Commenting on the nature of “monotheism” in the Second Temple era, Matthew Thiessen noted the following:
Paula Fredriksen (“Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go,” SR 35 [2006]:231-46 [241]) rightly notes that “ancient ‘monotheism’ spoke to the imagined architecture of the cosmos, not to its absolute population.” Consequently, claims that there is one God in early Judaism should be taken to mean that there is one supreme God, even though there may be numerous divine beings under this one God. For instance, while Philo portrays Abraham coming to worship God instead of the kosmos, he still thinks that the kosmos is divine (e.g., Eternity of the Kosmos 46). (Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 181 n. 6, emphasis added)
