The complex religious environment of the Middle(Near in Europe) East gave birth to and nurtured the central thoughts of Old Testament. Religion of the Old Testament is Yahwism, which was created within the context of the endless conflicts between the dominant powers and the different religions in the Middle East.
The start of the Yahweh religion can be characterized by the fact that despite very close relationship with other national religions and their various religious literatures, there is no indication of any explicit imitations of these religions by the Yahweh religion. For instance, arguments that the creation narrative and the flood story have their antecedents in ancient Babylonian mythologies, or arguments that the idea of monotheism has been borrowed from the religion of ancient Amarna Egypt or from Midianite religion, have now been dismissed as valid explanations. Quite to the contrary, Yahweh religion is now considered as having arisen out of the historical experiences of ancient Hebrews who had a semi-nomadic existence, and who were also outsiders, in the ancient Middle East.
The main confession of the “wandering strangers” in the ancient historical creeds of Israel was that “Yahweh brought Israel out of Egypt.” Martin Noth and Von Rad refer to this confession as a “Urbekenntnis” (primary confession) of Israel, and such an argument is consistent with the historical narratives, the prophetic traditions, and the poetic tradition the Old Testament, which emphatically describe the Exodus-event as the terminus a quo of their religion and of their history.
Therefore, Israel's encounter with Yahweh's salvation in history is a central event in defining the central ideas of the Old Testament. From this, it follows that the divine name “Yahweh”(Israel's God) has a causative meaning, not only an ontological meaning. J. Bright's observation that “Yahweh was no benign maintainer of status quo to be ritually appeased, but a God who had called his people from the status quo of dire bondage into a new future” is appropriate. If so, we can infer the characteristics of God from Exodus 33 : 19 to interpret Exodus 3 : 14, taking the tautological paronomasia in the passages in question into account. If we accept this logic, then we must read Exodus 3 : 14 as a causative sentence. Accordingly, we can interpret the divine name Yahweh as One Who Causes to be, or One Who Creates(=Creator).
This Yahweh was easily reconciled with the encompassing characteristics of El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, but established an opposite perspective relative to aggressive Baalistic ideologies which can be characterized as materialistic, hedonistic, and unethical. Therefore, the religion of Yahweh is opposed, in nature, to Marcionite tendencies. And Yahweh War(Holy War) passages of the Old Testament demand, in actual fact, a spirituality of nonviolence in a world that had not learned how to beat swords into plowshares. Such ideas represent a Copernican shift away from Marcionite tendencies of the Christian societies.
Israel became the people of the covenant by pursuing a life centered round the torah, and confessions of faith that included praise, thanks, and complaints. That the people of the covenant live to (1) become a ligth to the nations and (2) stay faithfully to the torah is a response to Yahweh's Heilsgeschichte(history of salvation).
The torah - oriented demands to destroy Baalism can be traced to many historians from J to dtr and chr, and to prophets like Elijah, Hosea, and Jeremiah. The central tenets of Old Testament do have an important message for modern society, and that is to destroy new-Baalism that is present in our world today.