Weber wrote that Anyone who is heir to traditions of modern European civilization will approach problems of universal history with a set of questions, which to him appear both inevitable and legitimate.

These questions will turn on the combination of circumstances which has brought about the cultural phenomena that are uniquely Western and that have at the same time (...) a universal cultural significance[1]Weber notes that Judaism not only fathered Christianity and Islam, but was crucial to the rise of the modern Western world, as its influence was as important as those of Hellenistic and Greco-Roman civilizations.

[...] Thus, in considering the conditions of Jewry's evolution, we stand at a turning point of the whole cultural development of the West and the Middle East[2]Weber analysed the interaction between the Bedouins, the cities, the herdsmen and the peasants, the conflicts between them, and the rise and fall of United Monarchy of Israel and Judah.

Those periods were significant for religious history, as the basic doctrines of Judaism that left their mark on Western civilisation arose during those times.

[3] Reinhard Bendix summarising Weber's work writes: ...free of magic and esoteric speculations, devoted to the study of law, vigiliant in the effort to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord in the hope of a better future, the prophets established a religion of faith that subjected man's daily life to the imperatives of a divinely ordained moral law.