Do they even exist?

Isaiah and the others were desperately trying to prevent the disaster that would eventually engulf Israel if wholesale violation of the national covenant persisted. To do so, they depicted the other deities—the “idols” whom their fellow Israelites could not bear to insult or to ignore—in the most unappealing terms they could muster: weak and unreliable, unable to protect the people from YHWH’s wrath once that wrath burst forth, and hardly worthy of being called gods at all, as though they do not even exist.—Robert Goldenberg in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, p. 94