In my review of Israelite material in the Bible, I began with texts from Judges and Genesis. These texts grapple with a tradition in which Israel consisted of separate peoples that cooperated or competed on the basis of a larger affiliation. This tradition became crystallized into the Bible's persistent scheme of Israel's twelve tribes – counted differently depending on the occasion. Most often, however, Israelite narrative presents Israel as a single body, and its collective political character is expressed only in its function as a group that is distinct from its leaders. This collective character is the norm throughout the older Moses material in Exodus and Numbers; it marks the core accounts of conquest under Joshua; and it defines what Saul rules as the first king of Israel. Each of these clusters calls for attention and will be addressed in a separate chapter.

The most difficult of these Israelite narrative traditions is the cluster involving Moses, because it is particularly complex. In final form, the affairs of Moses fill the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, a large portion of which are devoted to various collections of his religious instruction, or tôrâ. This teaching comes to play a central role in defining the postmonarchic community of Judah's survivors, and the question of whether it has roots in Israel is important but secondary to the task of evaluating the Bible's primary narrative. The Moses narrative itself is found mainly in Exodus and Numbers. In the first, Moses brings Israel out of Egypt to a mountain in the wilderness to the east; in the second, he leads them from the mountain into the land of Moab east of the Jordan River, after the people refuse a direct assault on the land of Canaan (Numbers 13–14). The book of Deuteronomy begins in chapters 1–3 with a brief history of how the people found themselves east of the Jordan, a section constructed from story elements that overlap with material found in Exodus and Numbers.