I completed my historical evidence for the Exodus. The exodus is simply one facet of the well-known Hyksos expulsion of the 16th century. The primary reason people claim to find no evidence for it is that they claim it was the 14th or 13th century for spurious reasons. But this discounts the testimony of Judges, Solomon, Manetho (in Josephus), and Ptolemy of Mendes (in Tatian), who all refer to Moses; and the testimony of the exodus event from contemporaries like Ahmose I, Ahmes the mathematician, Hatshepsut, Ramses II, and the Hearst Papyrus. The exodus was one big part of the sudden historical change from the contemporary 15th and 17th dynasties to the New Kingdom of the 18th.
Other notes: Thank you for mentioning Mot and Yam, because while I was familiar with their Hebrew meaning I didn't know the Ugaritic history behind them. They deserve investigation too. In terms of tying to a spring festival, there was no connection demonstrated (same for the earlier Dumuzid/Neti saga where Inanna gets denuded trying to recover Dumuzid); there was only a late theory that Baal's connection with the rain cycle was recalled in spring, which was not accepted as mainstream. So they're more in a mythopoeia limbo where the whole story is incomplete but people are trying to weave what parts they have.
The problem with JEDPR is that there is no disunity in the MT where a knife can successfully be inserted between Yah and El, they are never treated as separate gods. You could divide El from Baal while at other times identifying El with Baal, but that's because they are both titles in the earliest Hebrew (apparently the names are more personalized in Ugaritic so they're always separated). There's just no Tanakh text or forebear text that speaks of any equal-opportunity pantheon at all. So to claim that the source is polytheist honors neither the text nor polytheism nor the legend of Abram as iconoclast.
I also found an Egyptian Iah, who appears to be a syncretization of Yah that makes him primarily the moon god as squeezed into the pantheon. This too will reward study.
I completed my historical evidence for the Exodus. The exodus is simply one facet of the well-known Hyksos expulsion of the 16th century. The primary reason people claim to find no evidence for it is that they claim it was the 14th or 13th century for spurious reasons. But this discounts the testimony of Judges, Solomon, Manetho (in Josephus), and Ptolemy of Mendes (in Tatian), who all refer to Moses; and the testimony of the exodus event from contemporaries like Ahmose I, Ahmes the mathematician, Hatshepsut, Ramses II, and the Hearst Papyrus. The exodus was one big part of the sudden historical change from the contemporary 15th and 17th dynasties to the New Kingdom of the 18th.
Other notes: Thank you for mentioning Mot and Yam, because while I was familiar with their Hebrew meaning I didn't know the Ugaritic history behind them. They deserve investigation too. In terms of tying to a spring festival, there was no connection demonstrated (same for the earlier Dumuzid/Neti saga where Inanna gets denuded trying to recover Dumuzid); there was only a late theory that Baal's connection with the rain cycle was recalled in spring, which was not accepted as mainstream. So they're more in a mythopoeia limbo where the whole story is incomplete but people are trying to weave what parts they have.
The problem with JEDPR is that there is no disunity in the MT where a knife can successfully be inserted between Yah and El, they are never treated as separate gods. You could divide El from Baal while at other times identifying El with Baal, but that's because they are both titles in the earliest Hebrew (apparently the names are more personalized in Ugaritic so they're always separated). There's just no Tanakh text or forebear text that speaks of any equal-opportunity pantheon at all. So to claim that the source is polytheist honors neither the text nor polytheism nor the legend of Abram as iconoclast.
I also found an Egyptian Iah, who appears to be a syncretization of Yah that makes him primarily the moon god as squeezed into the pantheon. This too will reward study.