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Like I said, the Bible records their behavior. While I'm sure it has changed over time, I don't see it as totally divorced from the kikery today. It's pretty much bronze age kikery that they were up to.

Much appreciated, brother. And: exactly.

Thanks, sir. Yeah, it's kind of a semitic trend generally, the whole suzerain contract. I think the Code of Hummurabi had something like 300 laws in it, compared with the original Jewish Ten (or so). But there's a fairly good reason for that initial dearth. They had to be general. There was a good deal of heterogeneity in the tribes they were trying to unite (the Exodus story is almost certainly not true). There was a lot of different God-belief floating around. By and large, the primary motivation of the Ten Commandments was to unify the theology and worship of these people in order to unite them politically. When you "don't have a pot to piss in", you can't police three-hundred laws. But this legalism was not uncommon to Mesopotamia. The Jews kind of always needed a "Sky King" because they were always subjects of other suzerains. It's not surprising that their God concept behaved like a law-giving King. Nor is it surprising that such strict monotheism emerged from the Jews; they were used to being ordered to pay homage to a kingly sovereign who could punish them at will.

If God mirrors the Jewish experience of suzerains, then God would be such as to be one, mighty, and unquestionable. More established cultures tended to have more deities, mostly because they had other factors (secular factors) holding their socieites together and didn't need God to be a single monarchical ruler (which isn't to say they didn't recognize a Supreme Deity, but that different aspects of that Deity were explored). Anyway, I'm rambling. It seems (to me) that other cultures were able to spawn a plethora of deities because their anthropologies overall were more sophisticated. You could almost think of it in terms of the (individual) psychological hierarchy of needs (in which you self-actualize only after you've achieved certain other forms of basic security). More security, more thought and philosophy. The Jews were never secure. Their God remained a political entity, through and through. They knew they had God's favor when they could wipe out a competing tribe and rape their women; with various captivities, Yahweh took on qualities that were like those of the chief gods of their captors and their kings. The Yahweh of the Old Testament is a pretty violent being. But I tend to see Judaism (which was not without its innovations, don't get me wrong) as a kind of "take it on the run" theft from the religious sytems of stronger, neighboring empires (Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome).

Most Christians don't really get how pagan their belief system is; they think they inherited the "new covenant" of Jews. But tell me what the "old covenant" was, haha. Which one? It was always a new covenant, with each new influence. I say this as a Christian.