Ancient Hebrew Polytheism?

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There are so many passages in the Torah were God seems to refer to itself in the plural form. Some say this was merely honorific, but it seems a case can be made that the Ancient Hebrews started out Polytheist and gradually developed into monotheists. It certainly complicates any Bible reading exercise.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7RF_GoeOTg[/youtube]

It doesn't seem that way to me. The whole point of the Scriptures is to stress the uniqueness of Yahweh as the one and only true God.

Whether the majority of the ancient Hebrews themselves were polytheists or not, that's a different story.

This is nothing new nor surprising. The proto-Israelites were southern Canaanites (more specifically, southern Phoenicians), the distinction between the 2 groups was just political.

For instance, "Ba'al" was a title for major gods used by Phoenicians, while it was viewed as "False god" or even "the lesser god" by Jews , and as demon by Christian literature.

The truth is, The Israelites were nothing more than a Canaanite cult.

Cool. I'm aware of this. Each branch that uses the OT has a different explanation for it. I was raised Mormon, and thus taught one simple phrase... "As man is now, God once was. As God is now, man may become."

Logically, this means there are many gods out there and many more to come. Provided, of course, enough make it to the highest level of heaven.

It is fairly clear that the Hebrews were in constant contact with polytheism, and tat there was a constAnt tension. Besides frequent work to root out hill shrines and such, there was the Jewish colony in Egypt [operating for many purposes an Achaemenid Aramnaic very close to the Aramaic sections of the OT] which not only illegally had their own temple but also, if I remember right, brought in a few of the local deities.

Several passages particularly in the psalms echo neatly word for word [original liturgical poetry is hard, and good liturgical poetry easier to adapt that eradicate] texts in Ugaritic, a northern Canaanite lingo of a polytheistic somewhat earlier culture.

Clearly when THE God is in dialogue with the gods, we do not have to assume polytheism, awareness of Hebraism as SPECIAL will handle it.

For the linguist [forget theology], the issue is that possibly honorific plurality is

a. reserved for divine entities [not the king, not my father]

b. extended to officially false divine entities [Baalim, Ashtaroth]

c. not licensed for ALL divine entities [Rimmon, Moloch]

d. problematically used in the unique and possibly not originally Hebraic Book of Job with Behemoth - literally "critters"].

It is possible to devise several reasonable scenarios which will fit the data. Won't bother, you can figure them so good as me. It is probably NOT possible to determine a clearly best-fit scenario - and if we did history and Comparative Linguyistics say the best fit could still be way off the truth.

Hoookay....

You could clarify.

I confess I do not at this writing see how Adam as name or Adam as string of reported incidents directly affect the choice of scenarios accounting for Hebrew divine ebntity pluralization.

I get a shock every time I look at that do. Literally a shock of hair?

Yes, it's highly likely that there was a slow development from polytheism, through monolatrism (belief that while there are other gods, only one of them is worthy of worship), to true monotheism. Even long after the Jews had taken the Shema as their basic declaration of faith, there were hints at a primordial multiplicity of gods, a Council of Souls, and the presence of Wisdom, the Shekhinah and the Torah itself as coeval figures with God - there are various references to them in the Talmudic writings that suggest that even if power was 'officially' vested in one place, it wasn't always seen as having been that way.

I'm currently reading a book called 'Tree of Souls' by Howard Schwartz - it's a compendium of Jewish mythology, all the different stories told in their different versions, with references to the original texts. It's fascinating. For me, one of the key points of Judaism is that at least over the years, Jewish scholars have discussed among themselves various possible explanations for the discrepancies in their scriptures, whereas Christians, when faced with contradictions in the Old Testament (and between the Old and the New) tend to either ignore them or say they just need to be accepted by faith. Whatever the theological merits of the two methods, at least the Jewish method has come up with some interesting stories.

The Jews (or Israelites) did not become fully monotheistic until during the Babylonian Exile.

ruveyn

And almost certainly not as a single ynit, given the Elephantine colony and some of the data on the early Samaritans.