The ancient Canaanite religion was still popular in the region, and coexisted with Yahwism and the early form of Judaism that evolved from it. However, the ancient Israelites eventually began to see the Canaanites as adherents of an entirely separate and idolatrous faith and compete with them. The oldest books of the Hebrew Bible reflect this competition, as in the books of Hosea and Nahum, whose authors lament the "apostasy" of the people of Israel and threaten them with the wrath of God if they do not give up their polytheistic cults. The transition to monotheism and the concept of idolatry can be summarized as the following: 1) Ancient Canaanites worshipped a large variety of gods, though probably not including Yahweh; 2) Canaanites in the lands that would later be known as Israel, Samaria, and Judah began worshipping Yahweh; 3) The early Israelites prioritized Yahweh worship, treating other gods as secondary; 4) The Israelites gradually merged other deities into Yahweh, associating their traits and stories with him; 5) The deities that had previously been merged with Yahweh, and some vestigial traditions and rituals associated with their worship, were eventually seen as superstitions or elements of distinct, separate religions; 6) The authors of the most ancient books of the Hebrew Bible argued that Yahweh is the only god that Israelites "should" worship, and that all other worship angers Yahweh, but did not overtly deny the existence of the other Canaanite deities; 7) It's possible that at some point after the Babylonian captivity, the history and memory of Canaanite gods being worshipped alongside Yahweh in mainstream Yahwistic temples were forgotten; 8) Later Tanakh authors argued that Yahweh is the only god that truly existed, and that the other forms of worship described in the more ancient books were merely ancient superstitions or misguided foreign religions, marking the completion of Yahwism's transformation into early Judaism.