Historicity
The tradition of Moses as a lawgiver and culture hero of the Israelites can be traced to 8th or 7th century BCE in the Kingdom of Judah. Moses is a central figure in the Deuteronomist account of the origins of the Israelites, cast in a literary style of elegant flashbacks told by Moses. The Deuteronomist relies on earlier material that may date to the United Monarchy, so that the biblical narrative would be based on traditions that can be traced to about four centuries after the supposed lifetime of Moses.
The question of the historicity of the Exodus (specifically, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, identification of which would connect the biblical narrative to Egyptological chronology) has long been debated, without conclusive result. Manetho for instance in a distorted account reported in Josephus, states that Moses was originally Osarseph a renegade priest, who led a band of lepers out of Avaris (referred to as Raamses in the Bible).(Exodus 1:11)
Many biblical scholars are prepared to admit that there may be a historical core beneath the Exodus and Sinai traditions, even if the biblical narrative dramatizes by portraying as a single event what was more likely a gradual process of migration and conquest. Thus, the motif of "slavery in Egypt" reflects the historical situation of imperialist control of the Egyptian Empire over Canaan after the conquests of Ramesses II, which declined gradually during the 12th century under the pressure from the Sea Peoples and the general Bronze Age collapse. Israel Finkelstein points to the appearance of settlements in the central hill country around 1200 as the earliest of the known settlements of the Israelites. A cyclical pattern to these highland settlements, corresponding to the state of the surrounding cultures, suggests that the local Canaanites combined an agricultural and nomadic lifestyles. When Egyptian rule collapsed after the invasion of the Sea Peoples, the central hill country could no longer sustain a large nomadic population, so they went from nomadism to sedentism.
While the general narrative of the Exodus and the conquest of the Promised Land may be remotely rooted in historical events, the figure of Moses as a leader of the Israelites in these events cannot be substantiated. William Dever agrees with the Canaanite origin of the Israelites but allows for the possibility of some immigrants from Egypt among the early hilltop settlers, leaving open the possibility of a Moses-like figure in Transjordan ca 1250-1200.
Martin Noth holds that two different groups experienced the Exodus and Sinai events, and each group transmitted its own stories independently of the other one, writing that "The biblical story tracing the Hebrews from Egypt to Canaan resulted from an editor's weaving separate themes and traditions around a main character Moses, actually an obscure person from Moab." The Moabite king Mesha seems to have preserved another form of the name.
William Albright held a more favorable view towards the traditional views regarding Moses, and accepted the essence of the biblical story, as narrated between Exodus 1:8 and Deuteronomy 34:12, but recognized the impact that centuries of oral and written transmission have had on the account, causing it to acquire layers of accretions.
Biblical minimalists such as Philip Davies and Niels Peter Lemche regard the Exodus as a fiction composed in the Persian period or even later, without even the memory of a historical Moses.
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