Biblical Religion in Context

This week I listened to a lecture about Biblical religion in the context of Ancient Near Eastern culture from Christine Hayes at Yale. This lecture was one of many from her course "An Introduction to the Old Testament(Hebrew Bible)". The purpose of this lecture is to discuss two different ways that Biblical religion is understood in its historical context: one model shows Biblical religion as an evolutionary extension of Ancient Near Eastern religion and culture, while the other shows Biblical religion as revolution in that Israelite religion is radically different from Near Eastern culture. Hayes briefly discusses the first model, and spend almost the entirety of the lecture on the second model. She uses a specific work by Yehezkel Kaufmann throughout her entire discussion of the revolutionary understanding of Israelite religion, drawing exclusively from his conclusions to discuss this topic. It was interesting to me that she chose to use only Kaufmann's work in this lecture, especially because at the end of her discussion she mentions that Kaufmann's conclusions are often forced and can be disproved with further investigation. So my question is, why spend forty five minutes discussing a work that does not present an accurate interpretation of the material you are attempting to teach? It seems as if a different approach, using a wider variety of sources, would have been more effective in presenting this material. Overall the lecture was engaging and informative, but the approach Hayes chose to take and the limited number of sources she used in her discussion of this broad and multifaceted topic seemed to diminish the quality of this lecture. The discussion of Biblical religion in its historical context is one that has the potential to be a more interesting and wide ranging subject, but the approach taken by Hayes severely limited this potential.