Book of Exodus, Scripture Portions
Standing
Concerns Era of Composition
Currently States A departure from Egypt, if placed historically at all, is usually located in the thirteenth century BCE. The book as written is dated by critical scholarship to the monarchic period and later, with the tabernacle chapters generally regarded as among the latest material in it.
Exodus narrates events traditionally dated to the second millennium BCE, but Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Georg Reimer, 1883) reads the text itself as compiled from sources written centuries later, in the first millennium BCE, rather than as a contemporary record of whatever events it describes. The method is source-critical, dating each identified literary strand by its theological outlook, legal concerns and points of contact with other datable material in Israel's history, independently of when the narrated events are traditionally placed. Wellhausen's original four-source scheme is no longer followed in its specific details, but his separation of the question into two distinct questions, when the events might have occurred and when the text describing them was composed, remains the field's working approach. Because the two questions are logically separate and the evidence bearing on each is different, a late compilation date for the text does not by itself settle when, or whether, the narrated events occurred.
Source Prolegomena to the History of Israel, Julius Wellhausen