When did the Israelites first begin to worship YHWH, refusing to worship or even recognize the existence of other deities? Was monotheism part of Israelite religious belief from the beginning, or was it an idea that developed later? While many biblical scholars view monotheism as a relatively late development within Israelite religion, I believe—based on evidence from early Israelite poetry—that the origins of biblical monotheism can be located early in Israel’s history, most likely by early in the first millennium B.C.E.There is still some debate about the date of these biblical poems, but I accept them as early.
That said, I think the straightforward reading of Exodus 15:11 is that there are other gods, but YHWH, the God of Israel, is by far the greatest in that category.
Deuteronomy 32 is harder to pin down. Verse 39 sounds as monotheistic as anything in Second Isaiah. But who is the speaker? Is it YHWH, or the Most High, or are they the same? Verse 8 pretty clearly allows for a category of divinity called the "sons of god" whose number corresponds to the number of the nations, implying that each is in charge of one nation. YHWH's charge is "Jacob," that is, the people of Israel, so he got the best deal. That seems to put the sons of god as his peers in some sense. If he is the Most High, which is debated, he also did the assigning, which puts him uniquely in charge.
Elsewhere the poem says other gods are demons, not gods, and newcomers (V. 17); that they weren't involved in the wilderness events (v. 12); that Israel made YHWH jealous with their non-god idols; and that the other gods are powerless, but they did eat and drink the sacrifices to them (vv. 37-38).
To make matters more complicated, a line seems to have been deleted in v. 43, and the verse was adjusted in other ways. 4QDeuteronomyq reads the opening of the verse as "Chant O heavens with him / and worship him all gods." The Septuagint reads the second line as "and worship him all sons of god." The second line is missing in the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch. But the poetry needs a parallel line in that spot. It's pretty clear that someone deleted it because it sounded less than monotheistic.
In short, those early poems regard YHWH as very high in the divine hierarchy, at the top according to Exodus 15 and perhaps also in Deuteronomy 32. But he is not unambigously the only god. That level of monotheism only comes with Second Isaiah.
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