One of the current views in archaeology is that the Jews and Israelites were the people remaining from the fall of the early Canaanite city-states. It's thought the problem may have been internal rebellion, and so the survivors had an interest in reworking the Canaanite pantheon to reflect their new status. Several of the old gods were enlisted by different authors - Elohim, who was a father figure and Yahweh, a storm/war god. The idea of a monotheism was slow in developing: Yahweh had a wife, Asherah, whose statuettes are found all over the time's excavations. Baal and others are also still present.
This pastiche straggled on until around 630BCE, when the Northern Israel states had been conquered by the Assyrians and laid waste. A reformer in Judah, the southern states, declared their bad fortune was brought about by not sticking with the pure monotheism, and he (known as the D author) influenced the Judean king, Josiah, to enforce the monotheism. His writings, "discovered" in the temple by Josiah, became the later part of Deuteronomy. The real change doesn't happen, though, until the return from Babylonia, when Ezra codified the reasons for the punishment and lays down the monotheistic law, and incidentally, finishes the OT. The poor, benighted Samaritans, who were the Judeans left behind when the higher classes trudged off to the east, have a religion that was likely what the Jewish religion was before the Babylonians came, with lots of animal blood sacrifice.
One easily accessible source for this archaeology is Nova's
The Bible's Buried Secrets.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/program.html
While a lot of the broader ideas you're talking about are, as far as my studies have found, pretty much factual, the details you contextualize them in are not. It's not that the early Hebrews were the remainders of the Canaanites, it's that they
were Canaanites, likely the more rural folk who moved into the metropolitan areas during years of decline, which would have the 'kingdom' of Israel starting some time during the second millennium BCE. This fits with the evidence we do have, as well as the evidence of differing dietary habits between the people of the cities and the more rural people who would most likely fit the description of the Hebrews. Their kingdom was met with the same troubles of internal politics and external pressure as anyone else during the time, but the main difference between them and their neighbors-- with whom they essentially shared the same DNA-- was with their culture, both social and religious.
The problem with the names like Yahweh or Elohim or Adonai-- names that have been essentially adopted by Christianity as "names of god," are not proper names at all in ancient Hebrew contexts but are instead titles used in the place of the naming of their god, which was considered to be a sacred thing that could only be done under serious circumstances by qualified individuals. Even the Tetragrammaton is not the
name of god but an abbreviation used in holy writings of great portent. It would be a gross misunderstanding of ancient Hebrew culture and language to assign the titular names the status of the name of their god in terms of their religious practice. That is a common attribution from the Christian re-workings of the meanings of the words used by the early Hebrew writings, hence the use of the name (among others) "our Lord" (capitalized) in many Christian writings and liturgy. It's the linguistic equivalent of taking a two or three word phrase in one language, running it through Google Translate to Greek (or Latin), then running it through the Babelfish translator back into English-- the process loses context and cultural or historical significance.
That isn't to say that those names haven't been used by their neighbors or their predecessors-- even the Hebrews in their stories and scriptures loved to invoke Baal as a common god of others (though 'Baal' would have been more of a generic in the sense that they used it)-- but the similarities in name do not themselves denote a conversion of the multiple deities into one. Dumuzi (later Tammuz), a god popular in the region of Syria around the same time as the Hebrews, was also called Adonai, but the word 'adonai' is titular in nature and means 'lord' in the literal sense, both in Hebrew (ancient and modern) as well as Aramaic and its linguistic roots.
Also, keep in mind that I'm
not saying that the people the Hebrews are descendants of weren't polytheists. In the broad sense, everyone around there was to some degree. However, many of the city-states in the region also tended to eschew all other gods but the patron deity of their city-state, often designated by the religious/political leaders of the time as their claim to or stake in power. This wasn't uncommon in the ancient middle-east, particularly earlier on further east between the Tigris and Euphrates, whose land had been growing less arid and fighting over land rights, farming rights, and water rights kept these city-states at a near constant state of war. Considering the story of Sargon, who united a large swath of these city-states, and the stories that followed of others, including some religious mythological stories, it's not only believable but highly likely (considering evidence) that these are the things that made up the bulk of influence of the Hebrews as a people, who eventually established Israel. The Hebrews were indeed an amalgam of the cultures and beliefs that surrounded them during their time in the ancient world, but just as any of those neighbors had differentiating features about themselves, so did the Hebrews of Israel. One of those distinguishing features was taking the tendency to be loyal to one god to an extreme or an absolute. It often proved useful in assignment of powers and as a unifying motif when attacked (which happened regularly enough).
