Origins of Judaism century BCE, including the Torah (the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the historical works, and much of the prophetic and Wisdom literature. The Bible narrates the discovery of a legal book in the Temple in the seventh century BCE, which the majority of scholars see as some form of Deuteronomy and regard as pivotal to the development of the scripture. The growing collection of scriptures was translated into Greek in the Hellenistic period by the Jews of the Egyptian diaspora, while the Babylonian Jews produced the court tales of the Book of Daniel (chapters 1–6 of Daniel
The Exodus were Canaanite rulers of the Egyptian Delta in the 16th century BCE, may have formed the basis of the descent into Egypt and the exodus. The meaning a reader takes away from a text depends on his or her understanding of the literary "type" to which it belongs: as one scholar puts it in his discussion of the Genesis creation myth, "it makes an enormous difference whether the first chapters of Genesis are read as scientific cosmology, creation myth, or historical saga" (Wood, 1990). There is an almost universal consensus among scholars that the Exodus story is best understood as