One of my favorite historical 'fiction' novels is "The Source" by James Michener
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It's a long epic novel about Jewish culture, from the pre-monotheistic days to something like modern times. The chronological order gets confusing and some parts of it are kind of horrible but definitely my favorite part was the pre-monotheistic times.
They had this village by the name of "Makor" at about 2000 BC that had a few hundred inhabitants. It was a walled oasis in the middle of the desert, and these Jewish desert warrior nomads led this by a bearded patriarch happened upon the village at the behest of God. They made an agreement with the governor to not bring trouble to the locals and made an agreement to live on nearby land.
The village inhabitants of Makor were pagans who worshiped a number of gods, like a large stone effigy of a proto-Baal named on the mountain (he was a destruction god, I think), some kind of fertility god, and a god of harvest.
The two tribes coexisted peacefully on a mutually beneficial trade agreement, with the Jewish nomads farming and shepherding outside of town in the fields and the Makor citizens pressing olives in their walled fortress, but shit really hit the fan once the harvest was over and the festivities picked up. There would be parties of women and younger men who would go single file into the city every day to carry water from the well of Makor to their encampment where the pagans would worship their gods.
Every day they would have a woman dancing naked in front of the temple to tempt a passersby, where they would then walk into the temple and fornicate on the pagan alter to feed the earth with spirit energy or some shit. Once a prostitute in the service of the fertility god was removed from the entrance, another had to replace her after the couple on the altar were done fornicating.
The second part of the ritual happened nine or ten months later in the summer when the harvest was underway; they would worship their destruction god. First they would dig an enormous pit in the middle of town. They lined the pit with brush and lit a towering inferno, and danced around it like maniacs for days while all the whores in the service of the fertility god would hurl their prom-night dumpster babies into the pit to be eaten alive by the gaping, flaming maw of the earth and rejuvenate the life force they took due to the harvest.
Since the young men of the tribe of Jews outside of the town were worshiping with these pagans (basically fucking all of their women), God informed the patriarch leading the tribe that a great deal of blasphemy was going on under his nose, so after he got done killing a lot of the offenders with a sword, he climbed up the mountain and toppled the effigy to Baal.
Of course this was grounds for war (the whole book is basically a thousand pages of warfare), but the pagan fertility issues were definitely a page-turner.
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