Reddit mentions of The Invention of God

Since you seem open to a critical approach, I cannot recommend this Yale Religious Studies course enough. Lectures 1-3 cover the early Canaanite origins you are looking for.

There are a few books I can recommend, but even though I have studied OT history as a hobby for years, I find them a bit too much for this casual reader:

• The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times
  
• 
  The Invention of God
  
  Really, any non-devotional Intro to Old Testament resource is going to be able to touch on the origins of El and Yahweh and how they morphed into God through the centuries.
  
  If you have it in you, this lecture series is an excellent exploration of the origins of Yahweh (by the author of The Invention of God above):
  
  
• The God Yhwh: His Origins, His Cults, and His Transformation into the Only God
  
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  To give you a little something to chew on . . . If you are not familiar with the documentary hypothesis, it is the idea that the first books of the bible were compiled from multiple earlier resources. (There is lot of scuffling on assigning verses and dating and such, but in the big picture, it remains the prevailing academic opinion.)
  
  One of the sources is called 'the Elohist' (E) because those passages concern El. Another of the sources is called the 'Jahwist' (J) because those passages concern Yahweh (Yahweh starts with J in German). Here is a link to an online Bible where they have color-coded the different sources: J is navy blue, while E is teal
  
  The reason I bring this up is because if you read the El and Yahweh passages in isolation you can get a sense of the different ideas about God that the authors had. You can also locate them based on where the stories take place and who the good/bad guys are. The Elohist is more concerned with the north (Israel), whereas the Jahwist favors the sound (Judah). The god El was originally part of the Canaanite pantheon, while Yahweh his believed to have drifted up from the south.
  
  

If you want to read extra-biblical sources, you can start with something like Old Testament Parallels., which has excerpts arranged by their possible similarity with the OT canon. For more comprehensive coverage, look at Outside the Bible (3 vols).

Heiser has his defenders on here, but from a historian's perspective my view is that his approach to those ancient texts has been unduly shaped by his theological agenda. You can compare his approach with the work of some others, including David Penchansky, Twilight of the Gods, Mark Smith, The Early History of God, Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan, Adam Kotsko's The Prince of This World, and Thomas Römer, The Invention of God.

On Enoch and the Apocalyptic tradition in particular, look at John Collins's The Apocalptic Imagination, and Anathea Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire.

Now that I type this out, these would make a kick-butt course syllabus. Hmmm...

Here's the story written for any educated layperson:
http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-God-Back-Readers-Pick/dp/031606744X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453706897&sr=8-1&keywords=the+evolution+of+god

Here's the story for someone with a good familiarity with Biblical studies:
http://www.amazon.com/Invention-God-Thomas-R%C3%B6mer/dp/0674504976/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453706971&sr=8-1&keywords=the+invention+of+god

You might find these books interesting:

The Invention of God by Thomas Romer

>Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms―Yhwh, God, or Allah―by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE.

>That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe―the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah―that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism.

>A masterpiece of detective work and exposition by one of the world’s leading experts on the Hebrew Bible, The Invention of God casts a clear light on profoundly important questions that are too rarely asked, let alone answered.

King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature by Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins

>This book traces the history of the idea that the king and later the messiah is Son of God, from its origins in ancient Near Eastern royal ideology to its Christian appropriation in the New Testament.

>Both highly regarded scholars, Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins argue that Jesus was called “the Son of God” precisely because he was believed to be the messianic king. This belief and tradition, they contend, led to the identification of Jesus as preexistent, personified Wisdom, or a heavenly being in the New Testament canon. However, the titles Jesus is given are historical titles tracing back to Egyptian New Kingdom ideology. Therefore the title “Son of God” is likely solely messianic and not literal. King and Messiah as Son of God is distinctive in its range, spanning both Testaments and informed by ancient Near Eastern literature and Jewish noncanonical literature.

Excellent list, I'd also add Thomas Römer's Invention of God and his free university classes.