Not that I wish to attack anyone, but I would seriously question the scholarship in a lot of that.
From the Ugarit tradition:
Professor Cohn noted that some scholars suspected that Ugaritic Yaw might be the prototype for Yahweh:
"It is becoming ever more difficult to say with any confidence when, where and how the Israelites first came to know the god Yahweh. It may be that, as Exodus says, he was originally a Midianite god, introduced into the land of Canaan by immigrants from Egypt; or he may have started as a minor member of the Canaanite pantheon...Originally El was the supreme god for Israelites as he had always been for Canaanites. Even if one discounts the pronouncement of El in the Baal cycle,'The name of my son is Yaw'- the import of which is still being debated- one cannot ignore a passage in the Bible which shows Yahweh as subordinate to El. Deuteronomy 32:8 tells how when El Elyon, i.e., El the Most High, parcelled out the nations between his sons, Yahweh received Israel as his portion." (pp.131-132. "Yahweh and the Jerusalem Monarchy." Norman Cohn. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. New Haven and London. Yale University Press. 1993)
First, this translation is overly paraphrastic. It should rather be that he (the Most High) "divided the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the sons of god (=El)", though Israel did become the portion of Yhwh. But this does not necessarily mean that Yhwh was one of the "sons of god" (which in the Bible is usually a term for what we call angels, ie non-divine supernatural beings that are servants of Yhwh). Indeed, if one considers that Elyon is frequently used in the Bible as a name or title for Yhwh himself, it might be that both words speak of the same agent here, too. So one can quite plausibly read the text to say that while Yhwh gave each nation to an angel, he took charge of Israel himself. This interpretation is supported by other passages, such as Daniel 7-12, where mention is made of angelic "princes" ruling over the nations.
Second, one should note that the version quoted is the one represented by the Septuagint, ie a Greek translation of original Hebrew documents. The Hebrew manuscript tradition for the Old Testament (the so-called Massoretic Text) has "sons of Israel" in place of "sons of god". Which removes the possibly polytheistic reference altogether. Which version is the older, we can't say with any confidence.
The Bible tends to support the Ugarit tradition:
That Yahweh was originally a son of El is attested by a document (KTU 1.1 IV 14) from Ugarit, a Palestinian site occupied by neighbors of Israel. It reads sm . bny . yw . ilt, which translates as "The name of the son of god, Yahweh."
I don't follow that vocalization. "Yw" reads "Yaw", or the like, not Yahweh.
This status as the foremost of the sons of El is remembered in the Song of Moses, one of the oldest of the Hebrew scriptures, in Deuteronomy 32:8-9: "When the Elyon [another name of El] apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods [i.e., each god controlled one nation of people]; Yahweh's own portion was his people, Jacob [i.e., the nation of [Israel] his allotted share."
See above. And in Hebrew it doesn't say gods (elohim), but sons of god.
Psalm 82:1: Elohim has taken his place in the assembly of EL, in the midst of the elohim He holds judgment.
Psalm 29:1: Ascribe to Yahweh, O sons of EL, ascribe to Yahweh glory and strength.
Psalm 89:6: For who in the skies can be compared to Yahweh, who among the sons of EL is like Yahweh,
El in the Bible is never used as a proper name, though it does appear so in the Ugarit writings and elsewhere. It means simply "god" in a general sense, just like in Arabic Allah isn't a name, but a simple noun. It's practically a synonym to elohim, just like he other main form of the word, eloah. Presenting it as another god than Yhwh is disingenious at best.
Honestly, I'm very unimpressed with these sources. I didn't read the bulk of the first one, but from the general gist I did get it that his MO seems to be to pick mythological and biblical sources out of context and force analogies between them. It doesn't help that he also mangles them in the process -- for example, his description of the legend of Ishtar's (Inanna's) descent into the underworld is fragmentary at best.
The second, of course, endorses Immanuel Velikovsky. To anyone mildly familiar with the scholarship of ancient mythology, I shouldn't have to say more than that.
It seems like the cut off point between the pantheon and Yhwh as the solo god is the Book of Ezra, following the Persian invasion of Babylon. Ezra was a courtier of the then Persian king and according to his book, preached monotheism to the then polytheistic Judeans. The Persians being monotheists at the time, probably encouraged that sort of thing.
The Persians were not monotheists. What they were was Zoroastrians, which faith was dualist if not polytheist at the time (it's very hard to figure out the specifics, since we have no contemporary sources on that religion, but only much later writings).
When the Hebrew religion became monotheist is something of an open question, but in my personal reckoning we see at least the beginnings of it rather earlier in the Bible than Ezra. We can look, for example, at the apparently monotheistic campaign of King Josiah of Judah in the late 7th century.
Another unscholarly source, but this one commendably short, so I can comment in some more detail on its shortcomings. My general impression is first of all that of its partiality to all things Persian. It then proceeds to make a number of bizarre and unsupported claims. Since when was marrying foreign women a favored Israelite/Judaic practice? It's condemned throughout the Old Testament, from Genesis to, erhm, Nehemiah. As for translating the "Book of the Law", this would be for the sake of Aramaic speakers who didn't know Hebrew. Where he gets it that the Jews of the day didn't understand Aramaic, I have no idea. Equally bizarre are his claims about the Judaic sects of New Testament times. The word pharisees derives from Hebrew perushim, which means "set apart". The sadduccees, by contrast, were the Temple priesthood elite, not any kind of popular movement at all, or numerous. Most Jews belonged to neither of the sects, however.
This would also explain why Herodotus who preceded Ezra had never heard of Yhwh, inspite of the Temple being 500 years old by his time.
http://giwersworld.org/OT-HTML/opening.phtml
And yet another unscholarly source. Rhetorical question, has this guy ever even read a critical Bible commentary? Bizarre claims like the Bible being written originally in Greek and there never being such a thing as a Hebrew language instantly disqualify him from any serious consideration.
(He was only play insulting me of course