When you read someof the Qumran scrolls from the Essenes, an ultra-fundamentalist jewish sect, who was furiously keen on the "purity" of worship before Yahweh, you will see that they have no bones in admitting that there are other gods in the heavenly realm. Only Yahweh is to be worshipped, but there ARE others whose divinity status is reckoned by the Essenes. Thus, the Jewish religion was never monotheistic [ony one God exists], but rather Henotheistic [several gods exist, but only one is to be worshipped]. Apparently, only after the return from the exile in Babylon, with the fundamentalist heroes Ezra and Neemiah, the myth of monotheism was retrospectively forced into the written history of the Jews. However, this was a feature of the urban elites that were somehow related to the Second Temple establishment. In the countryside, the ahm-harets, the country folk, were still very much attatched to the polytheistic / henotheistic worldview. It was ony later that, as a reaction to the hellenistic opression from the polytheistic Seleucid rulers in the 2 centuries BCE, that the monotheistic ideology of Yahweh became the norm in Judea.
Eden