Hi @Mark, @jongarvey, @Guy_Coe, @gbrooks9, @deuteroKJ, @AllenWitmerMiller and @Patrick:
Speaking of the Patriarchs, here are a couple of brief excerpts from the Wikipedia article on Abraham:
In the early and middle 20th century, leading archaeologists such as William F. Albright and biblical scholars such as Albrecht Alt believed that the patriarchs and matriarchs were either real individuals or believable composites of people who lived in the “patriarchal age”, the 2nd millennium BCE. But, in the 1970s, new arguments concerning Israel’s past and the biblical texts challenged these views; these arguments can be found in Thomas L. Thompson’s The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), and John Van Seters’ Abraham in History and Tradition (1975). Thompson, a literary scholar, based his argument on archaeology and ancient texts. His thesis centered on the lack of compelling evidence that the patriarchs lived in the 2nd millennium BCE, and noted how certain biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions and concerns. Van Seters examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names, social milieu, and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations.[7] By the beginning of the 21st century, archaeologists had given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac or Jacob credible historical figures.[8]
The Abraham story cannot be definitively related to any specific time, and it is widely agreed that the patriarchal age, along with the exodus and the period of the judges, is a late literary construct that does not relate to any period in actual history.[4] A common hypothesis among scholars is that it was composed in the early Persian period (late 6th century BCE) as a result of tensions between Jewish landowners who had stayed in Judah during the Babylonian captivity and traced their right to the land through their “father Abraham”, and the returning exiles who based their counter-claim on Moses and the Exodus tradition.[5]
Regarding the Exodus, I’ve been discussing the arguments for and against its historicity, over on my thread on Jesus, Moses and Elijah, so let me just say this. If you’re going to accept an historical Exodus, then the version propounded by Richard Elliott Friedman is your best bet. For a good summary of his argument, see this review here. Friedman thinks only ONE tribe came from Egypt: the Levites. The other tribes already lived in Israel, and were well-established there: as Friedman points out in his book, the archaeological evidence for their continuous presence there is overwhelming. Friedman “agrees with the scholarly consensus that the biblical story as we have it was composed in the first millennium, but he argues persuasively that this story contains historical memories that go back much further.” Thoughts?