What is the difference between more contemporary religions, like the Abrahamic faiths, and others like the old Norse faith, that is considered mythology.

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The biggest difference between the two belief structures is that one is monotheistic whereas the other is polytheistic. Polytheistic pantheons grow by assimilation, old tribal cults get worked into the ‘big tent’ through conquest and annexation. Religion organized life, and if you wanted to rule a people, you needed to account for their existing way of life. It was far easier for conquering empires to adopt a nation’s god into the fold than it was to forcibly convert them. Storytellers over time told stories that combined all the gods into one big overarching narrative.

The Abrahamic faiths started when one of these peoples refused to play ball with this established way of doing things. They refused to let their god be a part of the pantheon, refused to adopt the empire’s ways of life. Now, normally when this happened the conqueror would destroy the temple, and slaughter whoever wouldn’t convert. This happened to the Hebrews too.

But the Hebrews did something that nobody else thought to do, they decided to keep their faith even though their peoples were scattered and without a land and a temple. If you ask me, I think what made this happen was their collections of scripture. They gained early access to papyrus scroll technology and were able to write down their religious ideas and collect them over time, bringing them with them when conquering armies knocked at their door. Papyrus was much cheaper than other writing tech of the day and enabled Hebrews of modest means to contribute to scripture.

This sort of folk access to religion allowed them to continuously refine their religion and as such, the Bible collects a lot of really deep, wonderful stories along with some deeply horrific cautionary tales.

Not being willing to adopt imperial culture even through massacres, along with the decentralization of their scriptures made Jewish culture extremely durable and it stuck around ancient Israel for over a thousand years, surviving the Roman empire, which did its best to annihilate it.

No fewer than six religions use the Hebrew Bible as its base. All of them read slightly different versions of truth into the Biblical narrative. Any religion using the Hebrew Bible is referred to as an Abrahamic religion.

I consider myself a Christian even though I spend far more time considering comparative, universal spirituality than I do inside the Christian frame. I believe Christianity offers a unique and powerful evolutionary iteration over the other Abrahamic faiths, and is the correct way to read the Hebrew Bible narrative, as setting up for just the sort of holy dominion that Christianity describes.

So to answer your question, the Norse pantheon was but one of many exactly like it, while the Abrahamic faiths represented a clear evolution. It is precisely these evolutionary advantages that allowed Abrahamic faiths to remain relevant to people over time while pantheons, save Hinduism, which managed to survive to the present day, eventually died out and rendered to be ‘mere’ myth. The evangelical aspect of Christianity allowed it to displace the pantheons through the same sort of mechanism that the pantheons replaced tribal cults, assimilation. How do you think we got all those saints and angels?