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Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

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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