This is a continuation of thoughts from my first post about Richard Elliott Friedman's ideas about a "Levite Exodus" from Egypt.
Many conservative Christians who know their bibles know Israel was conquered by Assyria and Judah by Babylon. But, other than "knowing" there was an exodus from Egypt, they don't know the reality of relations with Egypt.
At the time the people who later became known as Israel emerged from previous culture in Canaan, that was around the height of Egypt's influence over Canaan. Setting aside old kingdoms, like old Babylon, Akkad, etc., the eastern and northern Fertile Crescent simply had nothing comparable, other than the Hittite power intruding from Asia Minor not too long before the Sea Peoples. And, before the rise of the neo-Assyrian Empire, for a few hundred years, there was simply nothing to compare to Egypt in the eastern Fertile Crescent, even with Egypt in a period of faded glories.
So, if you were some newly emerging statelet in today's Palestine and writing an origin myth, tying yourself to Egypt was the deal. Egyptian religious cult names, a putative revolt leader with a Pharaonic knock-off name? Check and check. Coronation ritual for a king stolen from Egypt by a big prophetic writer? Yep. And finally, to creatively borrow from the Egyptian account of the creation of the world, replacing your people's older version.
Remember, it was more than just power. Egypt was about gold and riches. And style and beauty. And, so it was hoped, occult science on the mummification of the dead.
Israel, then the Judah-infused Israel, didn't go quite to cargo cult length, but it did stretch its claims to Egyptian metaphysical ancestry a fair bit.
As for Nehushtan, the bronze serpent that had reportedly become a cult object by the time of King Hezekiah and his problematic reign? (It's problematic among other things in that, per biblical chronology, Ahaz would have had to be 11 when Hezekiah was born; nice trick on doing both that and being his alleged father. Some critical theology postulates both as sons of Joram, but that doesn't really solve much; it mainly just moves the problem around.)
Anyway, I digress. Nehushtan might have been an aniconic angle inserted by the Deuteronomic historian in Kings as part of touting Hezekiah's reforms.
As far as other aspects of the origin of the Jerusalem-based cultus, modern scholars like this don't see animal sacrifice as central to Egyptian worship, meaning it came from either the Ba'al and El cult of Syria (Aram) or Judah and other wandering Semites who moved into the southern Fertile Crescent, or some combination. And religious tensions, then, arose not from Moses vs Aaron adherents, but retrojections onto that from different subgroups within Ba'alim before it started getting displaced by Yawhists, or by Yahwists. Add into all of this Aaron being Moses elder brother and J, especially, telling "younger brother" stories.
Behind this, in turn, were surely larger struggles within Judah after the fall of Samaria in 722, about aligning with Assyria vs Egypt, or even more, with Babylon vs Egypt as it superseded Assyria. Josiah arguably guessed wrong a century after Hezekiah. And, ignoring Necho's claims to have Yahweh's support, it seems likely that a majority of Judahite leadership agreed with him and disagreed with Josiah's decision to fight. The decision was problematic a generation later. After Nebuchadnezzar's final visit to Jerusalem, the remaining non-peasant non-exiled largely moved to Egypt.
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