Yes – a Redeemer has to be a close relative to both parties for reconciliation and redemption to happen. If it wasn’t God who walked the paths of Galilee and Palestine, then we have no Redeemer.
The first one is, but the second is from God. But it has to be read in the context of God’s “heavenly council” of lesser “gods”. He isn’t saying that man had become like God, but by the lesser beings of heaven.
Examining statements like this in the context of God’s heavenly council points to a difficulty the ancient Hebrews had and that hasn’t really gotten better: they needed an additional word for YHWH-Elohim because putting Him in the same category as other “gods” was a false equivalent, but they didn’t have another word to use. The best they could do is use singular verbs with the plural “elohim” for YHWH-Elohim and plural verbs for the other variety, but that still implied too much commonality.
Solid point! The attempt to make ancient Israel polytheist fails in Genesis, Exodus, and onward. They were at worst henotheist, but that still misses the polemical point of Genesis 1 that all the things the nations around Israel considered to be gods were created by YHWH-Elohim as tools! and it still also misses the point of the name “YHWH”, which tells Moses that only the God of Israel exists in and of Himself – and when you put those two together, it’s plain that the all the “gods” around were just what the later prophets re-emphasized: no different than sticks and stones (which didn’t deny they existed, just that they were made things with no greater status than a pebble or a twig).
Absolutely. Even though in second Temple Judaism there was a recognition of three powers in heaven all who were YHWH, they were adamant that this was just one God.
I’d replace “largely” with “rabidly” – due to the prophets’ exposition of the Torah, there was no doubt in the minds of second Temple Jews that there was YHWH-Elohim on the one hand, and things created by Him on the other – period. That was already clear in the first Genesis Creation account, but it took a millennium for it to really get through to the national consciousness.
[Personally I think the breaking point was the Exile; by all the definitions of the ANE at the time, the Exile meant that YHWH had been defeated, but the prophets insisted that was not the case, that YHWH-Elohim was just using those other nations as tools – He was still in charge. That view demotes all other claimants to deity to the status of pretenders at best.]