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This definitely isn't true narratively (in the sense that e.g. Genesis clearly sets out God as the Creator God) but I don't think this is true textually, either, at least in the sense that the older parts of the Old Testament are more polytheistic and the newer parts of the Old Testament are more monotheistic. Wikipedia, which I assume is probably a good summation of scholarly consensus, lists the Song of the Sea as possibly the oldest part of the Old Testament. And the Song of the Sea has a fairly standard monotheistic (or, if you prefer, henotheistic) line:
The Song of Moses (again, one of the four oldest passages as per Wikipedia), has even stronger language, identifying other "new" gods worshipped by the children of Israel as demons or devils, and differentiating God from the gods:
So it seems fairly clear that the earliest written parts of the Old Testament were already making a distinction between God and gods qualitatively, suggesting that the other gods were in some sense false. (Now, obviously, if you take the Scriptural narrative as a historical one, it definitely records that the children of Israel were in fact often polytheistic in practice.)
And as OliveTapenade points out, this sort of rhetoric (where the other gods are false gods or demons) doesn't gradually disappear, but reappears even in the New Testament. Interestingly (and to Goodguy's question below) my understanding is that some early Christian apologists centered some of their pitch around the idea that the old oracles had begun to die after the advent of Christ, which suggests that they thought a persuasive argument to pagans or post-pagans was "the old gods are out, the One True God has defeated them." (I guess pagans were primed for this, the death of Pan supposedly occurring under Tiberius' reign, chronologically close to the crucifixion of Christ). But in order to make those sorts of arguments, early apologists had to concede the existence of other gods of some kind. So the most maximalist monotheistic idea ("there are no other gods and pagan religious practices are all bunk") isn't really something that you see either in even the New Testament or the early Church.
To be fair, the sorts of people who make this evolutionary argument will typically point out that the Old Testament is not written down in the order in which it was composed (for instance, Genesis 2 is usually thought to be significantly older than Genesis 1), so we have to do a bit more work to determine which texts came first chronologically, and then discern the evolution that way.
They're no doubt correct to an extent here, but the risk is that the way we identify a text's origin comes to be a self-fulfilling prophecy - we might create a narrative for ourselves of development from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism, and on that basis alone assign more henotheistic-sounding texts to earlier strata. So some degree of skepticism is warranted, and classic forms of the documentary hypothesis have come under plenty of fire.
Incidentally:
There are some interesting examples of this! Here's one from the epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians:
The star of Bethlehem agitated the heavens, and destroyed the power of magic. So the people who might once have been in slavery to spirits, demons, or sorcerers have now been set free, and are ready to hear the gospel.
Merry Christmas!
(cf. also New Testament contempt for sorcerers, such as Simon Magus in Acts 8, or the fortune-telling girl in Acts 16:16-19. There may be a sense that the magic is 'real' - the girl's 'spirit of divination' enables her to immediately and correctly realises that Paul and Silas are apostles of God - but even so, it's bad, and Paul and Silas exorcise her and free her, much to the consternation of the girl's owners, who were making money from her power.)
Yes, I agree – that's why I focused on the Song of the Sea and the Song of Moses, since they're supposed to be composed early, as I understand it. From what I understand of mainstream Scriptural textual criticism, I'm a bit skeptical of some of the approaches
you[edit:] textual critics employ (for the reasons you lay out), but I think it's interesting to make arguments with even significant concessions. Any other candidates of early Old Testament texts that come to mind for you?Beautiful. Merry Christmas!
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