Early Hebrews were henotheists, not monotheists. Yahweh was one of many provincial deities.

This deserves real scholarly respect rather than dismissal: the textual evidence for Deuteronomy 32:8's earlier 'sons of God/El' reading (4QDeut^j) against the MT's later 'sons of Israel,' and the divine-council language of Psalm 82 and Psalm 89:6, is well-established and should be conceded as genuine data, not explained away. Where the objection overreaches is in treating 'Israel's religion emerged from, and used, shared ANE conceptual vocabulary (a divine council, the term *elohim* applied broadly)' as equivalent to 'canonical Israelite religion, taken as a whole, was ordinary polytheism indistinguishable from its neighbors.' Those are different claims, and the textual evidence supports only the first. The biblical 'divine council' texts consistently, without exception, subordinate every member of the council to Yahweh's unique, unrivaled, and non-negotiable supremacy — the council members are never called to be worshipped, are frequently unnamed or anonymous, and function as a heavenly court/administrative assembly under one sovereign, comparable to (but theologically distinct from) royal court imagery, not a pantheon of independently powerful deities. Michael Heiser's *The Unseen Realm* develops this 'divine council worldview' as compatible with, rather than a threat to, Yahweh's uncompromised supremacy, though his popular synthesis should be weighed alongside more critical treatments like Smith's for a full picture. The most defensible description of Israel's earliest attested religion, per Smith's own careful analysis, is monolatry — worship of Yahweh alone as legitimately worship-worthy, while not always fully denying the metaphysical existence of other nations' gods — evolving toward explicit ontological monotheism (the flat denial that other gods exist at all, e.g. Isa 44:6, 45:5, 'I am the LORD, and there is no other') by the exilic period. The First Commandment itself ('you shall have no other gods before me,' Exod 20:3) is a jealous, exclusive-loyalty formula that presupposes a live polytheistic temptation in the surrounding culture, consistent with a religion that was substantially monolatrous and covenant-exclusivist from an early stage, even before its full metaphysical implications were articulated with later philosophical precision.

This developmental trajectory — Israel differentiating itself progressively and polemically from surrounding Canaanite religion, sharpening toward explicit monotheism — is exactly what one would expect of an authentic, historically embedded revelation given progressively within a real ancient cultural context, rather than a modern systematic theology parachuted in fully formed on day one. Genuine historical rootedness of this kind is a mark of authenticity, not fraud.