Which Jews Came Out of Egypt? And When Did God Get Out of Our Heads?

In his recent book, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters, Richard Elliott Friedman tackles the question of whether the biblical exodus really took place. He concludes that the narrative is no fiction but is based on a true story, except that only just the tribe of Levi, and not all the Israelites, had been slaves to Pharaoh; then, he argues, after the Israelites returned to the land, Levite religious traditions, some of Egyptian origin, mixed with indigenous ones to give birth to the Torah’s account. In another new book, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times, James Kugel explores how the biblical God went from being immanent to being transcendent and thereupon stopped talking to people. In his review of these two books, Benjamin Sommer writes: