After explaining why the Torah's account of the Exodus does not fit the historical or archeological records, archeologist Stephen Rosenberg (no relation) writes:
My proposal is that this miraculous account of the Exodus is describing a series of events that took place over more than 300 years, when Semitic foreigners, including the Jews, left Egypt in wave after wave. Some came and went with the Hyksos, and destroyed Jericho on their way back. Some were expelled by Queen Hatshepsut and 480 years later helped to build Solomon's Temple. Some came after the Hyksos and were forced to build Pithom and Ramesses, and then left in haste to get to Canaan before Merenptah could claim to have destroyed Israel in their land. And some perhaps never left at all and stayed on to tell the tale from an Egyptian point of view, with an Egyptian slant to the agriculture of Canaan and an Egyptian description of the Mishkan.Rosenberg ascribes the Torah's account to "mnemo-history," a form of folk memory where myth (in its classical sense, not as falsehood) compacts various related historical events into a compact whole. For more on this understanding of mnemo-history, read When They Severed Earth From Sky: How The Human Mind Shapes Myth.