Through the Jewish Torah, known also as the Pentateuch, runs a literary narrative that forms the core of the Epic of Israel. It does not present a history but an accumulation of myth, legend, prophecy, and narrative brought to its present form toward the middle of the first millennium BCE to form a “late Judean literary tradition” (Peckham 1993). Its features include a mythic antiquity from the beginning of the world, a covenant with the Hebrews by a powerful deity, and alleged origins for the Hebrews and Israel shaped as an epic narrative. These include genealogies stretching millennia into the past; eponymous ancestors for the Hebrews, Israel, and their enemies; chronometric inflation in ages attributed to ancestors; and gigantism associated with the size of armies, wars, numbers of captives, and conquests. Recognizing these requires demythologizing the text, shearing away sections on ancient Israelite law and ritual, and penetrating the naïve realism of setting and custom to expose its underlying fabric of imaginative narrative. What is left are narratives of power preceding and surrounding the Israelite empire of desire brought to a devastating end in 586 BCE, just before its compilation.

The Greek term Pentateuch means five books, the first five in the Bible. Genesis and Exodus provide the main part of the narrative. Leviticus and Numbers include interspersed continuations of the narrative separated by chapters setting out ancient Israel's legal code. These include laws, rituals, and practices from several different periods in Israel's history. During Moses’ second climb up Mount Sinai Yahweh instructs Moses to “cut two tablets of stones like the first ones” upon which he says “I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke” (Exod. 34:1–2), referring to the commandments received earlier (Exod. 20:3–17). However, Yahweh's second version (Exod. 34:14–26) is different from the first. The second version is originated in an earlier nomadic period of Hebrew history. Like most narratives accumulated over centuries, the Pentateuch retains earlier along with revised materials. Rather than older laws being eliminated or repealed, they have been preserved within a revelatory template, implying that both the originals and their updated versions were revealed to the Israelites before their conquest of Canaan.