722 BCE. Composition of the Torah narrative The revelation of God on Sinai appears to have originally been a tradition unrelated to the Exodus. Joel S. Baden noted that "[t]he seams [between the Exodus and Wilderness traditions] still show: in the narrative of Israel's rescue from Egypt there is little hint that they will be brought anywhere other than Canaan – yet they find themselves heading first, unexpectedly, and in no obvious geographical order, to an obscure mountain." In addition, there is widespread agreement that the revelation of the law in Deuteronomy was originally separate from the Exodus: the original version of Deuteronomy is generally dated to the 7th century BCE. The contents of the books of Leviticus and Numbers are late additions to the narrative by priestly sources. Scholars broadly agree that the publication of the Torah (or Pentateuch) took place in the mid-Persian period (the 5th century BCE), echoing a traditional Jewish view which gives Ezra, the leader of the Jewish community on its return from Babylon, a pivotal role in its promulgation. Many theories have been advanced to explain the composition of the first five books of the Bible, but two have been especially influential. The first of these, Persian Imperial authorisation, advanced by Peter Frei in 1985, is that the Persian authorities required the Jews of Jerusalem to present a single body of law as the price of local autonomy. Frei's theory was demolished at an interdisciplinary symposium held in 2000, but the relationship between the Persian authorities and Jerusalem remains a crucial question. The second theory, associated with Joel P. Weinberg and called the "Citizen-Temple Community", is that the Exodus story was composed to serve the needs of a post-exilic Jewish community organized around the Temple, which acted in effect as a bank for those who belonged to it. The books containing the Exodus story served as an "identity card" defining who belonged to this community (i.e., to Israel), thus reinforcing Israel's unity through its new institutions. Hellenistic Egyptian parallel narratives Writers in Greek and Latin during the Ptolemaic period (late 4th century BCE–late 1st century BCE) record several Egyptian tales of the expulsion of a group of foreigners that were connected to the Exodus. These tales often include elements of the Hyksos period and most are extremely anti-Jewish. The earliest non-biblical account is that of Hecataeus of Abdera (c. 320 BCE), as preserved in