Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary

by Kenneth W. Daniels

That the story of Moses as recounted in the Pentateuch is a late literary construction is supported by a recent and increasingly accepted hypothesis put forward on other grounds, that there was no mass immigration of Israel into Canaan from outside at all! ... [This] view has been supported on both archaeological and sociological grounds. These scholars and those who have followed them maintain that there was no occupation of the land from outside. Rather, the later Israelites were actually descendants of part of the Canaanite population ... There was no "conquest" of Canaan by immigrants, nor was there a gradual infiltration by nomads ... Modern archaeological research has revealed that there was neither a cultural nor a linguistic break which would suggest the arrival of a

I've never considered this before. It needs a little research.