Celsus

Frustrating as it may seem, I don't think we can determine this without more evidence.
I read Hosea as post-exilic fiction, Israel whoring itself out and being punished for it is a stronger story if Israel doesn't exist any longer; 3:4-5 is a complete giveaway of the exile; all references are to Judah as if Israel doesn't exist (ok there's mention of Samaria but that existed after the exile as well). As for Amos, never really read it in detail but at best it's been heavily redacted in the post-exilic period.
Which part of Hosea or Amos would you consider pre-exilic and why?
Eh. Homer's Iliad is completely fiction. Just because there's a destruction layer at a city identified as Troy doesn't mean the Iliad is suddenly based on historical events. If Homer had made more substantive regional claims we could debunk it the same way the Conquest is debunked because there isn't a time period when all the cities listed in Joshua and Judges were sacked as the Bible says they were. But when all we knew of the record was a destruction layer at Jericho (circa 1930), people thought this proved the Bible. It doesn't.
What I meant was where would they find the metal, iron or bronze, to fight bloody battles. They wouldn't have unless they set up quarries and foundries in the desert, which would have left a trace (though where they found the firewood for it would have been an interesting side-project). Logistic realism is no friend of the text
All we're doing is speculating. I was only speculating because someone asked what might a plausible reason be for the invention of a tradition (obviously it did not occur in this manner, but gradually developed over time, the same way asking about the Boeing 747 whipped up by a hurricane makes no sense of evolution because that's not how evolution occurs).

Anat

Bedouin use camel dung. Now we know where the waste from the flocks went.

Clivedurdle

Baden Powell wrote of the invented tradition of scouting.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Ldt...dition&f=false

Is not the backstory of the Exodus and the invasion of Canaan also an invented tradition?

So the next question is when was it invented?

I propose post Alexander and that Judaism is actually a Greek religion.

show_no_mercy

I'm pretty sure that the Egyptians actually controlled a vast majority of the area known as Canaan at one point in time. Much like how the Israelites inherited the global flood meme from the Assyrians and monotheism from the Persians, the little bit of Egyptian in the Pentateuch might be from this occupational period.

Joan of Bark

Wouldn't this create a dating problem? The "Israelites" weren't monotheistic until after 2 Chronicles was composed ...

2 Chronicles 2:5 (NIV)

Anat

I don't think the story of the Exodus is a story of monotheism but henotheism. It is the victory of Israel's god over the Egyptian gods - who are real enough, just not as strong as him.

premjan

Maybe the serpent in the Eden story is also a rival God.

Anat

I don't know, he isn't described as anything but a talking beast. The Egyptian gods are actually called gods.

lpetrich

This reminds me of my pet theory, that the Exodus is a mangled memory of the expulsion of the Hyksos nearly a millennium before the Babylonian Exile.

Since the Hyksos had been Canaanites, they could easily mix in with their fellow Canaanites when they returned to Canaan.

The Minoan caldera eruption of Thera had happened when the Hyksos were ruling Egypt, and Cretan refugees could have described its effects to their Hyksos hosts. Their descriptions would then have been remembered as some of the Ten Plagues of Egypt.

The Hyksos were expelled by Egyptians under the leadership of Ahmose, who became Pharaoh. Ahmose's name sounds like "Brother of Moses" in Hebrew, and later storytellers could then have filled in the details on who "Moses" had been. "We were driven out of Egypt by the Brother of Moses" could have been mangled into "We were led out of Egypt by Moses".

The Israelites certainly did not cross the Red Sea; that is a Septuagint misidentification of yam suph, "Reed Sea" or "sea of reeds". The fleeing Hyksos may have gone through a big marsh near Eilat, a marsh that seemed like a sea of reeds to them.

Ahmose and his troops likely lost interest at this point and decided to return to Egypt, but it must be said that that's not very dramatic. So some storytellers may have turned it into Moses parting the Reed Sea and then letting the water return to drown the Egyptian troops.

Celsus

For those who are interested, Mark Smith's The Origins of Biblical Monotheism is a great read. Can tell you about how to navigate the path through polytheism to henotheism to monolatry to monotheism that ancient Judah probably took. I wrote something of an overview of Smith's thesis in The Rise of God some years ago. I'd probably revise some bits today but it stands as it does for now.

As for a national origin myth coopted wholesale, one needs look no further than modern FYR Macedonia, which of course was a territory actually conquered by the Macedonians and yet now claims to be Macedonian, a dispute they still haven't resolved with Greece (which also has a territory called Macedonia which was approximately where Alexander the Great came from).