If there is a God .. is there only 1?

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I see what you mean there too, but I think that the Jewish people were always monotheistic.

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I used to believe this, too. The Bible, with a little help from historians and a fundamentalist prayer book, straightened me out on this.Melchizedek has to be one of the most fascinating characters in the Bible. He's hardly mentioned in Genesis, but then David says there will be a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek, and the writer of Hebrews devotes a chapter or two to expounding the meaning of all this.What stands out to me, though, is here is this Canaanite priest/king, who serves a God called El Elyon, and Abraham pays him tithes. Melchizedek feels quite free to call Abraham "Abram of El Elyon."It's all cleaned up for the English-speaking Christian who thinks Jews were always monotheistic. It says "Most High God" rather than "El Elyon." The fact is, however, that El was the head God of the Canaanite pantheon, and Melchizedek was, after all, a Canaanite.Why should Abraham have had a problem with this? A god had shown up to him and said, "I am El Shaddai. Walk before me and be perfect."El Shaddai did not tell Abraham that there were no other gods. He simply told Abram that he, El, would be Abram's God. When Abram met Melchizedek and Melchizedek met Abram, why shouldn't they both, as servants of El, the chief God of the many existing gods for both of them, feel favor for each other.It would be bizarre if Melchizedek, a Canaanite priest, was monotheistic, when we know that El (Elyon attached to it just means something like "El the highest") was the chief God of the Canaanite pantheon.Let me add that I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of El, an eternal being (in whatever way I might be able to understand eternal), and I am a worshipper of both Jesus (Yeshua is more accurate) and El/Yahweh. I believe that the Creator used both El and Yahweh as names in the past, although I don't think he's much interested in either now. So I am not speaking as an unbeliever.However, facts are facts. Abraham could hardly have been a monotheist. That would have been very strange, considering what we are told about him.Some sites that mention El as the head Canaanite deity are IIS 7.5 Detailed Error - 404.0 - Not Found and http://jf.org/papers/names.html. I don't know that either of these sites is real authoritative, but the second one is a Christian site, readily admitting what I've said. I think you can find references all over the place, as I had heard it many times before I looked at those sites. Probably a good Bible dictionary would mention it, too.

The links I gave were simply to establish that El, the name God gave for himself when he introduced himself to Abraham, is the name of the head god of the Canaanite pantheon. I was simply trying to show that Melchizedek was not monotheistic, yet he and Abraham seemed to see eye to eye. It was to establish that Abraham himself was a polytheist, although he worshipped El alone.I don't pray to several Gods. My explanation was unnecessarily complicated; I'm prone to that, sorry. I'm not your typical Christian, but I do believe in Christ and his Father and in obeying the commands of what is known as the New Testament. I was only trying to point out that I have no motive for insulting Abraham, who I would consider the father of my faith.

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Although the same name was used for the Canaanite god, this doesn't really show wether Melchizedek and Abraham believed in more than one God/god.

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It doesn't really "show" it, but since we know that Melchizedek was a Canaanite, and since we know that El was the head of a Canaanite pantheon, isn't it logical to conclude that Melchizedek was a polytheist? And if Abraham was from Ur, a polytheistic city, and God had never told him to be a monotheist, and he gave tithes to a Canaanite priest, isn't it logical to conclude that they were both polytheists?The only thing that could be said against that conclusion is:

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Also,when you read the Bible through a few times,the recurring(sp?) picture is of one omnicsient,omnipresent,omnipotent God.

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But this isn't true, at least not in Genesis. It's been pointed out repeatedly that the Bible becomes monotheistic later, but the Torah is hardly monotheistic, which is where the story of Abraham and Melchizedek is. So you have a priest from a polytheistic civilization, using the name of a head God of a pantheon, talking with Abram, from a polytheistic civilization, using the same name, in a book that is quite polytheistic. Why would you read monotheism into it?