Biblical Monotheism is Another Sunday School fantasy

The forgotten gods of the Bible and the rise of manufactured monotheism

El and Yahweh, the two gods that were destined to become one. (Created by the author in Midjourney)

The narrative that the Bible is the story of a single god is a manufactured myth — an invention forced upon us by later authoritarian institutions addicted to the simplicity and control of monotheism. In this essay, we’ll peel back those layers of deceit to expose the Bible’s true story of multiple gods and the tangled history that transformed them into “one.” We’ll trace how this counterfeit monotheistic narrative was carefully crafted over centuries, and we’ll expose how religion, at its core, is often nothing more than a web of comforting emotional stories spun together to keep people in line. Once you start to pull at these threads, the entire fabric of the monotheistic narrative unravels.

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To understand how this myth of monotheism was retroactively applied to the Biblical texts, we need to explore the ancient Israelite religion, where multiple gods coexisted long before the Bible was reframed as monotheistic. In its earliest phases, the Hebrew Bible reflects a divine pantheon with gods like El, the high god of Canaan, and Yahweh, one of El’s sons and a warrior deity favored in the southern kingdom of Judah. As we’ll see, traces of…