I was reading an article written by an atheist who is not quite as honest as he sees himself. Nevertheless, the article was interesting as it is definitely looking at the subject of God from the opposite direction. I hadn't read very far when he started claiming that there are many Gods in the Bible and that God is basically jealous of them. Okay.
We meet God in Genesis in which He is spoken of as creating everything that we know. There He is first referred to as Elohim (judges), a plural noun. The catch to that is that the verb connected to the seemingly plural noun is singular. Sometimes the word elohim is used as judges and has a plural verb. Therefore He is still one. Throughout chapter one He is called Elohim.
The first reference of another name being applied to God is in 2:4 where the two names Elohim and YHVH (which most Christians pronounce as Jehovah) are used together (Lord God in the King James). YHVH is usually defined as Lord (meaning master, one who is superior to you).
Yes, it is possible that God was assigned the name YHVH from previous beliefs. However, assuming it matters, do those references predate the name YHVH? In ancient times most cultures did not know how to communicate through writing. These cultures passed their knowledge down to succeeding generations orally - storytelling. There is no way to say which beliefs came from which in ancient times. And there is no reason to say that those entities did not exist before the myths. In fact, if you'll think about it for two seconds, you should be able to understand that those mythical references could have been stories that distorted the original stories long before the written ones.
There are many references to other gods in the Bible but they are creations of men. There are lots of idols which are referred to as gods but they aren't. There are people such as Pharaoh who were seen as the embodiment of a god. But there were no other gods. There was only the belief that there were gods. The God of the Bible stands alone and He doesn't like idols and He doesn't like people worshiping what He created instead of Him. His jealousy is that we assign more importance to anything than to Him. He gave us the free gift of life, which we screwed up, and He deserves to be number one. I'm sure you would get angry, too.
