"... Jews of later ages surely did believe that no other gods but their own are real, so how did monotheism arise? What led the people of Israel to such a radical conclusion? There is a hint about the answer to this question in the narrative of biblical history. The historical books of scripture describe a development that would recur every few generations: the appearance of a religious reformer who would attack the nation’s tendency to idolatry and demand the removal of previously acceptable customs. For example, the Torah relates that when “fiery serpents” invaded Israel’s encampment in the desert, Moses himself crafted a similar creature out of bronze or copper and set it up to view: “if a [living] serpent bit a man, he gazed upon the copper serpent and lived” (Numbers 21:9). One might have thought that the copper serpent’s association with Moses gave it legitimacy, but years later the reforming King Hezekiah destroyed it, even though he knew that Moses himself had made it, because “the people of Israel had offered it incense, calling it Nehushtan.” (2 Kings 18:4 ... The name is a play on the Hebrew word nehoshet, meaning “bronze” or “copper.”) Over the centuries, many objects of veneration were thus excluded from the life of the nation, until finally only one God was left ..."

"... In the Legend of Kirta, El created a goddess for the express purpose of delivering King Kirta from a mortal malady that no existing deity was capable of curing. The creation of Shatiqat is tied solely to the immediate situation of the narrative, namely, saving Kirta’s life. This particular goddess appears to meet the requirements stipulated above for being on the level of divine hierarchy of the artisan gods. The goddess had a clearly defined area of specialization in which she is quite competent, since the king did indeed recover. In the passage itself the goddess does only what she was requested to do and nothing more, but the narrative is much too short to determine whether or not she was envisaged as having volition of her own. Shatiqatu appears nowhere else in the texts from Ugarit, neither in narrative nor ritual sources, so all that exists with which to define her is a single literary composition. It is possible either that Shatiqatu was a recognized, though minor, deity in a Syro-Palestinian cult, or that she was a literary invention concocted for the plot development of this particular legend. In either case, it would be reasonable to assume that she was presented in a manner deemed plausible to the contemporary audience. A similar deity appears in biblical narratives, though no proper name is given to the god. The story of the creation of the image of the deity, as the story now appears, leaves the divine nature of the seraph out of the narrative (Numbers 21:8-9) ... that the passage refers to the institution of a cult for a healing deity can be seen in the passage that recounts the later destruction of the cultic image (2 Kings 18:4) ..."