claims that the Canaanites and Israelites were entirely distinct peoples, that their ancestor Abraham hailed from Ur rather than from Canaan, and that the Israelites migrated to the land inhabited by native Canaanites and conquered it by force. The prevailing academic opinion today is that the Israelites were a mixture of peoples predominantly indigenous to Canaan, although an Egyptian matrix of peoples may also have played a role in their ethnogenesis (giving birth to the saga of The Exodus), with an ethnic composition similar to that in Ammon, Edom and Moab, and including Habiru and Shasu. The culture of ancient Israelite sites was extremely similar to that of other Canaanite sites, with the most significant difference being the worship of Yahweh, so in spite of late Biblical references to Ur, it is probable that the Israelite federation evolved in situ in Canaan, rather than by conquest of a foreign nation, and inherited the cultural concept of high places from indigenous ancestors. While Canaanites associated high places with ʼĒl, early Israelites used them for worship of Yahweh in an equivalent sense due to the conflation of Yahweh with ʼĒl. This can be seen in the frequent Biblical references to Yahweh with terms such as El, El Shaddai, Elohim, and Elyon, instead of YHWH, which was considered too holy to speak aloud. These El-based terms are likely derived from the original personal name of ʼĒl and from ancient Canaanite titles meaning "son of God," "angel of God," or "God most high." Consequently, high places can be seen as an indigenous development of both the Israelites and the Canaanites, but by the time of the composition of the Hebrew Bible's oldest texts, high places were considered avodh zereh, foreign worship associated with the Canaanite pantheon. The prophets of the 8th century BCE assail the popular religion as corrupt and licentious and as fostering the monstrous delusion that immoral men can buy the favour of God by worship, but they make no distinction in this respect between the high places of Israel and the temple in Jerusalem. (cf. sqq.; ; Isaiah to sqq.) Hosea stigmatizes the whole cultus as pure heathenism—Canaanite Baal-worship adopted by apostate Israel. The fundamental law in prohibits sacrifice at every place except the temple in Jerusalem; in accordance with this law Josiah, in 621 BCE, destroyed and desecrated the altars (bmoth) throughout his kingdom (where Yahweh had been worshipped since