The Israelites originated as Bronze Age Canaanites, but Yahweh was not a Canaanite god. The head of the Canaanite pantheon was El, and one theory is that the name Yahweh is a shortened form of el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly army accompanying El as he marched beside the earthly armies of Israel. But Yahweh's earliest possible occurrence is as a place-name, "land of Shasu of YHW", in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE), the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia. In this case a plausible etymology for the name could be from the root HWY, which would yield the meaning "he blows", appropriate to a weather divinity. There is considerable but not universal support for the view that the Egyptian inscriptions refer to Yahweh. The question that arises is how he made his way to the north. A widely accepted hypothesis is that traders brought Yahweh to Israel along the caravan routes between Egypt and Canaan, the Kenite hypothesis, named after one of the groups involved. The strength of the Kenite hypothesis is the way it ties together various points of data, such as the absence of Yahweh from Canaan, his links with Edom and Midian in the biblical stories, and the Kenite or Midianite ties of Moses. However, while it is highly plausible that the Kenites, Midianites and others may have introduced Israel to Yahweh, it is highly unlikely that they did so outside the borders of Israel or under the aegis of Moses, as the Exodus story has it.

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