gave him to sacrifice his son. Such stories, whether true or not, represent the turning away from idolatry. As a result, Abraham is considered the founding figure of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. For the scribes in Babylon, simply writing down stories of their ancestors was not enough. Their great challenge was to make sense of their own world. How did such a promised people of God end up near extinction in Babylon? In paganism, if you are defeated it was because someone else's god was more powerful than yours. But, with monotheism, if someone is suffering, then the individual must have done something wrong. This new book describes to the Judeans what they did to lose God's favor. Moses The documentary recounts Moses's encounter with the flaming bush and his involvement with the freeing of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. the Exodus is where the great epic of Israel starts. According to William G. Dever, archeologist, the desert can only support a few thousand nomads, not the purported 3-million that legend tells us accompanied Moses. Furthermore, only 1 or 2 sites mentioned in Exodus have been identified. For the scribes to write an accurate historical account of what occurred 700 years earlier was improbable. What was probable was bringing to text the eternal lessons that the story of Moses taught. The Ten Commandments To the scribes, the most important truths of all were how God gave Moses the laws that the people were to preserve for all time. God gave them to Moses in a face-to-face meeting. The revolution in the Ten Commandments was that God cared about how human beings treated each other. One honors God by treating well the person standing in front of him. The commandments were viewed as a legal contract where God will bless an individual if the individual would follow His rules. After Sinai, all the stories of the Israelites would be whether or not they had obeyed God's commandments. Canaan Archeologist feel, through the study of pottery fragments, that the Israelites did not invade Canaan, but were really Canaanites themselves. They were the lower classes within Canaanite society that inhabited the countryside. As they told their stories over and over, those stories helped shape a culture. After they became a people, they continued telling the stories about the good and evil in every human heart. Book of Deuteronomy By 620 BC, according to