The history of religion spans many thousands of years prior to Judaism and Christianity. In our society, because of the heavy Judeo-Christian influence, we often focus on a very tiny sliver of human history. Tremendous weight is placed on mythical teachings from a few brief moments in time while the rich and much longer history preceding and surrounding those narrow events are largely ignored.

An article in this months National Geographic was a good example of the narrow focus and over interpretation. The article highlighted the battles between the archaeological camps that are trying to determine how large King David's kingdom truly was. Whether it was large, small, or non-existent would seem to not be of much import other than an academic curiosity. Why the focus on a few decades out of the tens of thousands of years of human history? Why those few decades and not those of a century or two prior or following? Will a resolution of that argument somehow make the belief in a 6,000 year old earth or a universal deluge become a reality? Does that suddenly make the god, or gods, described in the text somehow more plausible?

People often neglect to explain how such arguments fit into the much larger picture. If the larger picture is mentioned in passing the rationale for why individual archaeological findings should influence the larger view is general absent.

Expanding the historical horizon just slightly begins to reveal a picture that is reflected in the following:


"Israelite religion branched off from the Canaanite religions. The Israelites were not monotheists; they were henotheists, which mean that their culture was defined by their worship of Yahweh as their only god, but they did not deny the existence of other gods. During their earliest history they also worshipped El, from which their namesake derived, and Baal and Asherah. The idea of a single exclusive God didn't enter Hebrew culture until the Babylonian exile. By extension, this is the false foundation on which Christianity and Islam rest.

The ancient Israelites did not live in a cultural vacuum. From prehistoric times, Canaan was linked to Egypt and Mesopotamia. Those two powerful nations dominated Canaan and Israel from the mid-third to the first millennium BCE. The first mention of Israel comes from an inscribed monument of the pharaoh Mernaptah. This stele dates to the fifth year of the pharaoh's reign (ca. 1208) and mentions both Israel and Canaan.

Surely, the Israelites were late comers to the history of religion. Says Smith, "The word 'Canaan' is written with a special linguistic feature called a determinative, denoting land. 'Israel' is written with the determinative for people." In other words, there was an ethnic group call Israel, before it became a kingdom or city-state"

http://www.usbible.com/God/evolution_of_god.htm

Christians take the Bible out of its culture and so leave it in basically a vacuum. Looking archaeologically at the Bible and the Middle East, we can easily see that although some of the "history" in the Bible is correct (albeit propagandist), there is much of it, specifically anything pre David is sheer myth and not shown archaeologically. And yes, there is some evidence for David and for a House of David and a beginning state in "Israel."

The folk religion of Israel is basically polytheistic. And the Elite of Jerusalem were Henotheists. The folk religion had a God and a Goddess. Yahweh and Asherah. The Shekinah or spirit of God on the Tanakh (Old Testiment) is all that is left of the Goddess of Israel.

William Dever, an archaeologist who taught at the University of Arizona wrote a number of books on these subjects which are very good.