The climax of the Exodus is the covenant (binding legal agreement) between God and the Israelites mediated by Moses at Sinai: Yahweh will protect the Israelites as his chosen people for all time, and the Israelites will keep Yahweh's laws and worship only him. The covenant is described in stages: at Exodus 24:3–8 the Israelites agree to abide by the "book of the covenant" that Moses has just read to them; shortly afterwards God writes the "words of the covenant" – the Ten Commandments – on stone tablets; and finally, as the people gather in Moab to cross into Canaan, the land God has promised them, Moses makes a new covenant between Yahweh and the Israelites "beside the covenant he made with them at Horeb" (Deuteronomy 29:1). The laws are set out in a number of codes: Ethical Decalogue (i.e., the Ten Commandments), Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5; The Book of the Covenant, Exodus 20:22–23:3; Ritual Decalogue, Exodus 34; The ritual laws of Leviticus 1–6 and Numbers 1–10; The Holiness Code, Leviticus 17–26; Deuteronomic Code, Deuteronomy 12–26. Origins and historicity There are two main positions on the historicity of the Exodus in modern scholarship. The majority position is that the biblical Exodus narrative has some historical basis, although there is little of historical worth in it. The other position, often associated with the school of Biblical minimalism, is that the biblical exodus traditions are the invention of the exilic and post-exilic Jewish community, with little to no historical basis. The biblical Exodus narrative is best understood as a founding myth of the Jewish people, providing an ideological foundation for their culture and institutions, not an accurate depiction of the history of the Israelites. The view that the biblical narrative is essentially correct unless it can explicitly be proved wrong (Biblical maximalism) is today held by "few, if any [...] in mainstream scholarship, only on the more fundamentalist fringes." There is no direct evidence for any of the people or Exodus events in non-biblical ancient texts or in archaeological remains, and this has led most scholars to omit the Exodus events from comprehensive histories of Israel. Reliability of the biblical account Mainstream scholarship no longer accepts the biblical Exodus account as history for a number of reasons. Most scholars agree that the Exodus stories were written centuries after the apparent setting of the stories. The Book of Exodus itself attempts to