Christine Hayes continues Yale's Introduction to the Old Testament with the close of Genesis and the opening of Exodus. She traces Jacob's name change to Israel, the Joseph story and the twelve tribes' descent into Egypt, and reads Exodus as both a sequel to Genesis and a myth of national origins. The lecture covers Moses's legendary birth narrative and early life, then turns to the varied descriptions of God found across biblical texts. Hayes closes with Mark Smith's model of Israelite religion developing through convergence, the merging of Yahweh with older Canaanite deities, and divergence from surrounding Canaanite culture, offering it as an alternative to the evolutionary-revolutionary framework raised earlier in the course. Recorded in Fall 2006 as part of Yale's RLST 145, the lecture proceeds chapter by chapter through these texts with close attention to the biblical language itself.