From the New Oxford Annotated Bible Fourth Edition’s introduction to Exodus:
Traditional authorship is ascribed to Moses in part based on passages such as 24.4 and 34.27. Modern biblical scholarship, however, has noted many problems with the view that Moses wrote the entire Torah, including Exodus. Like the rest of the Pentateuch, Exodus contains contradictions and redundancies. For example, Moses’
father-in-law is sometimes called Reuel and sometimes Jethro; and the mountain of revelation is Sinai in some passages and Horeb in others. The narratives of Moses on the mountain in chs 19 and 24 have many overlapping and conflicting details, as does the account of the nine marvels in 7.8–10.29. Differences in vocabulary, style,
and ideas are also discernible. Thus Exodus is best understood as a composite of traditions shaped over manycenturies by an unknown number of anonymous storytellers and writers. Those traditions eventually comprised four major sources (known as J, E, D, and P) that were skillfully combined into the present canonical book
by one or more redactors or editors who felt that all the sources were valid. The redactor(s) or editor(s) can be credited with the overall interweaving of disparate materials—narratives, legal texts, priestly records, lists,and one long poem. Redaction also introduced paerns, such as the repetition of a thematic word or phrase asymbolic number of times (usually seven or ten) in a literary unit (see, e.g., 4.21n.; 5.1n.; 18.26n.; 40.16n.), and
also the triadic arrangement of the account of the nine marvels (see 7.8–10.29n.).
The diverse materials in Exodus are situated within a storyline describing the departure of a group of oppressed people from Egypt to a sacred mountain in Sinai where they enter into a covenant with the God they believed rescued them; at God’s direction, they construct a portable shrine for their deity before continuing their journey. The historicity of that story has been questioned, partly because the sources comprising Exodus date from
many centuries aer the events they purport to describe. The events themselves, which involve the escape of a component of the Pharaoh’s workforce, the disruption of Egyptian agriculture, and the loss of many Egyptian lives, are not mentioned in Egyptian sources (although the Egyptians would not necessarily record such events). Similarly, the larger-than-life leader Moses is not mentioned in contemporaneous nonbiblical sources;
and no trace of a large group of people moving across the Sinai Peninsula has been found by archaeological surveys or excavations. Moreover, virtually none of the places mentioned in Exodus, including the holy mountain, can be identified with sites discovered in Sinai or with names known from other sources (see 12.37n.; 19.1n.). In addition, features of the story, such as the signs and wonders performed in Egypt and the exceedingly large
number of people said to have le Egypt (see 12.37n.), defy credibility. Finally, the Exodus story culminates in Joshua, with the conquest of the land of Israel; and here too the archaeological record does not corroboratethe main biblical narrative.
Despite these problems, the basic storyline is supported by evidence from Egyptian and other sources. Foreigners from western Asia, called “Asiatics” in Egyptian documents, periodically did migrate to Egypt, especially during times of famine (see Gen 12.10; 41.57; 43.1–2); others were taken to Egypt as military captives or were forcibly sent there as human tribute by Canaanite rulers. Moreover, many of these groups, including those who
had voluntarily entered Egypt, were vulnerable to conscription for state projects. This paern was especially strong toward the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1400–1200 bce). And, although virtually all of the foreigners in Egypt were assimilated into local culture, there is at least one documented instance of several workers escaping into the Sinai wilderness. Thus the overall paern of descent into Egypt followed by servitude and
escape is based on information in ancient documents. In addition, the end of the Late Bronze Age, by which time the Israelites would have le Egypt, coincides with the date of inscriptional evidence—a stele erected by the pharaoh Merneptah in ca. 1209 bce, which contains the first mention of Israel outside the Bible—for a people called “Israel” in the land of Canaan.
A plausible reconstruction is that a relatively small group of people, descendants of western Asiatics whohad entered Egypt generations before, managed to escape from servitude. So improbable was such an eventthat the people, or their leader, aributed it to miraculous divine intervention. This experience bonded them in their loyalty to that deity and gave them a collective identity. This story was originally oral and developed
like other oral tales. Upon entering Canaan, they told their story and spread word about their unusual saving God, Yahweh, a name perhaps learned from Midianites with whom they interacted (see 3.15n.). Their stories about securing freedom are collective memories meant to re-create for others the intense emotional experience of liberation rather than to record accurate details of their flight. As time passed, major features of Israelite culture—such as the main agricultural festivals (especially passover), the custom of redeeming firstborn males, the idea of a people in a covenant relationship with God, prophets as the transmiers of God’s word, the sabbath, the construction of a central shrine as God’s earthly abode, a sacrificial system administered by priests—were assimilated into the core Exodus story, which gives them their emotional power and authority (see 11.1–13.16n.). This commemoration of the past makes the experience of a few the collective story, the very identity, of the community taking shape and expanding in the highlands of Canaan and later struggling to survive the traumas of division and exile.
