The life of Moses as presented in Jewish tradition from four books of the Pentateuch (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) includes the following: a narrow escape from death while an infant, a privileged childhood in the royal household of the Egyptian Pharaoh, a revelation from Yahweh, command over the enslaved Israelites, a successful defeat of the Pharaoh, an escape with his people to the Sinai Peninsula, reception of the Ten Commandments and the entire Israelite law code from Yahweh, and continuance as the military leader until the Israelites are within sight of the Promised Land of Canaan. This is the kind of biography, though abbreviated, that one finds in standard Bible dictionaries (Berlin 1985, 655–59; Myers 1987, 731–32) along with the widely held but problematic tradition that Moses authored the entire Pentateuch. Both the “biography” and “authorship” assumptions require commonsense examination. Elsewhere in these dictionaries, one can find discussion of the Documentary Hypothesis (Greenstein 1985, 985–86; Myers 1987, 156–57), still widely unknown to most readers. Though it was put forward more than 140 years ago and considerably adjusted since then, it provides perspectives for understanding the Moses narrative.

Corroborating evidence for Moses and the Exodus does not exist outside the Bible, but internal cultural allusions suggest the middle of the New Kingdom of Egypt (1550–1085 BCE) as the likely era of these events. More than a hundred calculations were made between the fourth and seventeenth centuries based on biblical genealogies to provide a chronology for events with little variation for the kingships of David and Solomon and the centuries immediately preceding it. Bishop James Ussher's calculations that were generally accepted until the late nineteenth century dated the reception of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai at 1491 BCE. More soundly based periodization (Mazar 1990, 232–39) places Moses and the Exodus a little later, within the Late Bronze Age IIA-B (1400–1200 BCE). Hebrew and Old Testament scholar John Bright (1972) placed the Exodus within this era at 1280; the New Jerusalem Bible places it at 1250. All such dates not only assume but inadvertently imply that the Bible is a historical book.

During the Enlightenment, Thomas Paine (1737–1809) noted the impossibility of Moses as author of the Pentateuch, showing rather decisively that it was composed much later.