The Polytheistic Ancestry of Monotheism

Follow the river far enough upstream, and you find many springs.

For more than half of humanity, the question of how many Gods there are has an answer so settled it barely registers as a question.

One.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam disagree profoundly about His nature, His revelation, His relationship with humanity, and even about which statements concerning Him are permissible. But on this they stand together: there is one God.

Walk backward through history, however, and the picture becomes less tidy. Christianity inherited its God from Judaism; Islam inherited much of the same religious world, recognizing the God of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets as its own. Follow that line far enough backward, and eventually we arrive at ancient Israel and Judah, at YHWH, and at a religious world that does not look entirely monotheistic.

YHWH Among Other Gods

Ancient Israel emerged within the broader religious culture of Canaan and the Levant, where many Gods were worshipped. YHWH became the national God of Israel and Judah, but this did not necessarily mean that other Gods were thought not to exist.

Many scholars therefore describe early Israelite religion as polytheistic or monolatrous — YHWH was Israel's God, and increasingly the only God Israel was meant to worship, while other divine beings could still be acknowledged as real.

There remains scholarly disagreement about exactly how and when exclusive worship of YHWH developed. What is broadly accepted is that pre-exilic Israelite religion differed substantially from the monotheism Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would later inherit.

YHWH and Asherah

Some of the clearest evidence for this comes not from the Bible but from the ground itself.

At Kuntillet Ajrud, a desert way-station in the northern Sinai dating to roughly the late ninth or early eighth century BCE, inscriptions on storage jars and plaster walls contain blessings invoking "YHWH of Samaria and his asherah" and "YHWH of Teman and his asherah." A related inscription from Khirbet el-Qom in Judah, somewhat later, associates YHWH with asherah again.

What asherah means in these inscriptions is genuinely debated among scholars — the Canaanite Goddess Asherah herself, perhaps understood as YHWH's consort, or a cultic object or symbol associated with her. Each reading carries different implications, and no consensus has settled the question.

The inscriptions therefore should not be treated by themselves as proof that YHWH had a divine consort. What they do show is that some forms of YHWH worship incorporated religious elements that later Yahwism rejected.

The archaeological record adds to this picture. Judean pillar figurines, small clay images widespread in Judahite households from roughly the eighth through seventh centuries BCE, remain of uncertain purpose — fertility, protection, domestic cult, and representation of a female deity have all been proposed. Whatever their precise function, their wide distribution tells us something: these objects belonged to the ordinary material and religious world of Judah.

The Bible Preserves the Conflict

The Hebrew Bible itself repeatedly describes Israelites worshipping Baal, Asherah, the host of heaven, and other divine figures — not as a hostile outside description, but as a recurring internal complaint.

The reforms attributed to King Josiah in the late seventh century BCE are especially revealing here. According to 2 Kings 23, objects associated with Baal and Asherah were removed from the Jerusalem Temple, rival cult practices were suppressed, and local high places of worship were destroyed.

Whether every detail of the biblical account can be reconstructed as literal history is a separate question the text cannot settle on its own. But the account preserves something more durable than any single detail: evidence of a religious environment in which exclusive worship of YHWH had to compete against other practices — including practices that the biblical account itself places within the Jerusalem Temple.

From YHWH Alone to No God but YHWH

By the Babylonian exile and the period following it, the language shifts and becomes explicit in a new way. Isaiah 40–55 — the section scholars generally attribute to an author writing during or after the exile — contains declarations like "I am YHWH, and there is no other."

This is a different claim than commanding Israel to worship YHWH alone. It denies divine competitors altogether.

For that reason, Deutero-Isaiah occupies an important place in scholarly reconstructions of how biblical monotheism took final shape. Some locate fully explicit monotheism here for the first time; others argue that functionally exclusive Yahwism began considerably earlier, and that Isaiah 40 onward simply gives that older commitment its most direct theological expression — the exact timeline remains genuinely contested among historians of the period.

The intermediate stages left fingerprints inside the Bible itself. Psalm 82 pictures God standing in the divine council and passing judgment in the midst of the gods, and the older reading of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint has the Most High dividing the nations according to the number of the sons of God, with YHWH receiving Israel as his own portion.

Schematically, the direction across all that disagreement is harder to miss: Israel's God, then a God above other Gods, then a God alone to be worshipped, then, finally, the only God there is. The transition took centuries, and different communities almost certainly occupied different points along it at the same time.

Judaism eventually inherited the final position. Christianity inherited it from Judaism. Islam later made the absolute unity of God — tawhid — one of its central doctrines.

None of this makes any of the three religions polytheistic today. It does mean that one of the world's most influential traditions of monotheism has a polytheistic ancestry — and that YHWH, later proclaimed as the only God there is, was once worshipped in a world in which other Gods were very much present.

Why This History Belongs Here

This site is about inheritance, and inheritance runs deeper than one generation of belief. The monotheism the West treats as the natural shape of religion is itself a renovation — built, over centuries, on top of a religious world crowded with Gods. Nothing in that history diminishes the three traditions standing on it today. But it does change what "restoring the Gods" can mean: the polytheistic world is not an alien country to the Abrahamic one; it is the ground floor of the same house. An earlier essay traced the roads societies take out of a religion while keeping what still works. This one is a reminder that the traffic has moved before, in more than one direction — that religions are not fixed points but long transformations, and that the oldest layer of our religious inheritance is older than the claim that there was ever only One.