The Children of Israel represents a system that comes out of ancient Sumer but was tempered in the cauldron of Egypt, and so operates in some sense as the resultant of the two. Both civilizations however suffered from the ultimate exhaustion of their ecological limits.
The difference between Sumer and Egypt was that one was simply further along in the life cycle of civilizations that collapse, but it should have been clear to the Biblical author what ailed the world's presumptions about how societies remain vital and fresh. The Israelite system was no doubt designed to combat those failures.
To honor God's claims was to respect the civilization's ecological barrier.
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