How many gods are there?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The question as posed is blunt, but the underlying issue — whether the Hebrew Bible speaks with one voice on the number of divine beings — is among the most consequential in the study of Israelite religion, and the texts do not in fact speak with one voice. The later stratum, above all Deutero-Isaiah (chs. 40-55), is uncompromisingly monotheistic: 'I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god' (44:6); 'I am the LORD, and there is no other' (45:5). Deuteronomy 4 and 6 and the deuteronomistic 1 Kings 18 reinforce this, and the New Testament (Mark 12:29, 1 Cor 8:6) inherits it. Set against this are the divine plurals and the council texts. Genesis 1:26 ('Let us make humankind in our image'), 3:22 ('the man has become like one of us'), and 11:7 ('let us go down') have God speaking in the first-person plural.

Four explanations of the plurals compete. (1) A royal 'we' — but Biblical Hebrew attests no such majestic plural for a single speaker, and this option is generally abandoned by Hebraists. (2) A plural of deliberation or self-address — grammatically defensible and favored by some, including conservative commentators, though it strains in 3:22's 'like one of us,' which compares the man to a plurality. (3) Address to the angelic/heavenly court — God announcing his intention before the assembled bnei elohim; this is the reading of many critical and some traditional scholars and fits the council scenes elsewhere (1 Kgs 22:19-22, where YHWH consults the host of heaven; Job 1-2, where the bnei elohim present themselves before YHWH). (4) Trinitarian anticipation — a Christian dogmatic reading that postdates the text by centuries and which even most conservative OT scholars decline to defend as the original sense. The serious exegetical contenders are (2) and (3).

The council reading draws strength from Psalm 82, which is explicit: 'God (elohim) has taken his place in the divine council (adat-el); in the midst of the gods (elohim) he holds judgment' — and proceeds to sentence those gods to die 'like mortals' (82:6-7), an oddity if they were merely human judges, since human judges already die. Apologists, including Archer and Daniel Block, argue that these elohim are human judges or, alternatively, angels, never genuine deities, preserving strict monotheism. The strongest piece of evidence against that reduction is Deuteronomy 32:8-9. The Masoretic Text reads that Elyon apportioned the nations 'according to the number of the sons of Israel (bnei yisrael),' but the older reading is preserved in the Qumran scroll 4QDeut^j (4Q37), which reads bny 'lhym (bene elohim, 'sons of God'). The Greek tradition splits at exactly this point: the best-attested Old Greek reading is angelon theou ('angels of God'), but a significant variant reads hyion theou (υἱῶν θεοῦ, 'sons of God'), attested in pre-Christian Greek witnesses associated with the Fouad-266 group, and it is this latter reading — 'sons of God' — that corresponds directly to the 4QDeut^j Hebrew bene elohim and is widely held to reflect the more original Vorlage. The form bene el ('sons of El') is not the scroll's actual text but the cognate divine-council phrase known from Ugaritic, which scholars adduce to illuminate the same conception. Both non-Masoretic forms point back to a divine-council Vorlage, with YHWH then receiving Israel as his allotted portion (32:9) — a tableau of a high god distributing the nations among subordinate deities, with YHWH as one of them receiving Israel. The MT 'sons of Israel' is widely regarded as a later theological correction smoothing out the polytheistic implication.

The critical reconstruction, associated with Mark Smith and Patrick Miller, sees a trajectory from an early period in which YHWH presided over (or was situated within) a pantheon, through monolatry (worship of YHWH alone while other gods are conceded to exist, as in 'who is like you, O LORD, among the gods?', Exod 15:11), to the full ontological monotheism of Deutero-Isaiah and later texts. On this view the canon preserves the seams of that development: the divine plurals and council scenes are fossils of the older cosmology, and Deutero-Isaiah's polemic is the mature endpoint. Michael Heiser shares the council reading of the textual data — he too takes the other elohim to be real spiritual beings and Deut 32:8-9 as a genuine council text — but, unlike Smith and Collins, he rejects the evolutionary polytheism-to-monotheism trajectory; he reads the divine council within a synchronic Israelite 'monotheism' of a distinctive kind, in which the lesser elohim are created beings who never rival YHWH's unique ontological status. So Heiser and the critical scholars agree on the exegesis of the council passages while disagreeing on the developmental conclusion drawn from them.

The harmonizing readings are not impossible for any single verse — 'judges' for Psalm 82 and 'deliberation' for Genesis 1:26 can each be argued — but they must be applied selectively and against the grain of the Deut 32:8-9 textual evidence to keep every passage monotheistic. Because individual passages genuinely underdetermine the question while the textual and comparative data lean toward an earlier non-monotheistic stratum, the matter is best classed as disputed.

Where the critical reading lands: disputed, with the weight of textual and comparative evidence favoring a developmental account.