Why did the Israelites begin their story with exodus?

Answer 1

The Isralites begin their story with the march from exodus because that's when moses led them out of slavery in Egypt and led them to their salvation in Israel where they were no longer owned.

Answer 2

A:By the end of the second millennium BCE, the Hebrew people no longer saw themselves as descendants of the Canaanites and needed an explanation of where they came from and why they were in the land they occupied. They had early legends of how their God, Yahweh (bibl. Hebrew YHWH), came to them from the land of the Midianites, and these fitted in well with the concept of an Exodus of the Israelite people from Egypt. Some scholars believe that a small group of slaves might well have escaped from Egypt, begun the long journey north to Judah and were found, close to death in the desert, by the Midianites and given assistance. This hypothesis says that the Midianites credited their god, YHW (known to us from Egyptian sources), for the survival of the escapees, who took stories of YHW with them to Judah. The Israelites began to believe all their ancestors escaped in a grand Exodus from Egypt, to found a new nation under the guidance of their God.