Exodus: from Egypt to Sinai

"Like beautifully layered rock formations lining the walls of a desert canyon, so is the Biblical text. Story is piled upon story until the foundations are invisible. Those foundations tell a different story—one that only a trained geologist can tease from the rock; one that only a Biblical philologist, trained in the dissection of literature, can find in the text. In the earliest version of the Exodus account the Israelites were not enslaved, only prevented from leaving; there were not ten plagues, only three; and the firstborn Egyptians weren't killed because the Israelites left after the plague of darkness. Only 3000 of them left because that is how many Israelites there were, not 600,000; and perhaps most shockingly of all, when they arrived at Mount Sinai they received only seven commandments, not ten. Exodus: From Egypt to Sinai traces the development of this uniquely divergent account and its slow development into the canonical text of the Book of Exodus"--back cover.