The Exodus is Judaism's founding event and the reference point for a startling number of its laws: you shall not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers; the slave goes free in the seventh year; the Sabbath is for your servant too. The historicity is debated by archaeologists and the tradition's use of it does not depend on the verdict — it functions as the permanent template for what God does and what a liberated people therefore owes. Every liberation theology since, including ones outside Judaism, has borrowed it.