Smith’s study downplays a radical difference between monotheism and polytheism. According to him, “The notion of the family household perhaps provided polytheism with the sort of “oneness” that monotheists associate with monotheism. Indeed, in a society where the highest level of social association and identification was the family and not the individual, the polytheism of a divine family would have been far more intelligible than any notion of monotheism. Stated differently, the divine family was for polytheism a sort of ‘mono-theism.’“

Smith believes that El was the original god of Isra-el, and was originally distinct from Yahweh. “In the patriarchal narratives, the god of Shechem, ‘el, is called ‘elohe yisra’el, “the god of Israel,” and is presumed to be Yahweh. In this case, a process of reinterpretation may be at work. In the early history of Israel, when the cult of Shechem became Yahwistic, it continued the El traditions of that site. As a result, Yahweh received the title ‘el berit, the old title of El. Finally, Jerusalem may have been a cult place of El, assuming the connection of El Elyon and El “creator of the earth” in Genesis 14:8-22 to this site. This record illustrates the old transmission of West Semitic/Israelite traditions. Israelite knowledge of the religious traditions about other deities did not only reflect contact between Israel and her Phoenician neighbors in the Iron Age. In addition, as a function of the identification of Yahweh-El at cultic sites of El, such as Shiloh, Shechem, and Jerusalem, the old religious lore of El was inherited by the priesthood in Israel.”

Monotheism, then, would seem to be the distillation of an older pantheon, in which one figure (Yahweh) was so emphasized that he eclipsed all others, including El. Smith explains this development by saying that the father (El) was later conflated with the subordinate warrior and possibly “son” (Yahweh), and somehow the latter acquired the characteristics of the former, including fatherhood. Smith writes, “Yahweh in ancient Israel and Baal at Ugarit were both outsider warrior gods who stood second in rank to El, but they eventually overshadowed him in power. Yet Yahweh’s development went further. He was identified with El: here the son replaced and became the father whose name only serves as a title for the son.”

Smith details his reconstruction of the proposed development as follows: 1) El was the original god of early Israel. The ancient name Israel points to this first stage. 2) El was the head of an early Israelite pantheon, with Yahweh as its warrior-god. Texts that mention both El and Yahweh, but not as the same figure (Genesis 49; Numbers 23-24; Psalm 82), suggest an early accommodation of the two in some early form of Israelite polytheism. 3) El and Yahweh were identified as a single god.

Smith asserts that “From the perspective of this older theology, Yahweh did not belong to the top tier of the pantheon. Instead, in early Israel the god of Israel apparently belonged to the second tier of the pantheon; he was not the presider god but one of his sons. This older picture, assumed in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 and criticized in Psalm 82, presupposes the model of roughly equal national gods for all of the seventy nations of the world, a notion reflected also in the Ugaritic motif of the seventy sons of El and Athirat.”

According to Smith, the rhetoric of monotheism probably emerged shortly before the exile. “With the heightened importance of the national god and the centrality of the national shrine in Jerusalem, eventually both human and divine power coalesced into one central authority, serving both human monarch and divine king.” Foreign imperial powers also aided the push toward monotheism, in Smith’s view. “Monotheistic claims made sense in a world where political boundaries or institutions no longer offered any middle ground. In its political and social reduction in the world, Israel elevated the terms of its understanding of its deity’s mastery of the world. Thus, monotheism is not a new stage of religion but a new stage of rhetoric in a situation never known prior to the threat of exile.”

Smith claims that “within the Bible, monotheism is not a separate “stage” of religion in ancient Israel, as it is customarily regarded. It was in fact a kind of ancient rhetoric reinforcing Israel’s exclusive relationship with its deity. Monotheism is a kind of inner community discourse using the language of Yahweh’s exceptional divine status over and in all reality (“there are no other deities but me”) in order to absolutize Yahweh’s claim on Israel and to express Israel’s ultimate fidelity to Yahweh in the face of a world where political boundaries or institutions no longer offered sufficiently intelligible lines of religious identity.” He further asserts that apologetic rhetoric is only apparently intended to convince outsiders: in reality, it is meant to buttress complicity between members of the same group. It is not so much a discourse about the truth of God, but rather a persuasive tool that serves the cohesion of the group, in Smith’s opinion.

Smith is aware that there is great variety of opinions regarding the antiquity of biblical monotheism. He surveys the various proposals: some regard monotheism as an original feature of Israel, at least from Sinai onward; some hold monotheism as a feature of Israelite religion throughout the period of the monarchy; others see Yahweh as the sole ruler of his assembly, arguing that monotheism is implied; still others associate monotheism with the form of Israelite polytheism that knew only the Supreme Ruler and various “minor” divine figures who serve the One. But Smith objects that “biblical texts do not deny the power of other deities outside this “local” framework. This approach also tends to ignore biblical criticisms against polytheism and the claims of most scholars that Israel knew the cult of ‘Yahweh and his asherah.’ Thus, claims of ‘practical monotheism,’ ‘de facto monotheism,’ ‘virtual monotheism,’ or even ‘monolatry’ overlook the biblical evidence to the contrary, retrojecting onto ‘biblical Israel’ a singularity of divinity that the Bible itself does not claim for ancient Israel. … the Bible as a whole simply does not teach the existence of only one God.”

As for the question of whether Yahweh had a consort (Asherah), Smith notes the archaeological evidence in favor of this interpretation from the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud inscriptions (ca. 800) in several parts of his book, but he also notes that “Israelite inscriptions include 557 names with Yahweh as the divine element, 77 names with ‘l, a handful of names with the divine component b’l, and no names referring to the goddesses Anat or Asherah. … Just as no cult is attested for Anat or Asherah in Israelite religion, no distinct cult is attested for El except in his identity as Yahweh.” These facts seem to relativize the importance of the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud inscription. It could well be that popular religion knew greater syncretism than the strict biblical law allowed, much as some popular expressions of the cult of the Virgin Mary can deviate from the strict definitions of Christian theology.

It is worth noting a few limits in Smith’s work. Well before Josiah or the exile, the 9th century prophet Elijah looks rather dramatically like a monotheist on Mt. Carmel. Smith briefly alludes to Elijah, but does not engage his story directly. Elijah’s taunting of the prophets of Baal shows that he did not necessarily doubt their existence, but certainly he doubted their power. His point is that Yahweh actually acts, whereas other gods/spirits are useless and powerless, even if they exist. It is important to consider the various ways to relate to god(s) rather than only emphasize their numerical mono- or poly-theistic character: monotheism does not necessarily mean that there are no angels or devils. The question Smith alludes to in his introduction, “what is an ilu (god)”, remains crucial, and clarity regarding it rests tantalizingly out of reach in the present work. Without this clarity, Smith’s proposal of a progressive blending of boundaries between mono- and poly-theism is unconvincing. His proposal seems to be predicated on a lack of precision regarding the fundamental questions about what a god is and how humans relate to a god, notwithstanding exceptional erudition regarding the details.

Furthermore, as can also be seen in the story of Elijah as well as in many other places in the Bible, there could be (and frequently was) a coexistence of prophetic preaching of monotheism together with the practice of polytheism by Israel’s kings and/or people. As is usually the case in human affairs, Israelite cultic practice was not always coherent with its theology. This does not necessarily mean that the theology was unclear, nor that it was progressively modified from poly- to mono-theism. It is also possible that a monotheistic intuition arose at an early date and coexisted in tension with the broader polytheistic society for some time. Perhaps some crucial events (Josiah, the exile) allowed a minority monotheistic view to gain dominance, and for the prophetic explanation of historical disasters as the consequence of betraying a jealous Yahweh to become the accepted interpretation. Perhaps this monotheistic view had existed for centuries before the exile, in continuous combat with established practice, rather than arising, as Smith suggests, as the late and fairly unremarkable distillation of earlier polytheistic theology.