Why did I hear the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme in my head after reading this lol

good thing the context tells us it was little boys

The first rule is “Stop worshiping fake gods, you’re making the real god angry” and the second is “Stop just making up new gods from scratch. We’re monotheists. Fucking act like it.” The third, incidentally, is often interpreted to mean “Stop saying my name as a swear word” but is more traditionally understood to mean “Stop claiming you’re me or that you’re speaking in my name”… which is fucking wild considering everything in the books that follow.

Getting genocided and wondering who the fuck Yahweh is

It’s not like they didn’t know who Yahweh was. They were Jews fleeing Egypt precisely because they held a faith that contradicted the Egyptian high priesthood. You have to go back to the context of the story and recognize Moses only goes up the mountain because he’s completely losing control of the refugees he’s leading. They’re hungry, they’re lost, they have no direction or purpose anymore, and the cohesion of the society is falling apart.

So Moses goes up a hill and says “Okay, God, you got us this far. Now what?” And God sets down commandments. Then Moses returns down the hill and announces “I’ve got new instructions” and a bunch of the refugees say “Fuck no, we hate Yahweh now. We’re going to worship this big bronze bull and steal and rape and murder one another and you can’t stop us”.

And then there’s basically a mini-civil war in the refugee camp that ends (like so many civil wars do) in a genocide of the losing side.

My friend, they weren’t monotheists at that point. There were all sorts of gods and Yahweh was just one of them.

I always link 2 Kings 2 to The Apocalypse Players - A Christmas Inheritance. If you enjoy a Call of Cthulu adventure, I highly recommend it.

It would’ve been madness in that region at that time. The Romans were writing entire books on natural history and that’s not even getting into something like the lost works on the Etruscan civilization. Recording things in that way fell out of favor with the Jewish people at that time due to centuries of rather brutal occupation requiring a certain level of obfuscation. Though I will say that objectivism wasn’t a concept at that point, the Garlic Wars is as much an account as it is propaganda by Caesar.

Jesus:i cast curse

DM: roll to hit

Jesus: nevermind i cast true polymorph

DM: at?

Jesus: that pesky SOB over there

DM: the eight year old?

Jesus: well now he’s a fig tree.

DM: Jesus, dude…

Jesus: I cast curse on the tree

It’s less to stop worshipping fake gods, or asserting they’re monotheistic, it’s a directive to stop saying any God is “better” than Yahweh. At the start, it was a religion based on worship of Yahweh as the foremost diety, and eventually that started to include taking attributes from the other deity’s in the pantheon, and eventually saying they weren’t really gods, but spirits, demons or angels. Lesser devine entities strictly below Yahweh. Add in a couple centuries of linguistic drift and religious practice and you’ve got yahwehs name being replaced with “the LORD” in many places to avoid invoking the special power of names, and his name becoming your word for deity, making translation an absolute mess.
It’s not linguistic trickery to cast the “no other gods before me” as being a polytheistic belief. At the time it was and they only thought one god was worthy of worship.

At the start, it was a religion based on worship of Yahweh as the foremost diety

Apparently the real old school Jews believes that Yahweh had a wife, who was a kind of fertility goddess. And subsequent iterations of the religion simply removed her from cannon.

eventually saying they weren’t really gods, but spirits, demons or angels

That’s more New Age retconning of the Old Testament. Old Israeli Yahweh existed for a population that had no idea how big the world was. They literally just new this slice of the Mediterranean and the neighboring tribes. Even into the Roman era, knowledge of the outside world was third and forth hand, often translated through multiple tongues. It isn’t that Israelis thought foreign gods were demons, its that they don’t recognize these religions as “legitimate”. At its heart, Yahweh really was the One True God in the sense that no other gods existed.

It’s like the old joke about Atheists only believing in one less God than everyone else.

Prohibitions on idols and putting other gods ahead of Yahweh were meta-textual arguments against breaking the law by claiming “Well, my own personal Yahweh+ said disrespecting my parents and coveting my neighbors slaves is cool, aktuly”. We’ve got one god. It’s Yahweh. These are his rules. You can’t claim there’s a bigger better god with a different set of rules and use that as an excuse to break the existing code.

It’s not linguistic trickery to cast the “no other gods before me” as being a polytheistic belief.

It’s removing the social construct of religion from the text. The point of the rule is to preempt anyone from introducing “Ten Commands: 2 - Bigger God’s Better Rules”. Sort of the equivalent of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

Because so much of what all this was about was governing human behavior, with the expectation that properly behaved people resulted in elimination of human suffering.

Incidentally, its why Jesus’s New Covenant was so hotly contested by existing Jewish faithful. This new messiah wasn’t the first one to try to overturn the old rule. At the same time, the old laws having grown so stagnant and the institutions so corrupted by Roman occupation, there was an understanding that the old codex needed to be refreshed and rewritten. “The Messiah” was, in function, a godly ordained designate who could rewrite the laws. And everyone was supposed to wait around for his arrival, because his new rules would fix the bugs in the old ones.

But if you don’t like the new guy’s rules, you say he’s a fake. You blame him for the public’s suffering. And you politely ask your Roman friends in Jerusalem to have him executed.

It’s really not new age reconning, the old testament literally has angels and other quasi devine entities in it. It’s not that they thought the foreign gods were demons, it’s that they had stories from their own religion that involved other gods.
Previously, it was common for nations and tribes to have their own God that they worshipped.
A segment of the Israelites believed that their national diety was best God, but not only God, because that would be silly. Everyone know El, Ashera, Yahweh and Marduk all exist, but Yahweh is first amongst the pantheon, or that Yahweh was actually the same as the other god but just used a different name for reasons.
When political strife broke out with Babylon that sect gained prominence and shifted towards monotheism as a rejection and denunciation of the Babylonian gods, both as a middle finger to Babylon and as a bolstering of national identity: preserve the culture by saying it’s not just that this is your God, or that’s it’s the best God, but that it’s the only God.
The difficult part is the thousand years of stories and belief making it extremely clear that there are other deities. So those stories warped and recontextualized those gods as evil gods or lesser good gods, errr… Demons and angels. A perfect, all powerful, all knowing god who created everything has special helpers to do things for him and has an adversary who is somehow able to resist him, but is also a companion, or a betrayal. Baal. Or is is baelzebub? Samael? Satan? It’s so tricky to keep track of which came from early Judaism and which is a syncretism from a neighboring religion.

You slightly underestimate how broad the world of the Israelites was. They lived in tribes, but those tribes had a diety different from a neighbor tribe that they still recognized as “them”. Different households would have their own God, and the nation as a whole had a patron God. They lived in areas with enough traffic and people that other gods wasn’t a weird notion. Their interactions with Babylon are a significant recognized historical occurrence, and Babylon had a population of more than 200,000 by modern estimates during the relevant time period.

It’s confusing to say that it’s ignoring the social control aspect of religion to recognize that they weren’t monotheistic at the time the ten commandments became part of the religious canon. It took a thousand years for them to switch from a subset of the Canaanite religion to a distinct monotheistic one.
The purpose wasn’t to stop people from making their own gods, it was to stop people from saying any of them were better than Yahweh. It is not a subtle set of rules.

It’s a coherent argument built on the flawed premise that the interpretation of the text as applied to modern Judaism is the same as it was applied to the proto-judaism of 3500 years ago. We have ample evidence that it would not have, and that time has changed the interpretation and, in some cases, the actual words, like the written form of Yahweh that would be pronounceable in their language being changed to an honorific and subsequently lost to time.