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Comment by wbhart | Hacker News Reader

The authors don't say which race the Hyksos have traditionally been associated with. Do they mean the Hebrews?

It is interesting that the strontium isotope analysis suggests they did not come from a single homeland, but were from a variety of locations across the near East.

I'm not sure I'm identifying the race they are referring to correctly (too many History Channel documentaries maybe). For example, I don't think the Hebrews are supposed to have had a homeland at that point in history.

Nonetheless, the evidence that a significant number of them spent their childhood outside the Nile Delta region does indicate that they were not a race of people who were born, grew up and lived in Egypt the whole time.

Is someone able to confirm that the authors were referring to the past tentative identification of the Hyksos with the Hebrews? If not, to whom are they referring?

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>I'm not sure I'm identifying the race they are referring to correctly (too many History Channel documentaries maybe). For example, I don't think the Hebrews are supposed to have had a homeland at that point in history.

The relationships between biblical accounts of pre-classical periods is necessarily shaky. The pre-kingdom parts of the bible read very much like mythology, metaphor and heroic ancestor tales.

That said, there are various points of intersection or allusion to actual known history. The migration of the Hyksos could relate to the biblical story of Joseph. It's basically an account of migration from Canaan to Egypt because of a famine. Like the article said, there do seem to have been migrations to egypt of various semitic people. The hyksos are the best known of them.

Exodus relates to a later period. It's a story of a semitic slave migration out of egypt, becoming an independent nomadic tribe in canaan, midia & sinai. Historically, egypt had just lost these territories and receded to its core territory. Among many chaotic things happening, egypt was in conflict with various barbarian tribes from these regions...

It's not that solid historical accounts from egypt confirm the biblical narrative. They make almost no reference to hebrews, escaped slaves, etc. But, the biblical account does make some sort of sense.

I've been fascinated by this argument for a few years. An "ask a historian" thread on Reddit asked an important question: "Would a kingdom, that chased slaves out of Egypt, only to be met with massive defeat, record that history?". I know nothing about Egyptology, so I'd ask, "did Egyptians, as a general rule, record any of their defeats?" From my limited Google searches, they did not. So the question becomes, is there any evidence of semitic people living in Egypt. That seems to be argued a bit more.

There is lots of evidence of semitic people in egypt over various periods. Also egyptian conquests & long lived administrations in these regions.

"Semitic," as a language group is pretty big. There are also semitic languages spoken to the south of egypt, who were also interacting a lot with egypt.

The Egyptians glorified their history like any political culture does, but massive defeats don't go unrecorded. They just make them seem like wins.^ In the relevant period, egypt (and the whole region) went through extreme instability. Historians don't totally understand it, and people then may not have either. But, there's lots of historical record of chaos and defeat. There are even surviving letters between besieged nobles candidly admitting major losses.

I think it's more likely that exodus was just a much bigger deal to the Israelites than it was to Egyptians. To Egypt, it was no big deal. If Pharoah really had witnessed the sea part, and an angry god destroying his army... there would be a relief. Egyptians recorded noteworthy events.

That said, it was a declining period and the egyptian record is patchy during these times.

^EG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seev%C3%B6lker.jpg#/...

By "there would be a relief", I presume you mean "they would have created a relief sculpture", rather than "they would have felt emotional relief". As written the sentence is ambiguous, and right at the point where you pivot from evidence supporting the slave escape narrative to evidence contradicting the slave escape narrative, so I can't be certain my reading is correct despite it fitting much better with the following sentence.

Yes. I meant statuary, obviously. I also meant it as a joke.

Pre-Kingdom? David and Solomon are larger than life figures in bible but afaik no contemporary neighbor recorded their existence. They are historic ghosts. Pure fiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Dan_stele https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yahudu_Tablets

This comes up so often in these debates! I think there's way too much archaeological evidence on the ground to deny the reality of the Davidic Monarchy.

Sure. I didn't mean to draw a hard line.

The monarchic period, even David and Solomon, reads a lot more political writing. The region enters into a historical period. The biblical stories start to relate more definitely to known historical events.

David and Solomon are kind of transitional, it's really just gradual. It gets more mythical as you go back.

Immediately following from the solomon period, the bible is referencing known assyrian emperors, pharaohs, and reporting on conquests that are historically known. There are dates.

By the end of the kingdom period, it's already the babylonian era... At that point it's basically modernity.

Actually, as a student of Iranian history, those "Babylonian" era records are rather intriguing, to say the least. It seems to me Judaism (and associated myths) are a product of an aborted imperial social engineering project of the aborted first Persian Empire. Even the historic divide of religious Jews and "Greek Jews" reflects the sudden collapse of the first Persian Empire and its replacement by the Greeks.

A reading of relevant biblical texts strongly suggests that the 'returnees' from Babylon were alien to whoever was living in Jerusalem. And the religion they brought back smacks of Zoroastrianism in its theological contours. Heaven, hell, resurrection, judgment, angels, and good and evil: these are Iranian elements. (Egypt also had judgment, heaven, and hell.) It took a few attempts to get the inhabitants to change their religion -- it's in the book, as they say, so don't take my word for it.

Those famous boundaries of lands promised to Abraham, for example, which stop right at the border of historic Greater Iran and Egypt, are basically the boundaries of the project 'temple state' the Persians attempted to create as a prepatory step to conquering Egypt. Heck, the Persian Emperor is even specially called "Messiah" (Divine King) in Isa. 45.

It is my opinion (and just that) that the sudden cessation of [imported Jewish] religious leaders from Babylon -- a seat of Persian Empire at that time lest we forget -- due to the collapse of the empire, is the basis of the mutatation of the work-in-progress so that the "divine mandate" of the famous Abrahamic lands were now in fact given by none other than "GOD" itself.

The irony of course, is the blowback of this Persian Imperial project 2500 years later.

[minor corrective edits]

If you are interested in this subject, look into samaritans.

They are a closely related group to jews, but probably had less Babylonian & Persian influence. Their version of the Torah ends with Solomon. To this day, they maintain a religion similar to old temple judaism. High priest, sacrifice, etc. Their Torah is written in the native hebrew script. Jews switched to an assyrian script at some point.

Nehemiah (book in the bible) was the first pacha, persian governor of jerusalem. Religious & conservative fanatic, persecuting samaritans and annulling mixed marriages.

In any case, the samaritan torah has the same account of abraham as the jewish bible. It's still possible that Persian or Babylonian beliefs & characters were adopted, especially abraham. But, that would have had to happen long before cyrus. Samaritans also have abraham and the divine land grant.

I assume you mean the "nile to euphrates" boundary. It's actually very hard to tell what those parts are about. First, it's not actually clear those are the rivers... especially the nile. Second, there are no other passages that relate to this territory. Nehemia doesn't mention or pursue them.

Sorry for the late reply to your very interesting post.

I fully agree that ancient levantine figures, such as Noah, Job, and Abraham, predate the Persian era and were likely incorporated in Babylon.

Have to look into this Hebrew Samaritan Torah you mentioned. My understanding was that there were -no- extant torah of any kind at the time when the people came from Babylon claiming themselves to be the exiles. I know they presecuted the Samaritans to assert their own (version of) religion.

I have seen suggestions that the early Hebrew kings are re-branded pharaohs: Akhenaten and Nefertiti as (sequence-displaced) mono-theistic Adam and Eve, Solomon's gold as southern Egyptian tribute, Song of Solomon cribbed from an Egyptian prayer, maybe even a pyramid as Ararat. Nothing conclusive that I know of, but intriguing hints.

I'm entirely off the current mainstream interpretation of Akhenaten. Akhenaten, to me, was hardly a "monotheist". In fact, if I were asked to name a historic figure that was the famous pharoah of biblical lore (the anti-Moses) I would unhesitatingly point to Akhenaten. I suggest considering his treatment of 'temple' with the pre-existing Egyptian norm. His temple has no roof. The original Egyptian model reflected the canonical Macro-Micro duality and was in fact a 'closed' space. Akhenaten, per my reading, claimed that he was the incarnate 'one god'. No wonder the Egyptians erased all traces of his reign after his demise. They totally erased him from Egyptian records. Something to think about. (Egyptians were certainly 'godly'. Just review the Egyptian prayers of the dead.)

   O sole god, like whom there is no other!   
   Thou didst create the world according to thy desire

That is a prayer from ancient Egypt.

That said, the idea that Hebrew mythological kings are in fact borrowings of Egyptian glory makes a lot of sense. Some of the imagery -- tributes being brought from far away lands to Solomon -- however is distinctly reminiscent of Persepolis.

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/relief-depicting-procession-...

My interpretation is more banal.

The borrowings are more superficial. We know that language and style used to describe kings, emperors, and gods are very similar. The "I am Sargon, King of Kings" style occurs in political and religious writings all throughout the region... with roots going deep into the bronze age.

Recurring imagery, writing style, motifs, titles, etc. are the norm. Lots of cultural elements are broadly found throughout the greater region. It's not surprising that they'd exist in any two traditions. All these traditions affected eachother.

Take the Sphinx motif, Seraphim in temple judaism. It's a motif found very widely, over a very long period of time. The imagery is reused. The symbolism is reused. It's impossible to draw a clear path of progression though.

On monotheism... I don't think monotheism is all that significant, per se. Whatever the origins of this were, canaanite cities and kings were clearly being closely associated to single deities. One king, one god. Maybe one temple. That was a typical mode. Is that monotheism? Why care, outside of theology?

What is significant about monotheism is not monotheism. It's the "jealous god," the strict prohibitions on "foreign worship." This exclusionism is what made the religion so successful in the long term. We see this even in modern times. Religions that tolerate multiple belief systems give way to monotheism.

FYI, the name for the jealous god among many gods is "monolatry". Historically, monolatry has a strong tendency to morph into monotheism, as it's much more stable belief system vs. having solid reasons not to worship other gods on the side.

In the Bible, there's evidence that the earliest Judaism was monolatrist[0]. You can see a very long period of frustration the priests have with people mostly worshipping the most powerful god, but hedging their bets with side worship of Baal Zebul, Asherah, etc. despite Yahweh's jealousy. They had a much easier time discouraging the side worship once they started asserting those side gods didn't exist, rather than saying they were dramatically less powerful.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolatry#In_ancient_Israel

So... to my perspective, monolatry is the point. Monotheism is a good enough approximation in practice though.

Also, it's not the idea of monolatry or monotheism that matters... it's the development of a religious culture than is effective at banning other religions. This is what made monotheism what it is, historically.

What I have seen of Akhenaten has him representing Aten, the Sun god.

We have a great deal of material on him (or rather on what he chose to have carved) despite erasure from records, because his capital was abandoned immediately after his death.

> Do they mean the Hebrews?

According to [1]:

> The Hyksos... were people of probable Levantine origin, who established the Fifteenth Dynasty of Egypt (1650–1550 BC) based at the city of Avaris in the Nile delta, from where they ruled the northern part of the country. While the Hellenistic Egyptian historian Manetho portrayed the Hyksos as invaders and oppressors, modern Egyptology no longer believes that the Hyksos conquered Egypt in an invasion. Instead, Hyksos rule had been preceded by groups of Canaanite peoples settled in the eastern delta who probably seceded from central Egyptian control near the end of the Thirteenth Dynasty.

So Canaanites [2]. The paper supports the theory that Hykos were settlers rather than invaders.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyksos

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaan

The Hyksos are traditionally not associated with a race, but with the chariot-and-archer techniques that would come to characterize Bronze Age Egyptian military power and conquest. Indeed, it is usually the other way around, with the Hyksos being the race/dynasty to whom the chariot technology is credited.

At this point in history, the folks who would become the Hebrews were living in what would become Judea. We know that Ramesses II conquered them and the surrounding area, using Hyksos-style chariots; and we know that at least one of their tribes, who Ramesses III called Peleset and we might call Philistines or Palestinians, were sea-faring and related to the Phoenicians.

In general, this all happened in the Bronze Age, but the Hebrew tradition didn't really form until the Iron Age, and there's a minimum of two centuries separating them, with Ramesses III not encountering the Sea Peoples after around ~1150 BCE and Iron Age Hebrew stories not being written down before around ~950 BCE.

I don't completely follow your second paragraph. Are the Philistines now believed to have been Hebrew? That's a development I wasn't aware of.

I'm also not clear how the use of Hyksos-style chariots by Ramesses II's is linked. The Hyksos rulers in Egypt were a couple of centuries earlier, right?

Anyhow, can you shed any light on the "the elite attendant to the rulers" and the "ethnic group with which they are associated" mentioned in the paper?

I've seen a credible-looking documentary (despite being History Channel, IIRC) on YouTube claiming that there's evidence of large-scale slave/lower class uprisings in many Philistine cities right before the start of archaeological evidence of Israelite settlements in the Judean highlands. The documentary claims that the Israelites were Philistine in origin. The level of hatred of the Philistines may have been out of a need to keep a political distinction between the old and new cultures, to keep them from melting back into Philistine cities during times of hardship.

I think it was this same documentary that theorized a small number of escaped slaves from Egypt wandered through Midian and into Canaan. The documentary identified a minor city-state in/near Midian that's documented to have worshipped a god named Yahu, and theorized that these wanderers had some kind of dramatic religious experience there, which later mutated into Yahweh worship. The documentary further theorized that this small group of actual escaped slaves were adopted by, and became the leaders of, the nascent Israelite communities, accounting for the Egyptian slavery narrative.

The documentary didn't mention that Canaan was an Egyptian vassal state from the 18th to 13th centuries B.C.E. If the Israelites originated from Philistine slave / lower class uprisings, I wonder if the oral history of the Egyptian vassal state period is the origin for the narrative of being slaves in Egypt despite there being no archaeological evidence of a massive-scale slave escape from Egypt. Being a slave in a state that's essentially a slave of Egypt probably feels like being doubly a slave to Egypt. To me, this sounds more likely than a small number of Egyptian slaves being adopted by local tribes and their narrative becoming the tribal narrative.

Archaeologically speaking, the Hebrew people didn’t exist at that time in history.

Right, but one presumes that Josephus (a later Jewish historian) identified the Hyksos with the Hebrews? And he used the priest Manetho's works as source material for that claim?

So I'm curious if that is what the authors of this new study claim to be refuting. I think so, but it's unclear since they deliberately decline to mention the race they are referring to. Perhaps I should have quoted the sentence from the paper that I'm referring to (principally), "During this paper, we only refer to the dynastic rulers as the Hyksos, not the elite attendant to the rulers nor that ethnic group with which they are associated."

From my History Channel knowledge (not expert in any way), there has been a revival of interest in identifying the Hyksos with the Hebrews due to the location of a signet ring in Avaris by the archaeologist Manfred Bietak with "Ykb Hr" (Jacob?) inscribed on it. There is also a tomb with a statue of a Hyksos ruler who seemed to be almost as important as Pharoah himself, complete with what appears to be a multicoloured raiment painted on the statue.

Armed with this dumbed down version of archaelogy my interest in the paper is piqued. But they aren't so clear what they are refuting.

It depends on what you mean. There is absolutely no historical basis for the biblical exodus from Egypt of Jewish people. That said, when the hill people composed their history into the story that would eventually become Genesis and Exodus, they probably drew from some vague stories about the Hyksos occupation of parts of lower Egypt. The Hyksos were almost certainly Canaanite, or one of the other peoples the hill people (who would become the Jews) displaced when they conquered Israel.

I'm aware that mainstream archaeologist don't find evidence of an exodus of "Jewish" people from Egypt via the Sinai into Caanan. I personally don't buy their arguments (no dung piles in the desert, no artifacts found, no identification of Mt. Sinai, etc.) But I accept that no evidence is no evidence.

There is, as far as I recall, evidence of an "exodus" of sorts of the Hyksos from Egypt, but not any (solid) evidence of it happening in the manner or time described in the Biblical account.

I'm not sure I buy the Israel = Hyksos theory anyway. But this gets fairly far from my question, which really related to what the authors of this particular paper allude to, but don't say explicitly. They use some fairly strident language to describe what it is they are not talking about. I was just curious what that was, and why.

> They use some fairly strident language to describe what it is they are not talking about. I was just curious what that was, and why.

Have a look at what happened more than a decade ago when a paper came out showing no genetic distinction between Palestinians and Jews. Any discussion of nationalities in the Middle East is a political minefield.

Also, ever since The History Channel became the Aliens and Nazis Channel, the authors are probably afraid of being very badly misquoted in some Exodus documentary. The strident language makes it nearly impossible to cherry-pick a quote for a documentary without it sounding like complete gibberish.

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