Describe the relationship between historical fact and religious belief, as it relates to the Exodus.

the founding myth of the Israelites. The scholarly consensus is that there was no Exodus as described in the Bible.

Modern archaeologists believe that the Israelites were indigenous to Canaan and were never in ancient Egypt, and if there is any historical basis to the Exodus it can apply only to a small segment of the population of Israelites at large.Nevertheless, there is also a general understanding that something must lie behind the traditions, even if Moses and the Exodus narrative belong to collective cultural memory rather to history. According to Avraham Faust "most scholars agree that the narrative has a historical core, and that some of the highland settlers came, one way or another, from Egypt."

Egyptologist Jan Assmann suggests that the Exodus narrative combines, among other things, the expulsion of the Hyksos, the religious revolution of Akhenaten, the experiences of the Habiru (gangs of antisocial elements found throughout the ancient Near East), and the large-scale migrations of the Sea Peoples into "a coherent story that is fictional as to its composition but historical as to some of its components."

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