What I say now is look, our vocabulary is not adequate for this. A term like monotheism,
because when we hear it, we think that means only one elohim exists.
Yes.
That is inadequate because the scripture says otherwise.
I guarantee people watching if you ask them.
Yeah.
Are you monotheistic?
Right, right.
I don't know what the percentage would be. But it would be pretty high.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Because we've been trained. There's one God, one God. And so, and yet.
And there is only one of those.
Yes, one Most High.
Right. But there are lots of Elohim. So, right away, even in this little exchange,
we can see that we have a terminology problem.
Yes.
Because what we've done is we've taken a 17th-century term,
that's when monotheism enters the lexicon.
Okay.
In English. And we're using a 17th-century term to describe
what an ancient person thought,
Okay.
So we've got a fundamental problem.
Now, I believe that there is one unique deity called Yahweh.
Yes.
All right. Yahweh, the God of the Bible is, I like to use the phrase "species unique."
There really is non like him.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he's not a first amongst equals.
He's not the first amongst equals. He's not, just sort of one of many
that are sort of interchangeable parts. That is not what biblical theology teaches.
Biblical theology teaches, look, there's lots of elohim, members of the heavenly host,
If that's more comfortable. There's lots of elohim, but only one of them is Yahweh.
Yeah.
Only one of them is the creator, is omnipotent, is omniscient.
All these things that we're used to.
It's just that our vocabulary for expressing that idea actually gets in the way of the biblical text
when we encounter like plural elohim, and we don't know what to do with it.
So we have people commentators, I mean, I can take you to commentators,
all the gods here are just men. Well, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense
because if you go down to verse 6, they're sons are the Most High, which are sons of God,
there's only one Most High, we know who that is. It's not a brainteaser.
So there's sons of God. And then if you go to Psalm 89, you have the sons of God,
they're in a council just like Psalm 82, but it's in the skies. It's in heaven.
Okay.
You don't have a bunch of Jewish leaders ruling from the skies,
I mean it doesn't make any sense.
But people, they don't probe it that far. They either react to it because of the whole monotheism thing.
And it's like, Look, I understand it. I was there for many years, until I got confronted with the text.
And so what I say now is, look, our vocabulary is not adequate for this.
A term like monotheism, because when we hear it, we think that means only one elohim exists.
Yes.
That is inadequate because the scripture says otherwise.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense to not have other gods, you know, not worship.
Yahweh is the God of gods. Well, not really, because there aren't any other ones,
you know, well, again, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in a lot of passages.
But we define monotheism that way. So what my advice to people is, look,
dump the terminology.
So I'm gonna bring up one more term.
Okay.
Henotheism.
Yeah.
Which sounds a little more accurate,
which is like, we believe there's multiple gods, but one.
But we only worship one.
So what... are we better off not having any... don't identify as.
I'm saying dump them all.
Okay.
And here's why; monotheism is confusing because we define it as
meaning only one elohim exists. That is not the case, according to Scripture.
So that one doesn't really work. Henotheism is a little bit more descriptive.
But the problem with henotheism is that in Henotheistic systems,
the deity that is judged to be the best, might not be the best tomorrow. In other words, he's
So he can get voted off,
He can get voted off the island.
Usurped.
You have to ask yourself, Well, why do you think he's the best?
Well, he did something great for us. He won this battle here. But tomorrow he might lose.
Biblical writers aren't thinking that at all. There is no sense that Yahweh could be displaced.
You know, so that one doesn't really work either.
Monolatry is an academic word that you worship only one, and that's good,
because we do worship only one as believers. But the problem with Monolatry is
it doesn't say anything about attributes.
What biblical writers believed was that there were many elohim.
Only one of them is Yahweh. He is unique when it comes to a specific set of attributes.
So Yahweh is an elohim, (there's a bunch of those) but no other elohim is Yahweh.
Yeah.
So I say look, just describe what it is you believe. Just describe what a biblical writer
would believe about the uniqueness of Yahweh and the God of Israel.
Don't try to stick a label on it
because the label is not going to work somewhere in the discussion.