It's the latest from Richard Elliot Friedman, who's an absolute giant in biblical scholarship, but it hasn't seen a lot of mainstream circulation yet, so the best I could find was a New York Times review of Friedman's The Exodus:

>We know that some central figures in the biblical account have Egyptian names: Moses, Aaron, Phinehas, Hophni. All eight such names, Friedman notes, belong to Levites. For it was the Levites who left. The Exodus story is really the tale of how the people we call Levites left Egypt and joined up with the Israelites already in Canaan. To support this reconstruction, Friedman relies on several converging lines of evidence.
>
>Why conclude the Levites were the ones who left Egypt? Well, in the Song of the Sea right after leaving Egypt (Exodus 15), the word “Israel” is never used. Various Egyptian practices and themes appear in Levitical sources of the Bible — and none appear in the non-Levitical sources. And each — Levites and Israelites — has a distinct name for God. The name El is of Canaanite origin and was used by the indigenous Israelites before the Levites arrived. The other, Yahweh, we find in the priestly (i.e. Levitical) sections of the Bible and was brought with them. Neither is discarded; rather they are combined and both used for the God of Israel. In other words, the Levite tradition was added to the Israelite tradition and together they formed the way the people refer to God.
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>Friedman also argues that the Bible’s preoccupation with the stranger is not from the Israelites who, after all, already lived in Canaan. Rather it is a product of the Levite experience of wandering and eventual acceptance into the people of Israel. (“Fifty-two out of 52 references to aliens occur in Levite sources.”) If Friedman is correct that the laws about the treatment of slaves and the story of the plagues and Exodus itself are from Levite sources, we owe to the Levites some of our most humane and influential ideas.

u/franks-and-beans · 3 points r/AskBibleScholars

Apparently I can't post this as a direct reply, but:

Richard Elliott Friedman's new book The Exodus talks quite a bit about this topic. I found this part of the book not quite so interesting to me personally so I won't try to muff my way through a detailed explanation, but in short according to Friedman it started with the Levites, the group he proposes as the only ones who were actually enslaved in Egypt and left for Canaan as the book of Exodus describes. When the Levites arrived in Canaan they were allowed to assimilate into the lands owned by the other tribes. The Levites brought with them the idea of YHWH and as the priest and teacher class were able to integrate the idea that their YHWH (their only god) and the god the Israelites worshiped, El, were one and the same. They worshiped no other gods at this point, hence "monotheism". I generalize of course, but this is the basic chain of events. Read the book for the details.

Luckily the book as has a lengthy free preview on the topic on Amazon although I didn't look to see how many pages on this topic could actually be read in free preview.

Here's a link: The Exodus.

u/jc4hokies · 3 points r/DebateReligion

Jewish scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, in The Exodus, suggests that the Exodus involved only Levites. Its history propagated through all of Hebrew culture through Levites role as priests.

excerpts from a shorter interview:

> Levites have names that come from Egypt. Other Israelites don’t.

> This is also significant because the architecture of the Tabernacle and its surrounding courtyard matches that of the battle tent of Pharaoh Rameses II, for which we have archaeological evidence, as was shown by Professor Michael Homan in a brilliant combination of archaeology and text (To Your Tents, O Israel, 2005).

> Likewise, only the Levite authors emphasize that males have to be circumcised, which was an Egyptian practice.

> And the Levite authors are also the ones who explicitly insist that Israel must not mistreat aliens (foreign residents).

> One of the Levites’ main tasks as priests was to teach Torah to the Israelite people. Naturally, when the Levites taught Torah, they taught the tradition they had brought with them out of Egypt.

u/Fochinell · 3 points r/Judaism

All I can offer up is Richard Elliot Friedman’s new book The Exodus in which he hypothesizes that the Exodus out of Egypt actually happened though it was accomplished by the Levites. The rest of us who would later become “The Jews” were already in Canaan clobbering the other Canaanite tribes who desperately needed a good clobbering. Quite provocative.

I’d always understood that when Moses was attributed to leading the former Hebrew slaves of Egypt within sight of what would become Israel, the Trojan War was taking place hundreds of miles away to the Northeast.

We only have Scripture, not a functional time machine to see for ourselves.

u/ummmbacon · 2 points r/AskHistorians

The first question one would have to answer is is the account of the Exodus accurate, historically.

There is much debate about this and scholars fall on varying sides from 'didn't happen at all' (Finkelstein and Silberman) to 'probably happened but was not the same in number' (Friedman and some others).

The most interesting book I have read on this recently is Friedman's Exodus^1 which argues for the arrival of 2 main groups inside the 'Holy Land' the second later group being the Levites who were in Egypt/From Egypt although whether they were slaves is still some debate. Which Friedman goes into, and notes examples of items like they had knowledge of Egyptian brickmaking techniques compared to Canaanite techniques. Moses is an Egyptian name, he gives some other examples however I don't have the text in front of me at the moment.

The early tribes in Israel would have come (or risen to power) and conquered/Mixed with the tribes already in Canaan and taken on some of their deities, some of the early types would have been El and Baal, for example, we note that some of the early creation stories map to Canaanite creation stories.

The earliest person we know of to accept the Israelite religion was Abraham as per the Torah itself, and there is evidence for someone like an Abraham around 1800 B.C.E. But there's no direct connection. What we can see is the common earliest reference to Israel as a unique entity which is in the Merneptah Stele, which dates to around 1200 BCE, although some scholars have identified a possible reference to Israel (the text is not complete, however) on a pillar in Egypt going back as far as 1400 BCE.^1.

So we know that the Israelites spread out and mixed with Canaanite cultures and were a part of them but eventually, the culture (and religion) of the Israelites eventually won out and developed into its own distinct religion. This would have been in the time of the Iron Age I (1200-1000 BCE). Going back to Friedman here, he shows genetic and historical evidence that the Levites come in and adapted themselves as another Tribe and planted the Exodus story among the existing (forming) Israelites. This Iron Age I would have been when this happened. This Yahewism would have been the basis for monotheism. This could have been from the Levites who brought the YHVH diety with them from the Midianites and supplanted it over the others.

However, there were pockets of idolatrous worship especially on the North for some time. Statuettes of different home or hearth goddesses have been found near Tel Dan for example in the Temple there. This Temple in Northern Israel would not have been condoned by the people in Judea and would have been in a contest with it (Schiffman^3) as the Priests in Judea (First Temple) would have felt the only true Temple was the one in Jerusalem. Really some forms of idolatry continued into the First Temple period and in the Second Temple period, it would have most likely been Monolatry (accepting that others deities could exist along theirs). The clearest case for this is the changes to the Shema (Duet 6:4) which at that time read: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” this statement defines the deity YHVH as the one for Israel although it allowed for other cultures to have theirs as well. This is shown in sources such as the Septuagint and in the Nash Papyrus in the Second Temple period. An amulet found in Halbturn, Austria called The Halbturn amulet shows the current version (in Greek) as we now know it to be “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

So to sum all that up, the historical evidence points to a polytheistic culture that developed into a monotheistic culture.

>Because in between the Exodus and the Promised Land it wasn't strictly Judaism yet, was it?

Which type of Judaism? Current Judaism is Rabbinic Judaism which takes the written tradition (Torah) plus the Oral Tradition (Talmud/Mishna) this developed most notably in the Babylonian Exile, prior to that there was the Temple Cult.

u/katapetasma · 2 points r/ConservativeBible

The Exodus by Richard Elliot Friedman is a good moderate-liberal academic-light book on the historicity of the Exodus/Conquest. Probably can't beat Lost World of Israelite Conquest by John Walton.

u/AcademicHistorian · 0 points r/atheism

>>If you want to insist that historians do not know how to do history I never said that. Yet another logical fallacy to add to your pile.

That wouldn't be a logical fallacy. Also, I've actually studied logical fallacies, I do not believe at any point in this entire discussion I have been guilty of one. Quite a lot of people though if they try to be 1) unpleasant, 2) give the illusion of appearing to have the upper-hand in a dispute will charge their interlocutor with falling fowl of logical fallacies when none have occurred.

Anyway, if you want to hold the evidence of early Christianity to a different standard to other periods of history, or different topics. That is your choice, but that is not how scholarship or history works. Historians don't retrospectively decide that since the story of Jesus became important to world history that he should be held to different standards of historicity than anyone else in antiquity. If you are consistent you will believe pretty much everything and everyone from ancient history didn't exist, (and likely all historians are all half-assed liars.)

>>What I actually made clear is that a half-assed "historical-critical" methodology is INSUFFICIENT to establish anything to a level of hard scientific certainty. Which any legitimate historian (without an agenda) would and should absolutely agree with. Historians should not and cannot claim to be scientists. Which you tacitly acknowledge with your comment about working "to formulate the historical-critical method".

I never said history can reach the same validity as, say, proving gravity or the hard sciences. I, literally, never argued that. I have no dispute with you about that. If you want to know, I think history gives scant reason to believe in a miraculous Jesus and if people are building their faith on that, they are wrong. But, as every historian will tell you, the only theory that makes sense of the evidence is a historical, but human, Jesus.

I cannot begin to understand why you think that I reference the historical-critical method you believe that is me tactically positioning the scholarly study of history to equate to a hard science. I can only believe you don't know what "historical-critical method" is. Google it.

If you want to read about the shift in archaeologists opinion regarding the Exodus, please see, e.g. http://exodus.calit2.net/ or https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319047676 or https://www.amazon.com/Exodus-Richard-Elliott-Friedman/dp/0062565249 or https://www.academia.edu/12144234/Egyptologists_and_the_Israelite_Exodus_from_Egypt

It is now the acknowledged consensus among archaeologists and Egyptologists (not Biblical historians, although them too) that there is a historical basis for the Exodus, but it is smaller than the Bible stated.

Professor Friedman by the way is a favourite of Bible skeptics, mainly as his book "Who Wrote the Bible" shows the layers of human scribal activity in the Torah (just in case you want, although I suppose you will do it anyway) to try to suggest he, and pretty much all other historians are wrong and all faith-based.

As, again, you should see, despite your emotional reaction, I was telling the truth, and the amateur websites you've obtained your information from (or just what you presumed) is in error.

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