Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: is the concept of yahweh and the pantheon of gods — March 9, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

I don't understand the imperative of calling something apologetic when there are citations. It would be better to deal with the argument which is that belief in a designer God and some kind of primitive monotheism is a phenomenon of human psychological development, anthropology, & sociology, and that this should inform our analysis of history where we may have gaps.

This was a good read but again doesn't seem to conclusively prove what you guys claim is "well known."

"There seems to be a clear implication that these were other deities venerated by at least some Jews and Israelites."

I am not sure that Jews were originally a solid polytheistic community that then transitioned over a long period of time into a solidly monotheistic one. I could just be ignorant of the literature, but typically religious development over thousands of years tends to be more complex.

This article proves that polytheism and worship of multiple gods was present among the Jews long before the Torah was compiled and that there are striking parallels in the Torah, but this doesn't mean it was a linear progression from a purely polytheistic outlook to a monotheistic one. It was probably a nonlinear process.

Jews themselves claim that their community repeatedly and regularly fell into polytheism but that there was a minority who opposed this.

Perhaps the best that can be said is, "we only have pre-Torah manuscripts depicting polytheistic or henotheistic religion among ancient Jews and we find parallels in the Torah that the scribes sanitized. If there were ancient monotheistic Jews, we don't have pre-Biblical documentation of that."