Documentary hypothesis with the following books, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, as Deuteronomistic History. There is a growing recognition that Genesis developed apart from the Exodus stories until joined to it by the Priestly writer. The Torah (or Pentateuch) is the collective name for the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. According to tradition they were dictated by God to Moses, but when modern critical scholarship began to be applied to the Bible it was discovered that the Pentateuch was not the unified text one would expect from a single author. As a result, the Mosaic
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