The history and religion of the ancestral period connects to the subject matter of chapters 1 through 15 of Exodus. These chapters tell the history of the sons of Jacob and of the story of Israel in Egypt, the oppression the struggle for freedom, and the final liberation, and the opening section seems to preserve the memory of clan movements and social relationships which were later seen as a preparation for the decisive event of Exodus and the formation of the people of Israel; namely, the story of Moses. Chapters 14 and 15 concern the story of the parting of the Red Sea during the escape from Egypt, and these chapters also show the influence of the three writers and suggests how the three were put together into one narrative.
The historical antecedents to the stories in this early section of Exodus create problems for analysts and historians. The first reason for this derives from the fact that the stories have come down through a long process of oral and written tradition and have been shaped to confess faith in God. The beginning of Exodus also links directly with the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph as if there were a unified sense of nationhood for Israel which in fact did not then exist. The passages present an oversimplified picture of the history of Israel extending back into the ancestral period. A second reason why the story of Exodus offers difficulty for those trying a historical assessment developed from the fact that the only source for our knowledge of the ancestors of Israel comes from the biblical story itself, and this was written in a time far removed from the events. Archaeologists and historians note how impossible it is at this time to link any person or event in Genesis 12-50, the section to which the opening of Exodus is linked, to any person or event otherwise known from another source (Anderson, 1986, 27-28).
Most commentators assign sections of these passages (and on up into chapter 22) ...