exchristian

That's a great question, but it kind of needs to be set against the context of "when did Moses show up in Judaism." Because he may have been a very late addition.

There's a major religious reform described in the Bible under Josiah, where he literally kills and performed human sacrifice of the old priests, hides away all the artifacts of the Moses time like the Ark and anointing oil, gets rid of Yahweh's wife, destroys the golden calves in Bethel and Dan which Jeroboam set up, discovered a new book of laws, and institutes the Passover story.

You might notice that there's a parallelism between Josiah's reform in getting rid of old laws and bringing new laws while destroying golden calves and Moses breaking the old commandments and going to get new ones in response to the people worshipping a golden calf.

So we can reasonably regard at least some of the Moses stuff in the Bible as post dating Josiah given that it effectively mythologized his alleged reforms.

But the problem is, Josiah's reforms appear to at least be in part anachronistic.

In letters over a century after Josiah, the Jewish community in Elephantine in Egypt are writing back and forth to Jerusalem discussing the upcoming Passover period, and there's zero mention of any Moses or Passover story. There isn't even any evidence in the letters that the two separate festivals of the earlier Canaanite festival of unleavened bread and the Pesach lamb sacrifice have combined at this point.

The version of the Old Testament we have today is actually from quite late, maybe more like the 3rd century BCE. And as mentioned, there was a contemporary claim around that the tests had recently been altered.

And between the Greek test from around then and the surviving Hebrew text from later on, we can see that things like a duplicated story about Jeroboam going to Egypt and marrying the sister-in-law of the Pharoh, mirroring the event two chapters before where the king of Edom did the same, disappears by the time of the latter. So something funky is certainly going on.

But outside of being able to say that parts of the Moses narrative are actively being changed much later on then one might think, it's almost impossible to say how early on Moses is an integral part of Yahweh worship, Judah or the Israelites, etc.

We're effectively stuck with layers and layers of propaganda written by the victors, and while there may be hints of what lay earlier on underneath the layers, exactly when and who and what those layers represented is broadly a mystery.

All that said, I'm personally of the opinion that a historical Exodus as described by Greek and Egyptian sources with a multitude of different peoples occurred at the end of the 19th dynasty with the Anatolian/Aegean sea peoples and Libya, that a Mose/Mopsus was a central figure to those events, and that sometime following the forced relocation of those peoples into the Southern Levant by Ramses III that there was syncretism with the Israelites/Judah with several rounds of reworking until the version we are left with today. But that effectively the Biblical narrative is a distant echo of the underlying story.

The populist features in the events of the sea peoples retaking their countries of origin and the descriptions of changes during the foreign conquest of Egypt at the end of the 19th dynasty would very loosely suggest that a paradigm change of salvation from being extremely classist in Egypt (you needed to spend massive resources on your tomb to try to impress your way into the afterlife) to something like the universalism Zalmoxis was bringing to a Thrace ("everyone sitting here at dinner won't actually die") might be plausible. But the most primary evidence of that time reflects a rejection of religious structures, with the conquers allegedly "making the gods like men" in keeping with the alleged Phonecian creation story of that period where the pantheon was actually described as just humans who had invented stuff culturally deified after death. So the salvation stuff could have simply been a later return to theology after a period of what was effectively atheism?

In Herodotus 2.47-48 you can actually see a bit of similarity between festivals of Osiris/Isis and the later Passover festival. He described a sacrifice of a pig near the entryway of the home on a full moon. Replace the pig with a lamb and you have something remarkably similar to the Passover story's sacrifice for the 10th plague.

Did Judaism have any earlier influence from Osiris mythology? Maybe? But there's speculation that Osiris came to Egypt from Libyan beliefs, and Libya is very much involved in the events at the end of the 19th dynasty, so it could instead be that Manetho saw the Greek claims of Orphic mythos as having been pulling from Osiris rather than as syncretism of a shared source between both Egypt and the later Thracian beliefs. Or something else entirely.

And part of the problem is that whatever early Judaism was, at least half the equation has been torn out with the reforms removing the goddess worship. Yahweh is a minor local god that's consort to major goddesses. Early parts of the Bible have a ton of indicators of empowered women with authority. But that's all stripped out. And the mystery traditions are all very goddess focused. So it's entirely possible there was greater similarity in the parts that were removed.

For example, Herodotus credited a women only multi-day festival that was celebrated all over the Mediterranean as originating with the daughters of Danaus fleeing Egypt. In Judges 11, you can see the mention at the end of a multi-day women only festival in Judaism, explained with what's effectively the same story as Idomenus's return home to Crete from the Trojan War sacrificing his kid based on sacrificing the first thing he sees. But this festival disappears from practice and history other than this mention in Judges.

Much like how Judges 18 preserves a tradition of Moses's descendent as priest of Dan, contrary to the claims elsewhere the priest should be from Aaron's line. Which again disappears from anything in Judaism, but is extremely curious if Yigael Yadin's theory the Denyen sea people in Adana were the lost tribe of Dan given that there's two separate bilingual inscriptions by the Denyen in the 8th century BCE claiming their rulers belong to a "House of Mopsus."

It's a bit like reconstructing what a shredded document soaked in water until it's a giant ball of mush might have once said.

TL;DR: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The "scholarly position" on Moses exclusively engages with the Biblical account and does not engage with the Greek and Egyptian accounts, which depict multiple groups of people including pre-Greek ancestors as having been involved.

So the rejection of the narrative is the rejection of the claim that the Israelites came out of Egypt, for which I agree there's no evidence and in fact counter-evidence. But they aren't engaged with the consideration that the narrative was one absorbed into Israelite mythological history from elsewhere.

The tide is starting to shift though. For example, Yigael Yadin's theory Dan were the Denyen sea peoples was a fringe theory, but in just the past few years we now have the lead scholar excavating Tel Dan, David Ilan, talking about the strange find of Aegean style pottery made with local clay in the site in the early Iron Age, and how he feels the evidence lends itself to strengthening Yadin's theory.

DNA confirming imported bees to Tel Rehov, the only evidence of actual bee honey in the theoretical "land of milk and honey" is less than a decade old. That apiary also has one of the earliest if not the earliest "four horned shrine" in the region, a feature which later finds itself into Israelite shrines and directions on making shrines that way into the Bible. But it's on a shrine to an unknown bee goddess where they were burning honey (something later explicitly prohibited in Leviticus). That apiary is burnt down right around the time period matching when Asa was reported to have deposed his grandmother the Queen Mother.

Not only were they worshipping Asherah who was considered Yahweh's wife during some of that time, but you also have the record of a combined Yahweh/Anat worship in Elephantine. And yes, they were polytheistic for quite a while, with about 30% of Israelite theomorphic names being based on Baal for centuries before the monotheistic reforms.

Which is part of why it's so strange that scholarship pretty much exclusively debates the Exodus narrative as recorded in the Bible. For which I agree there's no evidence for the majority of it. But the scholars in antiquity were nearly unanimous about a very different version of it, with the earliest attestation also claiming that the Biblical record had been altered - for which there's certainly evidence of alterations or composition post-golden calf reform given the parallel "get rid of old laws and golden calf and bring new laws" in the Moses story to Josiah's alleged reforms (themselves anachronistic given the letters between Elephantine and Jerusalem over a century later).

Don't mistake what I'm saying.

I'm not saying Israel was involved in any of this. But there's evidence that Israelites and sea peoples were cohabitating in the early Iron Age, and the same Babylonians that conquered Judea conquered the Que/Denyen of Adana, who in multiple Luwian/Phonecian bilinguals attributed their rulers to a House of Mopsus.

I'm saying sometime in between the early cohabitation and the return from the Babylonian captivity that the Israelites appropriated a narrative pertaining to a different peoples and reworked it into the version we have in the Bible today, with the additions of Aaron and the priestly line, the ethnocentrism in contrast to other accounts, the "god of my father" as opposed to the maternal line of prophetic inheritance attributed to Mopsus, etc.

I actually suspect that this was a cultural history inherited along maternal lines imported by way of one of the various foreign marriages of Israel to a gebirah ("great lady"), likely Jeroboam given the story of him marrying the sister in law of the first Lybian Pharoh present in the LXX which is removed from the Bible by the time of the Masoretic text and the alleged reforms of Josiah primarily targeting Jeroboam's legacy. Given those reforms allegedly involved hiding away the relics of the Mosaic period while also introducing the Passover narrative, that's a pretty good candidate for when an Exodus tale was being reworked into the form we have today.

Biblical scholarship is much less encouraging than you might think it you haven't really dug into it, and one can't make an effective case against something one hasn't even considered.

Feel free to look at the thread starting here in Reddit's /r/AcademicBiblical if you want more of the finer details.