Henotheism and Monolatry in the Biblical Exodus Narrative

A common observation in academic biblical studies is that the older layers of the Hebrew Bible, including the Exodus narrative, do not assume strict monotheism (the belief that only one god exists). Instead they reflect what scholars call henotheism or monolatry: the existence of other gods is taken for granted, but Israel is bound to worship YHWH alone. This article presents the scholarly framing neutrally; it describes how the texts have been read, not a verdict on any religious truth claim. **The wording of the texts.** The First Commandment in Exodus reads "you shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3) — a demand for exclusive loyalty rather than an assertion that other gods are non-existent. The Song of the Sea in Exodus 15:11 asks "Who is like you among the gods, O YHWH?", a rhetorical question that presupposes a divine plurality against which YHWH is being measured. Read on their own terms, such passages fit monolatry (worship only one of many gods) more naturally than monotheism. **The plagues as a contest of gods.** Exodus 12:12 has YHWH declare, "on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments." One influential interpretive tradition reads the ten plagues as targeted humiliations of specific Egyptian deities — for example the Nile turning to blood against the river-god Hapi, the frogs against Heqet, the cattle disease against the bull-god Apis, and the darkness against the sun-god Ra. It should be noted that this one-to-one mapping is a popular and homiletic reading more than a firm scholarly consensus; the biblical text itself names the gods only collectively. Either way, the framing of the narrative is a victory of one people's god over the gods of their oppressors, which is a henotheistic rather than a strictly monotheistic frame. **Israel kept worshipping other gods.** A recurring theme of the Hebrew Bible is that Israelites repeatedly worshipped other deities — the golden calf at Sinai, and later Baal, Asherah, and the gods of neighboring peoples. The prophets denounce this as faithlessness. From a historical-critical perspective, this narrative tension reflects a society in which competing cults coexisted and exclusive YHWH-worship was an ideal still being established rather than a settled fact. **When strict monotheism crystallized.** Since the work of Julius Wellhausen in the late nineteenth century, the dominant critical view has been that Israelite religion developed from polytheism through henotheism and monolatry toward monotheism, with explicit denial of other gods' existence appearing clearly only in the exilic prophet Deutero-Isaiah during and after the Babylonian exile (587–538 BCE). Some scholars contest this evolutionary model, arguing that the same exclusivist rhetoric appears in earlier monolatrous texts, so the dating remains debated. The relevant point for the Exodus narrative is that its likely original audience did not necessarily understand it as a claim that only one god exists, but as a claim about which god Israel belonged to.