Biblica_1:Layout 1 21-11-2011 12:59 Pagina 344 344 MARK LEUCHTER V. Implications for the Exodus Tradition The foregoing discussion sheds light on current discussions re- garding the Exodus as an historical event. Though the wide spectrum of Semitic experiences remained in the background of Israel’s na- tional consciousness and were eventually written into the Exodus nar- rative, the origins of the Exodus tradition itself are not to be found in the experience of a small group of Israelites who escaped from Egypt 96. They were experienced broadly through the regular conflict with Canaanite lowlanders heralding the memory of Egyptian hege- mony in the region, and Exod 15 reveals that these experiences were enshrined into an enduring myth and liturgy 97. This provides some explanation for why Exod 15 was positioned as the very apex of the Exodus narrative but does not in itself contain any reference to an actual Exodus from Egypt 98. The more familiar narrative traditions regarding the Exodus emerge from the poem’s influence on later writ- ers 99, but the poem itself conceives of the “Exodus” as a metaphorical and mythic representation of the settlement and defense of Israelite 96 For example, the putative “Moses group” discussed by N.K. GOTTWALD, The Tribes of Yahweh. A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 BCE (Maryknoll, NY 1979) 35-41. 97 See the similar implications in CROSS, CMHE, 143, though CROSS seems to have in mind a genuine confrontation with Egyptians (CMHE, 131- 132, 134, 137). Here I would offer an adjustment to J.J. COLLINS, “The De- velopment of the Exodus Tradition”, Religious Identity and the Invention of Tradition (eds. J.W. VAN HENTEN – A. HOUTENPEN) (STAR 3; Assen 2001) 150-152, that sees the Sinai tradition as rooted in historical experience while the Exodus myth arose only from fleeting and bleak memories into a cohe- sive tradition during Jeroboam’s reign. If the Exodus myth derives from the defense and settlement of the highlands by a league of clans with both Canaanite and Midianite-Kenite heritage (SCHLOEN, “Casus Belli”), then the Sinai tradition of the latter would have eventually been identified with the concept of the Ktlxn rh in Exod 15,17 as Kenite-Midianites integrated into early Israelite communities of lowland origins. The specifics of this process are perhaps beyond recovery, but it is not necessary to choose the Sinai tra- dition over the Exodus tradition as the more historically rooted of the two or to view them as completely independent concepts. 98 Pace S.C. RUSSELL, Images of Egypt, 148, 176. 99 E.g., the model argued by COLLINS (“Exodus Tradition”), M.D. OBLATH, “Of Pharaohs and Kings: Whence the Exodus?”, JSOT 87 (2000) 23-42, and others assigning the basic narrative to a Jeroboam propagandist.