18 Facts About The Exodus

Biblical The Exodus is central in Judaism, with it being recounted daily in Jewish prayers and celebrated in festivals such as Passover.

Story of the Exodus is told in the first half of Exodus, with the remainder recounting the 1st year in the wilderness, and followed by a narrative of 39 more years in the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the last four of the first five books of the Bible .

The Exodus begins with the death of Joseph and the ascension of a new pharaoh "who did not know Joseph" .

The Exodus is found and adopted by Pharaoh's daughter, who names him Moses.

The Exodus instructs the Israelites to take a lamb on the 10th day of the month, slaughter it on the 14th, and daub its blood on their doorposts and lintels, and to observe the Passover meal that night, the night of the full moon.

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Climax of the Exodus is the covenant between God and the Israelites mediated by Moses at Sinai: Yahweh will protect the Israelites as his chosen people for all time, and the Israelites will keep Yahweh's laws and worship only him.

The majority position is that the biblical The Exodus narrative has some historical basis, although there is little of historical worth in it.

The biblical The Exodus narrative is best understood as a founding myth of the Jewish people, providing an ideological foundation for their culture and institutions, not an accurate depiction of the history of the Israelites.

The Bible did not mention the names of any of the pharaohs involved in the Exodus narrative, making it difficult for modern scholars to match Egyptian history and the biblical narrative.

Evidence in favor of historical traditions forming a background to the Exodus myth include the documented movements of small groups of Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples into and out of Egypt during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, some elements of Egyptian folklore and culture in the Exodus narrative, and the names Moses, Aaron and Phinehas, which seem to have an Egyptian origin.

The Exodus narrative was most likely further altered and expanded under the influence of the return from the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE.

Some earliest evidence for Judahite traditions of the exodus is found in Psalm 78, which portrays the Exodus as beginning a history culminating in the building of the temple at Jerusalem.

The psalm's version of the Exodus contains some important differences from what is found in the Pentateuch: there is no mention of Moses, there are only seven plagues in Egypt, and the manna is described as "food of the mighty" rather than as bread in the wilderness.

Nadav Na'aman argued for other signs that the Exodus was a tradition in Judah before the destruction of the northern kingdom, including the Song of the Sea and Psalm 114, as well as the great political importance that the narrative came to assume there.

The second theory, associated with Joel P Weinberg and called the "Citizen-Temple Community", is that the Exodus story was composed to serve the needs of a post-exilic Jewish community organized around the Temple, which acted in effect as a bank for those who belonged to it.

The Exodus is invoked daily in Jewish prayers and celebrated each year during the Jewish holidays of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot.

The fringes worn at the corners of traditional Jewish prayer shawls are described as a physical reminder of the obligation to observe the laws given at the climax of The Exodus: "Look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord" .

The festivals associated with the Exodus began as agricultural and seasonal feasts but became completely subsumed into the Exodus narrative of Israel's deliverance from oppression at the hands of God.