The Ark of the Covenant - a sign that the Creator found us...

[grantcart]

2. Well

I am sorry but I never thought I would find such a primitive post at DU.

The Ark of the Covenant and the entire Exodus mythology was written, as most ancient sacred Old and New Testament scripture was written, during the Babylonian captivity when the Priestly class was allowed by the Babylonian captors to edit an ancient history.

These captives sought to create a narrative that would give meaning to their present existential reality and went back and crafted a narrative from dozens of oral traditions in a way that would make their present situation, and their crises of being captives and abandoned meaningful.

You can learn of the Babylonian Captivity here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_captivity

You can learn of the authorship and other analysis of Exodus here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Exodus#Authorship

According to current thinking, a first draft (the Yahwist) was probably written in the 6th century BCE during the Babylonian exile; this was supplemented and completed as a post-Exilic final edition (the Priestly source) at the very end of the 6th century or during the 5th century,[9] and further adjustments and minor revisions continued down to the end of the 4th century.[10]

[edit] Genre and sources

The book of Exodus is not historical narrative in any modern sense.[11] Modern history writing requires the critical evaluation of sources, and does not accept God as a cause of events.[12] But in Exodus, everything is presented as the work of God, who appears frequently in person, and the historical setting is only very hazily sketched.[13] The purpose of the book is not to record what really happened, but to reflect the historical experience of the exile community in Babylon and later Jerusalem, facing foreign captivity and the need to come to terms with their understanding of God.[14]

Although mythical elements are not so prominent in Exodus as in Genesis, the echoes of ancient legends are crucial to understanding the book's origins and purpose: for example, the story of the infant Moses's salvation from the Nile has its basis in an earlier legend of king Sargon, while the story of the parting of the Red Sea trades on Mesopotamian creation mythology. Similarly, the Covenant Code (the law code in Exodus 20:22-23:33) has notable similarities in both content and structure with the Laws of Hammurabi. These influences serve to reinforce the conclusion that the Book of Exodus originated in the exiled Jewish community of 6th-century Babylon, but not all the sources are Mesopotamian: the story of Moses's flight to Midian following the murder of the Egyptian overseer may draw on the Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe.[15]