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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]God created Earth. He was Jewish.

His son Jesus acted up and sent his 12 Apostles out to start Catholic Church.

But what’s up with all the other religions? Did people just make them up and folks blindly followed?

[/quote]

God wasn't Jewish.  He formed a covenant with Abraham and some of his progeny, but lot's of other peoples around at that time had their own gods.
And yes, almost certainly "people [did] just make up [these other religions.]"
Most religions pre-dating Judaism were polytheistic [/quote]

There is a good argument that Judaism was polytheistic prior to the Babylonian Captivity and the writing of the Torah. [/quote]

Good evidence that the ancestors of the Jews were polytheistic?  Or good evidence that there lol were polytheists who identified themselves as Jewish? I am skeptical about the latter.  [/quote]

I can read Biblical Hebrew, and Aramaic pretty because I attended Orthodox religious schools before becoming secular, and that background let me take some grad-level classes on the history of the Hebrew Bible as an undergraduate.  My recollection is that there are very many references to multiple gods.  For starters, the Hebrew Bible mostly references “Elohim” which is literally “gods”.  Also, the very word for God in Hebrew (“el”) is the name of a Canaanite god, and the Hebrew Bible consistently refers to both “el/Elohim” (“god”) vs the god of Moses (YHVH, usually translated as “the Lord”). Then there are  references to the goddess Asherah (אֲשֵׁרָה), a word the religious will tell you refers to “poles” in the Hebrew Bible and not the goddess, despite that being the meaning in every other Semitic language and dialect.

There is also the fact that the psalms are full of praise for “El ‘elyon” (God most high)… which happens to be the name of the chief Ugarittic god, and the phrase is used explicitly to refer to that god in Genesis.

Then, of course, there are the demigods in Genesis 6:1-2 (בני האלהים).

There are dozens of similar examples, and my impression is that it’s pretty broadly accepted in academic biblical archaeology that monotheism didn’t among Israelites until post-Babylonian exile.  [/quote]

[b]Angels are pretty non-controversial in Judaism[/b]. So what does "monotheistic" mean, specifically?

"I am the Lord your God. The Lord is One. You shall have no other gods before me" means that one God is in charge, not that only one god exists. [/quote]

Not sure what the bolder is meant to convey.  From what I recall, traditional sources (i.e. the mikraot g’dolot) don’t equate the b’ne Elohim with angels but rather with powerful humans. I think Kabbalah gets into Angels, but they are not nearly as big in Judaism as in Christianity.

If you look at the passage you quoted in Hebrew, it’s “ani Adonai (YHVH) elohekha…”, right?  So it’s part of the Yahwist tradition that’s at odds with earlier non-YHVH texts.

The point is that it’s clear that worship of a variety of gods and goddesses was widespread and not considered heterodox in pre-Babylonian-exile Israel.  These older texts were kept and fairly unevenly blended with Yahwist texts when the Hebrew  Bible was compiled, which is why it’s such a mishmash (e.g. Genesis chapters 1 and 2 with two conflicting versions of creation). [/quote]

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