Does the Jewish Bible teach Monotheism?

[Danmark]

God presides in the great assembly. He judges among the gods.
Psalms 82:1

"You are gods, All of you are sons of the Most High. Nevertheless you shall die like men, And fall like one of the rulers."
Psalms 82:6-7

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God....
Exodus 20
Both Judaism and Christianity claim there is but one God.
Do these verses prove that is a false doctrine and that therefore those religions are false?
Do these verses contradict the story in Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

[Difflugia]

One of my favorite recent interpretations of the thinly veiled polytheism in the Old Testament is by Richard Elliott Friedman in The Exodus (the ebook is on sale for $1.99 right now, by the way).

It's a fairly long subchapter/essay and I've cut out much of his explanation, but here are the most important paragraphs:

So monotheism arrived. One won. How did that work? How did some priests and teachers and prophets and kings gradually persuade the people to embrace this belief? One God. When there had always been many gods. How must that have felt? We have seen signs that Israel, Judah, and the Levites kindled the flame of monotheism in the era following the exodus. That energy persisted through centuries. And whenever most of the community became monotheistic, whenever there was the first generation to which we could point and say now that is properly monotheistic, what did people think of their parents or grandparents who had worshipped the gods? What did they think happened to the gods—and the goddesses? What did they tell their children? How did their writers depict it in the Bible?

We do have the answer to this. What they did was: they said that the gods used to exist, but they died.

Near the end of the Torah comes a song. The text attributes it to Moses. It may not in fact be by Moses, but it is in fact very old. It says:

When the Highest gave nations legacies,
when He dispersed humankind,
He set the peoples’ borders
to the number of the children of Israel.
(Deuteronomy 32:8)

What in the world is that supposed to mean? When God created the nations with their respective borders, He set them according to the number of Israelites? That is a lot of nations! People already were puzzled by this passage two millennia ago.

...

So do we have our passage (Deuteronomy 32:8) in the [Dead Sea] Scrolls? We do. And instead of “the children of Israel� (Hebrew bĕnê yiśr�’ēl), it says, “the children of the gods� (Hebrew bĕnê ’ĕl�hîm). (This can also mean “the children of God� because Elohim, the Hebrew word for God, can have a singular or plural meaning, depending on the context.) This phrase, bĕnê ’ĕl�hîm, is a term for the gods in the Bible. So the passage in the Song of Moses would mean that when God created the nations, He set them according to the number of the gods. That is, He made Greece and gave it to Zeus, He made Babylon and gave it to Marduk, He made Assyria and gave it to Ashur, and so on. Each people had its god. But, the next verse of the Song of Moses says, “Yahweh’s portion is His people. Jacob is the share of His legacy.� So Yahweh, the Highest God, assigned countries to the various gods, but He kept Israel for Himself. This makes a good deal more sense than making one country for every person in Israel.

...

Here is the text of Psalm 82 with commentary. It is not some obscure little chapter of the Bible. As a song in the book of Psalms, it was probably sung at the Temple in Jerusalem in biblical times. And to this day it is read every Tuesday in the traditional Jewish prayers as the “Psalm of the Day.� It says:

1 God is standing in the divine assembly
He judges among the gods.

That is about as explicit as you can get. There are gods. They meet in a divine assembly, as in Job. And one God, the highest of them, has the authority to judge them. Here is what He says to them:

2 “How long will you judge falsely
and favor the wicked?
3 Judge the weak and the orphan.
Justify the humble and the poor.
4 Adjudicate the weak and the needy,
Save them from the hand of the wicked.�

The highest God criticizes them for failing to act correctly as gods. They should defend the weak, but they favor the wicked. He concludes:

5 They don’t know.
They don’t understand.
They walk in darkness.
All the foundations of the earth melt!

The gods pervert justice, and the very foundations of the earth are dissolving. And so He renders a terrible judgment on them:

6 I had said, “You are gods
and children of the Highest, all of you.�
7 But: like a human you will die,
and like one of the rulers you will fall.

The judgment is: death. The gods, His children, are to lose their immortality. They will die just like humans. The psalmist then concludes:

8 Arise, God. Judge the earth.
Because you give legacies among all the nations.

Notice the final verses, identifying God as “the Highest� (Hebrew Elyon) and saying that He is the one who “gives the legacies among all the nations.� These are the very words of the passage in the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32:8–9) where we started: “When the Highest gave nations legacies.� The American biblical scholar Peter Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew at Harvard, wrote that “every interpreter of Psalm 82� has made some connection between Psalm 82 and that passage in the Song of Moses.

Now what if we could walk up and ask ancient Jews singing this at the Temple in Jerusalem, or even ask the poet who composed the psalm, “Do you mean this literally? Do you think that there really used to be gods but they were condemned to death? Or do you mean this as a metaphor, that we used to believe in such things, but now we reject them?� It is hard to know what their answer would be. But, literally or figuratively, Psalm 82 contains their myth of the death of the gods.