At the start, it was a religion based on worship of Yahweh as the foremost diety

Apparently the real old school Jews believes that Yahweh had a wife, who was a kind of fertility goddess. And subsequent iterations of the religion simply removed her from cannon.

eventually saying they weren’t really gods, but spirits, demons or angels

That’s more New Age retconning of the Old Testament. Old Israeli Yahweh existed for a population that had no idea how big the world was. They literally just new this slice of the Mediterranean and the neighboring tribes. Even into the Roman era, knowledge of the outside world was third and forth hand, often translated through multiple tongues. It isn’t that Israelis thought foreign gods were demons, its that they don’t recognize these religions as “legitimate”. At its heart, Yahweh really was the One True God in the sense that no other gods existed.

It’s like the old joke about Atheists only believing in one less God than everyone else.

Prohibitions on idols and putting other gods ahead of Yahweh were meta-textual arguments against breaking the law by claiming “Well, my own personal Yahweh+ said disrespecting my parents and coveting my neighbors slaves is cool, aktuly”. We’ve got one god. It’s Yahweh. These are his rules. You can’t claim there’s a bigger better god with a different set of rules and use that as an excuse to break the existing code.

It’s not linguistic trickery to cast the “no other gods before me” as being a polytheistic belief.

It’s removing the social construct of religion from the text. The point of the rule is to preempt anyone from introducing “Ten Commands: 2 - Bigger God’s Better Rules”. Sort of the equivalent of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

Because so much of what all this was about was governing human behavior, with the expectation that properly behaved people resulted in elimination of human suffering.

Incidentally, its why Jesus’s New Covenant was so hotly contested by existing Jewish faithful. This new messiah wasn’t the first one to try to overturn the old rule. At the same time, the old laws having grown so stagnant and the institutions so corrupted by Roman occupation, there was an understanding that the old codex needed to be refreshed and rewritten. “The Messiah” was, in function, a godly ordained designate who could rewrite the laws. And everyone was supposed to wait around for his arrival, because his new rules would fix the bugs in the old ones.

But if you don’t like the new guy’s rules, you say he’s a fake. You blame him for the public’s suffering. And you politely ask your Roman friends in Jerusalem to have him executed.

Idk what to tell you man. Trying to achieve a sense of intellectual superiority over a religious person by pointing out how the literal text doesn’t make sense when the entire purpose of an allegory is the SUBtext seems just as silly to me as cursing a fig tree for not bearing fruit.

I’ll allow that you’re free to use this tactic to dunk on proponents of Biblical inerrancy, but most mainstream sects of Christianity don’t subscribe to that doctrine.

Take religion out of it for a second. Someone says, “when I was a kid, I had to walk to school for 5 miles, through the snow, uphill, BOTH ways!”. Obviously, this is a statement which doesn’t make much literal sense. However, you probably understand that the person is actually just trying to communicate that they had it hard growing up, and that their words are not meant to be taken literally.

this video comes to mind. It’s not about the figs, it’s about Israel.

Now, think of the message what you will. I attended a lot of Catholic school, but I’m staunchly irreligious, so if you want to keep dunking on believers, you go girl. I just think you’d be better served (and more likely to get a believer to consider their beliefs more critically) by engaging with the text the way the believer does, lest you wind up just talking past one another.