In modern Church circles, it's popular to call ourselves (Christians) 'monotheists' -- and that's a good description of the modern believer...many believe there is one God and one God only. Any other god is thrown on to a pile labeled 'Idols' which is to say...not gods, or false gods. Is this right though? I've written on these electronic pages before that "if the 1st commandment of 'thou shalt have no other gods before me' is to be taken seriously, then it implies there are other gods." Many places in Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament, suggest that there are other gods/divine beings. Several are named -- and never do you get the impression that they were somehow not real: Amon, Asherah, Ashtoreth, Baal, Chemosh, Dagon, Molech, etc.
I saw something today that caught my eye - a tweet from Yonatan Adler who is an archaeology and early Judaism professor at Ariel University. I'm not recommending his work, but in this tweet, he was referencing a papyrus remnant, written in Aramaic, that he has been studying called "the Passover Papyrus", from ~419 BCE. I did some additional digging on this fragment - it's a letter, from one Jewish leader (Hananiah) to another (Yedaniah), providing instruction for Passover observance. The part Adler zeros in on is in the greeting of the letter where it read, "May the gods seek after the welfare of my brother..." His whole point in sharing it was to point to the fact that even within Torah-observant Judaic circles, this idea that they were monotheists is probably wrong. Now, it must be noted here that this was likely sinful, to either be praying to and/or associating in any way with any other God than Yahweh, but nevertheless, they were not monotheists in the sense that they believed there was one God and one God only. The more I read, the more I am convinced that almost everyone in the ancient world was a polytheist. That doesn't necessarily mean that they worshipped as a polytheist, but they most certainly believed there were many gods.
Perhaps I'm being too hard on modern Christians - maybe what some of us mean is that God (Yahweh) is the God of Gods, the Lord of Lords, and what we're really saying is that he has no equal, no rival. If that's the case, then my monologue here falls on its face...a modified definition of monotheism simply to indicate that Yahweh Elohim is the only God worth worshipping - how could I disagree with that? But - I don't think that's where most Christians are coming from. The next logical question is "so what?" but I've already answered that question in previous posts.
**Interesting sidenote: there actually is a theological name for the belief that there is one true God, but that other gods exist, it's called Henotheism. Turns out it was coined by a German theologian in the 19th century and I'm pretty sure he used it pejoratively in order to label people who thought differently than him.
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