"Their chronicles were not historical in any real sense. They displayed no love of their nation’s past, its beginnings, its mechanics, its gods, and its cosmologies. This inadequate way of dealing with history abruptly changed when a group of nomads began to write their history 500 years before Herodotus began his. Their tale centered on an event that they, as a people, could not get over, an event that acted to focus their minds on the significance of what had happened to them, fastening on this single tale in which a single omnipotent God had acted to bestow on them their freedom, a God who was always present and active within their affairs." Richard Sale