What applied in Mesopotamia was very detailed as it was a city state culture. A nomadic tribe would strip off the not applicable bits and create a version for uneducated herders.
Hammurabi's code of law had 282 items. The Jewish laws in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy add up to a bit over 600. Some can be interpreted as efforts to run their idea of an orderly society, telling people not to do obviously evil stuff like murder, theft, fraud/perjury, or homosexuality. Others look more like matters of maintaining the distinction between them and other people they knew of around them, lest they disappear and fade away into the background. "Those other people (down there at the coast) are the seafood-eaters, not us."
Not a lot of difference between the Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, protestant versions, but the Islamic version is something of a dog's breakfast with rambling opinions thrown in.
Even any one Bible has three different things that could be called The Ten Commandments:
1. The first set Moses brought down & broke (contents unknown)
2. The second set he brought down & kept (survived long enough to get quoted)
3. An unrelated set found in another chapter when they weren't even at that mountain anymore, which contains a different group of laws most of which most people have never heard of, including one on the Festival Of Unleavened Bread and one about boiling meat in milk; this one is the only one the Bible itself actually
calls "the ten commandments".
Go back to Hebrew tribes in the nomadic times and monotheism was their thing in a polytheistic world.
To a Hebrew, God was the one true and the rest were false and wrong.
There's lots of talk in the old testament of other gods and some (quite strange) imagery in Daniel as well. I've mostly taken this as "one true God" (capital 'G') versus idols and images of "false gods" (lower case 'g'), but whether these 'g'ods are supposed to be considered fictional, or just "lesser", I'm not sure.
The ancient Israelites/Jews/Hebrews were definitely believers in multiple gods at first, then shifted to believing in just one later (if you don't count angels & demons). But that conversion did not happen while they were still nomads; it happened after they settled.
In the Bronze Age, the speakers of Semitic languages included some groups that had settled on farms & in cities, and some groups that were still nomadic, particularly south & southeast of Canaan. They had a common pantheon, including two gods named Yahweh and ʼEl along with others. As was usually the case with Bronze Age pantheons, each town or tribe usually had a favorite god, while still believing the rest exist. ʼEl became the chief god of northern Canaan, while Yahweh became the chief god of southern Canaan and some nearby nomadic tribes.
When the chaos of the Bronze Age Collapse apparently hit the coast & lowlands of Canaan harder than the highlands, the highland population started booming and spreading down to fill in the vacuum of power in the coast & lowlands. This would appear to be the Jewish/Hebrew/Israelite conquest of Canaan, from the inside instead of the outside as the Bible depicts it, which means we need to consider Canaanite culture in the highlands before then "Proto-Israelite". It's also possible that those remaining Semitic-language-speaking nomads just outside Canaan also came into Canaan at that time and joined them, while there were empty or weakened towns to move into without needing to build new ones, which would explain both what happened to those nomads (who just vanish from history otherwise) and where the resulting population in Canaan afterward got the idea of having come in from the outside as the Bible describes. So then everybody lived in cities or on farms, no more wandering in the wild, but they were still polytheistic.
Later on, within those settled communities of Canaan, the ʼElohists and Yahwists would start diminishing the importance of the other gods, then banning worship of them, then insisting that they didn't exist while merging the last two, ʼEl and Yahweh, into one god with two names. That process was still underway when the books of the Bible were written, so it left its mark on them, despite some editors' efforts to scrub them to appear as if they'd been monotheistic all along: the Genesis reference to sons of the gods, the Babel story, the golden calf at Sinai story, the First Commandment allowing worship of other gods (just as long as you don't prioritize them
above the primary god), the stories in which wizards & witches who don't serve God wield real powers anyway, the experiment on Job, the iron chariots thing, weirdly specific orders not to do stuff nobody would ever think of doing unless it was part of a religious ceremony in some other religion, the verse about not being able to sing the songs of their lord while living in exile, the purging of names with "baʻal" as part of them, and the admonitions against using asherahs (decorated trees/poles; symbols of Asherah, the wife of Yahweh/ʼEl) and even an asherah needing to be dragged out of the temple of Yahweh/ʼEl in Jerusalem. And there are archeological artifacts of the other Jewish gods from that same period, continuous with those from before when polytheism had been out in the open, indicating that people still worshipped the other gods while the Bible authors & editors acted like they didn't. It took another few hundred years for the worship of the other Jewish gods to finally really apparently cease.
I remember a young skeptic challenging me many years ago about verses in genesis that seem to imply offspring-generating unions between "angels" and humans. I had never read it before and had no idea how to respond. It still makes no sense to me and even feels like an excerpt from Roman mythology that found it's way into the old testament. I bet you start a lot of conversations with Christians where you have given the topic considerable thought and they are simply responding off the cuff. It seems strange, no doubt, that someone would be so impassioned about something they have given such little thought, but I think that's the reality a lot of the time.
