I finished Martin Noth's History of Pentateuchal Traditions. It's a very complex book, but what I got out of it was this: There were oral traditions that were associated with localities, and they were deemed to be relevant to the entire nation of Israel after the twelve tribes joined together to form a confederation. There were also oral traditions that were told at cults, and I presume that they had a national consciousness of Israel, even if the stories were glorifying the local cults. Like many other scholars, Noth says that an Exodus group joined up with Israel and contributed its story to the national tradition. Oral traditions were combined, and stories were tied together into a broader narrative through genealogies (as local heroes were tied together into families, and other nations were accounted for genealogically) and itineraries (as local stories were incorporated into a broader journey). Written sources eventually emerged, as J and E drew from a common G source, and P gathered sources and wrote a narrative.
As I said yesterday, Noth believes that there were people from the East Jordan who entered the land of Canaan, but he doesn't appear to believe in the historicity of the wilderness traditions (at least that's my impression). On pages 193-194, he states:
"The entire theme 'guidance in the wilderness' is based upon all sorts of southern Judean narratives about unusual phenomena in the southern wilderness: about the wilderness food of manna which could be found there as a kind of gleaning of the great gift of God once bestowed upon the hungering Israelites; about the quails which could be caught there occasionally; about the springs gushing forth quite suddenly from a rock crevice here and there in the midst of the desert, or about the groundwater wells which one does not suspect until he suddenly stands in amazement before them (Gen, 21:19); about the uncanny and even winged serpents which supposedly were seen there (cf. on Num. 21:4b-9); about peculiar local phenomena about the 'graves of lust' (Num. 11:34) or the 'place of burning' (Num. 11:3)."
Noth's point appears to be that the southern Judeans lived near the wilderness, which they realized was a very strange place. They told stories about it. One of the stories tried to justify the Nehushtan, the metal serpent that they believed had healing powers. The murmuring stories related to quarrels.
Something that was interesting was that Noth wasn't always conventional in his view of the Documentary Hypothesis. For example, on page 230, he says that "no cogent proof can be adduced for the customary 'north Israelite' provenance of E", for "E reproduces the narrative tradition as it was shaped initially in central Palestine and then was further elaborated in the circle of the southern tribes." Noth also notes southern Palestinian traditions in E, such as Genesis 22:1ff and Exodus 18:1ff. Noth attributes Genesis 22:1-19 to E, whereas Richard Elliott Friedman only attributes Genesis 22:1-10, 16b-19 to E, and 22:11-16a to the redactor. Noth may say that its provenance is southern because of its reference to the mountain of the LORD (which probably refers to Zion), or to Beersheba, which is in the South. And both Noth and Friedman attribute Exodus 18 (the story of Jethro's visit) to E, and Noth may consider that southern because of its reference to Midian, which was close to southern Israel.
Richard Elliott Friedman argued that E was northern, in part because it glorifies northern cities, or places its stories in the North. But, as Noth notes, there are times when E sets stories in the South---like Beersheba, as Genesis 22:19 does. And Friedman believes that Genesis 22:19 is from E.
Noth's book could be a burden to read, especially when I plowed through 100 pages a day! But it had cool stuff!