The Israelites appear in the archaeological record as highland villagers in Canaan late in the second millennium BCE, and the earliest external mention of the name is on the Egyptian stele of Merneptah, around 1208 BCE. Lester Grabbe's survey of what can and cannot be known about them is deliberately austere about the distance between that record and the biblical narrative.
Mark Smith's work sets out the religious position. Israelite religion began inside the West Semitic world rather than outside it. The name of El is embedded in the name Israel itself, the divine assembly, the storm imagery and the divine titles all belong to the Levantine repertoire, and inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom appear to pair Yahweh with an asherah. The movement from that starting point to the insistence that Yahweh alone may be worshipped, and then to the claim that no other god exists at all, was gradual, was contested within Israel, and is recorded in the Hebrew Bible largely by the party that prevailed.
Practice before the exile included local high places, household figurines and a temple in Jerusalem serving a royal cult. Cornelius Van Dam's study of the Urim and Thummim examines one of the sanctioned techniques for putting a question to God, and its disappearance from later practice is itself part of the change.