Were the ancient Israelites really polytheists?

Some critics of Christianity claim that archaeological and textual evidence suggests that the ancient Israelites were really part of the Ancient Near Eastern polytheistic culture, with monotheism coming much later than the patriarchal period. While there is archaeological evidence to suggest that some Israelites did submit themselves to local Palestinian dieties-a fact that even a casual perusal of the Old Testament makes abundantly clear (c.f. the cycles of rebellion and idolatry followed by God's judgment and ultimate deliverance in the book of Judges), there is no need to resort to such radical conclusions advanced by these skeptics.

Bruce Waltke writes in his celebrated An Old Testament Theology the following:

"The common idea of an evolutionary development of biblical monotheism emerging from within Canaanite religion contradicts the Bible's own claim for the historical otherness of the true faith, including a monotheism that goes back to the patriarchs. The evolutionary model of the religion of Yahweh in the last decades has found support in recently discovered inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud (northeast Sinai, 800 B.C.) and from Khirbet el-Qom (near Hebron, 725 B.C.), which shows that Yahweh had Asherah, a Canaanite fertility deity, as his consort....On this and other evidence, the writings of even some senior scholars in the field reflect a growing consensus that true monotheism emerged only late in Israel's history, probably in the exile as represented in Isaiah 40-55....But this inscriptional evidence can better be interpreted to validate the biblical testimony that Israel constantly whored after the Canaanite fertility gods (cf. Deut. 16:21-22). Professors of the history of Israel's religion who seek to topple the biblical account that Yahwistic monotheism reaches back to patriarchal times and to replace it with an evolutionary model developing from polytheism to monotheism do so with a broken reed of ambiguous textual and artifactual evidence." (Waltke, p. 41 note 42.)

For a fuller treatment of this issue see the response on Bill Craig's website by Old Testament scholar Dr. Richard Hess, who is the Earl S. Kalland Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Denver Seminary and is an expert in ancient Israelite religion. See his response here:

See the question of the week over at Reasonablefaith.org