Bill Dever's Did God Have A Wife is pretty good, too. The Judahites of the first half of the first millennium BCE were no more monothestic than anyone else in the region.
For now, try this:
http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth/false_testament
For now, try this:
http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth/false_testament
Quote:Thus there was no migration from Mesopotamia , no sojourn in Egypt , and no exodus. There was no conquest upon the Israelites' return and, for that matter, no peaceful infiltration such as the one advanced by Yohanan Aharoni. Rather than conquerors, the Hebrews were a native people who had never left in the first place. So why invent for themselves an identity as exiles and invaders? One reason may have been that people in the ancient world did not establish rights to a particular piece of territory by farming or by raising families on it but by seizing it through force of arms. Indigenous rights are an ideological invention of the twentieth century A.D. and are still not fully established in the twenty-first, as the plight of today's Palestinians would indicate. The only way that the Israelites could establish a moral right to the land they inhabited was by claiming to have conquered it sometime in the distant past. Given the brutal power politics of the day, a nation either enslaved others or was enslaved itself, and the Israelites were determined not to fall into the latter category.
