> Completely off topic, but I thought I remembered reading somewhere
> that recent scholarship disputed the whole slavery-in-Egypt origin of
> the Israelites. I can't remember the justification, though...
That's true. There's a variety of alternative explanations, but the one that I find most attractive holds that Israel emerges in the 13th century BCE not from ethnic migration but from (wait for it) class struggle...
The argument that Israel began in a slave revolt ("hebrew" meaning originally "outlaw") was sketched by George Mendenhall a good while ago and is magisterially set out by Norman Gottwald in *The Tribes of Yahweh* and elsewhere. There's been a recent backlash against this view, said backlash not untinged by contemporary political considerations. --CGE