As followup to this piece, I'll bring in Johanna Markind. The claim is that Exodus' core narratives, around Moses being drawn from the Nile and then drawing water abroad, and around Moses striking the overseer, and about the Nile flowing with blood, are legends like what Sargon II spread about his heroic Akkadian namesake. Traditionally Genesis 13; Exodus 16, 22-3; and Isaiah 30 had thought of Egypt as a refuge. And so modern-day Egyptian apologist Henry Aubin in The Rescue of Jerusalem.
But then Sennacherib shut Hezeqiah in Jerusalem "like a bird in his cage". The siege was lifted; but Sennacherib doesn't seem aware that Egypt had helped much. Markind, against Aubin, argues for a Surrender of Jerusalem. If the Assyrians would just content themselves with a garrison and an alliance, against the Nubians calling themselves Pharaoh (like the Ramessides did); Hezeqiah could stay on his throne.
If the Exodus 1-16 be antiEgyptian propaganda, this may go to explain how it wasn't always canon in Egyptian Judaism, which maintained the old Pesach as having nothing to do with any earlier "sojourn" by the Nile. And why nonJewish Egyptians don't seem to know the tale until Ptolemy of Mendes, Agartharch, and others. That half of the book would then fall along with Isaiah 9 and 19.
If the tale is from Hezeqiah, that is after the northern kingdom fell. There's no Elohist up to Exodus 16; green and blue here be merged. If to this farrago there be earlier sources in Hebrew, we can't get at them.
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