Ok, JCL. As a throwback to the old days I've decided to include my ad hominem free rebuttle to your theory.

I just received my Strong's Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible Red Letter Edition (finally). That said, I still am not completely sure how to use the darn thing. Its a huge book, and you have to read the instructions in order to know what you're doing (I'll have to read the instructions several times before it sinks in), but so far its been pretty interesting.

After quickly reviewing the basic guidelines, I decided I wanted to do a test 'word study.' My first inspiration is my sister's church, which I consider to be a cult at worst, heretical at best. They have this strange doctrine about 'confessions' where you're not supposed to say things like, "I'm getting sick" because your words will make it happen. To me, I was immediately skeptical of this idea (I used to go to the church), but using the concordance I now know the preacher is more full of crap than I initially believed. As if humanity has God on a leash or something...

Anyhow, my second inspiration was your theory about elohim. I looked this up second of all and got some interesting information on it. The word Elohim is used 2,606 times.

However, the interesting facts lie in its use. Its actually still shrouded in some mystery as to its actual translation, so I don't claim to know for certain what its precise meaning is. However, there appears to be no evidence besides the plural structure of the word to imply that it means multiple gods.

Number one, elohim is used not only throughout both Genesis accounts, its used throughout most of the Old Testament. So apparently the contradiction doesn't lie just in Genesis, but throughout the entire writings of the OT.

Anyway, you could use this to claim that polytheism survived for quite some time. But there are other words used for God, so let's take a look at those first because they're inserted between the use of elohim.

In Genesis, Jehovah (...) or some variant is used a small number of times between the use of elohim. Its singular, meaning of course the self existent one. Strange that in the same text they could use a singular and plural word, and switch it up back and forth.

Ale (?) is also used, and means either power or can describe something as mighty or something along those lines. IE mighty God.

In Exodus, jehovah is switched up with elohim again.

In numbers, ale is again used. It goes on and on like this for some time. Elahh gets mixed in, in the book of Ezra (singular).

From quickly glancing over the rest of the usage before the NT, its just a mixed bag of what we've been seeing so far (with elohim dominating). Interesting to note is that elohim is used to refer to something that is "exceeding", refers to angels, means "goddess", "Godward", "godly". What's clear is that we have a somewhat limited picture of the exact nature of elohim. What is also clear however is that it takes a poor understanding of the bible to assert that this proves the Jews used to be polytheists. Simply saying that the word MUST mean what you think it means, without further examination is a pretty limited way of evaluating complex texts like the bible. I'm not trying to bash you here, since you never claimed to have studied the bible in depth. I'm just saying, whatever source you got your materials from should be checked.