re: #90 wheat-dogghazi

There is also the whole question of whether Moses was a real historical figure …

I’m pretty sure the academic community (at least in the modern scholarly world, not those at various fundamentalist Bible schools) have dismissed the Exodus story as being, at best, historical fiction. Fundamentalists decry so called “minimalists”, but if the evidence just isn’t there, it isn’t there.

The entire book of Genesis is a back-story, a way of giving a people a “history” in the sense of explaining they’re being a people, a group, who were more or less practicing the same basic religion (with variants.)

Devout Jews will no doubt also add that there are important moral lessons taught in these stories, and that might be true, but morality doesn’t need historical reality but rather does fine with a package of stories to communicate the ethics.