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The point may be added that Israel was already some sort of social entity by about 1208, the time of the reference to Israel in a stela praising Pharaoh Merneptah's victories. So Israel must have had some traditions predating 1208. Although there is no further means available to confirm the exodus tradition, it is possible that it existed among some Israelites already by this time. In short, the exodus seems to belong to Israel's earliest traditions, and its historicity in some form cannot be rejected or assumed to be false at the outset.

Within the non-Deuteronomistic material in 1 Kings 6- 7, some features suggest that the text itself, as opposed to what it refers to, may have been written down in the eighth centw·y. Because these features have largely gone unnoticed, some specifics need to be mentioned at this point. The first set of features involves Akkadian loan words into the Hebrew of 1 Kings 6- 7. chaz) in 1 Kings 6:10 (rendered "joined" in the NRSV). This word's sense "covered" is regarded as a "loan-meaning" from Akkadian into Hebrew (noted by Mankowski 2001 and Cogan 2001).

27-30) . A number of features in this chapter recall Deuteronomy. For example, 1 Kings 8:9 mentions the tablets of stone, which Moses had placed inside the ark at Mount Horeb, which is also Deuteronomy's word for Sinai. Also based on the other features of this prayer shared with Deuteronomy (provided in great detail by Cogan 2001), scholars now generally argue that this prayer is exilic or post exilic. In the memory of 1 Kings 8, the Temple is no longer an expression so much of divine warriorship, blessing, and kingship-in short, power and presence.