The Most Famous Prayer in Judaism Isn't Monotheistic

So these other gods are acknowledged as being real deities, but that doesn't mean that the ancient Israelite society is worshiping them.

That doesn't sound like polytheism, but it also doesn't sound like monotheism.

What would you as a scholar call that?

Right.

We want, we want to, we want to get the thing that comes between where we are now.

There's only one.

It has only ever been one.

And anyone who ever thought differently is, is, is, and was wrong.

And they shouldn't know better.

Um, And what we think of as polytheism, which is an individual culture, right, that worships multiple deities.

We already talked about, you know, today that would be like, for example, Hinduism.

And back then you would have the Canaanites and the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Mesopotamians.

In other words, polytheism was very popular, but definitely not what we find in Israel.

So what do we call it when you know there are other gods, but you only worship the one? And what we call that is monolatry, right? That is mono, one, and latry is worship.

So you're only going to, not latrine, that's different.

So you're going to worship only the one God, even though you recognize that there's other ones out there.

And that's interesting and healthy, like in a certain way.

I mean, one of the things that, When I say healthy, what I mean is one of the nicer things about much of the Hebrew Bible is that even as these texts tell you you may only worship this one God, they're only talking to Israel.

There's nowhere in these earlier, chronologically earlier books of the Bible that says, hey, you stupid Canaanites, why aren't you worshiping Yahweh? Or hey, Moabites, you're not worshiping a real God.

You should worship Yahweh like a weed.

That never happens.

No foreign people has ever condemned Yahweh.

or castigated or criticized or other C words like that for worshiping their own deities.

It's only and always Israel that is getting yelled at for not worshiping Yahweh, their own deity.

And my assumption is, though we don't have great evidence of it because we have so little writing from them, is that that same approach would be true for the other sort of small nations around Israel.