Cosmic Geography Is Not Polytheism

"Naaman said, 'If not, then, please let two mules' burden of earth be given to your servant; for your servant will from now on offer neither burnt offering nor sacrifice to other gods, but to Yahweh'" (2 Kings 5:17). A Syrian commander, healed of leprosy by Israel's God, asks to take Israelite soil home with him — because in the world of the text, worship was understood as bound to territory, and he wanted to stand on Yahweh's ground even while living in his own land.
That strange request is not a curiosity. It is a window into exactly the framework Deuteronomy 32 assumes: spiritual powers understood as tied to specific geography, with Israel alone under Yahweh's own direct jurisdiction and every other nation under a different, lesser, subordinate authority. This is what makes sense of Israel's strict prohibitions against worshiping the gods of other nations — prohibitions that go far beyond ordinary religious preference. Israel was Yahweh's own allotted inheritance; every other territory lay under a different, delegated spiritual authority. To worship the gods of the nations was therefore never merely a private moral lapse. It was a formal transfer of allegiance to another cosmic power, a change of jurisdiction in the most literal sense the ancient world could imagine. This is precisely why Deuteronomy 32:17 does not soften its language about these territorial gods: "they sacrificed to demons, not God, to gods that they didn't know" — Hebrew shedim, beings Israel is commanded never to sacrifice to under any circumstance.
None of this compromises Yahweh's supremacy; it protects it. The text never treats these other elohim as Yahweh's equals or rivals in being — only as subordinate powers who, unlike him, are created, accountable, and ultimately answerable. Cosmic geography is not polytheism smuggled into the text. It is hierarchy, carefully preserved, with only one throne at the top.