I believe Moses wrote the Torah.
I think you missed the Messiah and the judges who are also called Elohim. People should know that beings other than God can be called god, while at the same time saying that there is only one God and no other.
I don't believe the scriptures call them gods literally, but entirely metaphorically, and I read the whole books, which are filled with references to the unitary monotheism of the Jews.
Although God in Gen. 1:26 may have spoken to angels or to his personified wisdom, or with a ''royal we'', in the very next verse Gen. 1:27 we learn that he did all by himself. Your teachers have a wise saying about this - that whenever a heretic comes to you with a verse, you should just read the next verse.
Oh, no, Petosiris. Here you go on again about "my teachers." You simply are incorrect. Thankfully you believe these imaginative beings had something wise to say. If you wish to get particular about the grammatical distinctions between plural and singular, recall my one teacher 47 years ago.
Why is your insistence on my alleged "teachers" so important to you? Is the implication that the student is incapable of moving beyond her basic lessons?
Or is it, conversely, that the student implicitly adopts whatever her teachers tell her? In which case, how do you understand my being secular for the last 24 years or so? Would rabbis have told me to do that?
Who were your teachers?
I hope you will read up on biblical criticism. As I explained in a previous post, this doesn't mean trashing the Bible, but is a centuries-old type of scholarship that works more like philology.
The belief that "Moses wrote the Torah" is traditional, but not borne out by biblical scholarship.
The first two books of Genesis were written by different authors. J (sometimes called "Yahwist," because the letter J in German is pronounced like an English Y,) and E (sometimes called "Elohist." after their different names for God: Elohim and the unpronounceable Hebrew name spelled by the Hebrew letters yod-he-vav-he.) These textual differences. have been associated with the different scriptural traditions of the people of Judah and Israel (Jacob.) At some point when the Bible was finally codified, the editor (possibly the scribe Ezra) simply let the two traditions stand together.
Then we have to think of the definition of a god. A divine supernatural immortal being, whether real or imagined, possibly having power over people or an aspect of nature? Bingo.
What went into the Bible and how it came to be written makes a fascinating history. A religion just doesn't happen in a cultural vacuum. It comes out of precursors. The parallels between themes in the OT and earlier Babylonian, Egyptian, and Levantine religions are striking. Prior to the development of Judaism the paramount father god of the Levant region was El, with the Elohim as the pantheon.
Also, I don't know if you are familiar with the Midrash, a big collection of biblical folklore and commentary. According to Midrash, it took a nature-worshiping Abraham a sojourn in a cave to discover his monotheism. Then we have Rachel in Genesis 31:30-35, sitting on her father's stolen household idols to prevent them from being taken from her. We have the feminine figure of Hochma (Sophia, Wisdom) present with God during the creation in Proverbs.
See Psalm 89, on "heavenly beings", which also has an alternative Creation account, derived from the Babylonian myth of Marduk, where the world is created when He strikes down the chaotic sea monster, Rahab. (Also in Is. 51:9.)
There is a lot of polytheism in the Bible, actually; including with deities accorded reality. But the distinction is that only God is to be worshiped with undivided loyalty.
