for Crypto-Pagans

Over the centuries, when Jews have been forced to convert to other religions (usually Christianity), some of the converts continued to practice Judaism secretly. (If you weren't aware of that, you can start making up the deficit in your knowledge by reading this Wikipedia article.)

What is less widely appreciated is that in Biblical times there were crypto-pagans among the Jews.

The clearest Biblical evidence for this is the Book of Esther. The idea that the story of Esther is a pagan story is not new. God doesn't appear in the story at all, and the names "Mordecai" and "Esther" have uncanny resemblances to the names of the two main gods of the Babylonian pantheon, Marduk and Ishtar.

Here is my conjecture. (It may not be original, but I haven't seen it on Google.) In early second Temple times there was a group of Jews who secretly worshiped the Babylonian gods. They preserved their myths of Marduk and Ishtar in a disguised form as a story about two Jews named Mordecai and Esther. Every Adar 14th they had a carnival-style party. When their neighbors inquired, they told them their tradition of the Purim story. The neighbors thought that was a cool idea and joined the celebration, and the idea spread.

The other Biblical story with pagan roots is the story, in the Book of Judges, of Samson. The Book of Judges reads like somebody in late first Temple times collected all the stories he could find about the era of the Judges and wrote them down to promote his agenda, that life under the Monarchy was better than the anarchy that had preceded it. Hence the recurring refrain,

In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

The story of Samson is tacked on towards the end, just for the sake of completeness. Like the story of Esther, the story of Samson looks very much like disguised pagan mythology, invented by a group of crypto-pagans to shelter themselves from persecution, starting with the name "Samson" ("Shimshon" in Hebrew, from "Shemesh" = Sun) and his miraculous birth. What the real meaning of the stories is is necessarily conjectural. One interpretation that I saw a long time ago, is here. There is another one here.

Update on Samson 31/1/22

 The Samson story includes an episode in which he tied burning torches to the tails of 300 foxes to burn down Phillistine crops, as an act of revenge. Recently I found out about something that took place during the Roman Cerealia festival. They used to tie burning torches to the tails of foxes and then release the foxes in the Circus Maximus. There has got to be some kind of connection there.