Hebrew Peoples In Egypt
The Invasion of the Hyksos
"In the last quarter of the second millennium B.C., the collapse of the Hittite Empire to the north, and the decline of Egyptian power to the south at a time when the Assyrians had not yet become a major force set the stage for the emergence of the Hebrews."
- Army Area Handbooks, "Ancient Israel"
"People from Near Eastern lands, especially of course Syrians, found their way to Egypt, voluntarily or by coercion. Among those in the former category were the Hyksos, who during the Second Intermediate period gained a footing first of all in the eastern Delta (capital: Avaris) and then penetrated to varying distances into the interior of the country."
- Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion
"Before the close of the Thirteenth Dynasty, about 1650 BC, the 'Hyksos' poured into Egypt from Asia. The Egyptians called them the 'Nomad Kings' since they had no apparent origin in a particular Nation. This is confirmed by the fact that they left no monuments or works of art that represented a unique cultural orientation."
- Publius (publius@gate.net)
"They took control over the capital Memphis in Egypt in 1674 [conventional chronology], and founded the 15th dynasty (1674- 1567), which ran parallel to the 16th dynasty, a dynasty of vassal chiefs under Hyksos' control."
- Tore Kjeilen, Encyclopaedia of the Orient
The Hyksos invasion was roughly contemporaneous with a period of global cooling, which may have been caused by a massive volcanic explosion spewing large amounts of dust into the upper atmosphere. The massive eruption of Thera has been dated to 1628 B.C.E. using tree-ring records, although historians prefer to date the eruption to circa 1500 B.C.E. David Rohl dates the beginning of the Early Hyksos period to circa 1450 B.C.E., following the exodus of the Israelites.
For information on support for the Biblical timeline, see: |
"And these six were the first rulers among them, who were all along making war with the Egyptians, and were very desirous gradually to destroy them to the very roots. This whole nation was styled HYCSOS, that is, Shepherd-kings: for the first syllable HYC, according to the sacred dialect, denotes a king, as is SOS a shepherd; but this according to the ordinary dialect; and of these is compounded HYCSOS: but some say that these people were Arabians.' Now in another copy it is said that this word does not denote Kings, but, on the contrary, denotes Captive Shepherds, and this on account of the particle HYC; for that HYC, with the aspiration, in the Egyptian tongue again denotes Shepherds, and that expressly also; and this to me seems the more probable opinion, and more agreeable to ancient history. [But Manetho goes on]: 'These people, whom we have before named kings, and called shepherds also, and their descendants.'"
- Josephus Flavius, Against Apion, Book 1:14
"Although Josephus [citing Manetho in Against Apion I, 14] thought that the word Hyksos was derived from the words 'Hyk' - 'king' and 'sos' - 'shepherd', thus meaning 'Shepherd kings', we now know that 'Hyksos' is derived from the Egyptian words 'hekau' - 'rulers' and 'khaswt' - 'foreign hill-countries'. The Egyptians had used the term since the Middle Kingdom to describe the nomadic chieftains on their north-eastern border."
- Peter H Blustin (ea45@dial.pipex.com)
"He unleashed against them his hot anger, his wrath, indignation and hostility-- a band of destroying angels. He prepared a path for his anger; he did not spare them from death but gave them over to the plague."
- Psalm 78:49-50
Velikovsky "notes that the phrase usually translated 'evil angels' is malakhei-roim, but the literal translation would then be 'angel of evils'. The correct Hebrew for 'evil angels' is malakhim-roim. Could it be that here we have another textual corruption resulting from a misunderstanding on the part of the deactor....The phrase 'king-shepherds' in biblical Hebrew is malakhei-roim!"
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 288,
"These tribal leaders, pushed southwards by a people called the Hurrians on the one hand and lured by the rich pasture land and agricultural land of Egypt on the other, were arriving at a time of great political instability in Egypt - the Middle Kingdom had come to an end and the country was being ruled by parallel dynasties of weak rulers. It was not hard for these displaced leaders to take power in this disorganized situation. It doesn't seem that they encountered much by way of coordinated resistance, perhaps because of the presence of a large foreign population already within Egypt, as indicated by the 'Brooklyn Papyrus' of the 13th dynasty which lists no less than 45 people of Asiatic origin who were members of the household of an Upper Egyptian official."
- Peter H Blustin (ea45@dial.pipex.com)
"When Moses and the Israelites were journeying eastwards through Sinai they were confronted by an Amalekite army. Was this Arabian horde on its way into Egypt? If so, then Manetho's Hyksos invaders were one and the same as the Amalekites who clashed with the Israelites during the first year of the Wilderness Wanderings and, at the same time, can be recognized as the Amalekite invaders of Arabian tradition who became pharaohs of Egypt. These barbaric tribesmen cannot, however, be closely identified with the rulers of Avaris designated by Manetho as the 15th Dynasty and whom he states originated in Phoenicia...Salitis, the first pharaoh of that dynasty, fortified Avaris some considerable time after the initial invasion - the word 'finally' being used by Manetho to separate out the two events in time [perhaps half a century]."
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 286
"The Amalekites invaded Egypt, the frontier of which they had already crossed, and stared to ravage the country...to smash the objects of art, to ruin the monuments."
- Masudi, a medieval Arabian author
"The warrior clansmen of the early Hyksos/Amalekite chieftains brought their families with them into Egypt because, according to the Arabian traditions, the disaster which had smitten Egypt had also desolated their own homeland, forcing the population to migrate to the relative safety and abundance of the Nile valley and delta. These would be the Asiatic folk of Bietak's stratum F at Avaris who 'showed little Egyptian influence' and whose rich grave deposits included damning evidence of their plundering of the native Egyptian Middle Kingdom tombs."
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 288
"Male burials with weapons show a warrior strain in the new-comers. Especially at the beginning, they posses very original features; some of them, indeed, look rather barbarous."
- M. Bietak, Avaris and Piramesse: Archaeological Explorations of the Eastern Nile Delta (1979), p. 244
"Manetho informs us that the Hyksos 'treated all the natives with a cruel hostility, massacring some and leading into slavery the wives and children of others'. Archaeology has revealed that the stratum F warriors were accompanied by their servants into the next world. The graves at Tell ed-Daba, containing sacrificial burials of young females, provide us with further indications of the brutality of the early Hyksos invaders."
"The invaders "settled at sites such as Avaris in the eastern delta and drove the native Egyptian pharaohs back to their capital at Itj-Tawy in Upper Egypt."
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 288, 289
"The Hyksos immediately proceeded to kill all the Egyptian males. Many Egyptians fled to Crete and the Aegean mainland, where - with the indigenous population they reconstituted a semblance of their culture. This accounts for the architectural similarity along with the concept of the 'Living God' in the religion of the Classical Age. Further, the Hyksos introduced the idea of 'slavery' into Egypt. Prior to their occupation, no Asiatics or sub-Sahara Blacks were permitted into Egypt. The Hyksos, in fact, brought in Blacks as slaves..."
- Publius (publius@gate.net)
Their god is said to have been Seth..."
- Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion
"[The Hyksos king] Apophis took to him Sutekh [Seth] for lord and served not any god that was in the whole land save only Sutekh [Seth]."
- Papyrus Sallier, I, I, 2-3
In Egyptian mythology, Apophis was the name of an evil, monster, serpent god. [The last Hyksos king also known as Apophis or Apepi.]
"Here it may be assumed that Seth stands for the Syrian god 'Baal', because of all foreign deities Baal alone is designated in later Egyptian texts by Seth's animal (its species cannot be determined with certainly)."
- Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion
(2) The Hebrew Connection
Knight and Lomas (The Hiram Key) suggest that Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch, may have been a Hyksos, a 'desert prince' who entered Egypt around 1780, B.C.E. This date can be calculated by backtracking from the estimated date of his great grandson Joseph's investiture as vizier in 1570. By both the conventional chronology and new chronology of David Rohl, however, Abraham would have lived centuries before the Hyksos invasion.
"The mix of people who did enter Egypt as early as the eighteenth century under the steadily increasing pressures originating from the Indo-European (Hittite and Mitanni) expansions and the more organized invasions of the seventeenth century (with the two-wheeled chariot borrowed from the Indo-Europeans) probably did include groups which were ancestral to the Israelites, and refugees from the expulsion of the Hyksos a century later also probably included such groups, but these were movements in and out of a melting pot of peoples in the area. At best, a small portion of the 'Israelites' could legitimately claim such Hyksos ancestry."
- John Celenza (jpc12243@aol.com)
"The Hyksos and the Hebrews were racially akin. Some of the Hyksos rulers had Semitic names: one, for example, was called Jacob-el (Ya' qub-'al), 'May El give protection', and another, Jacob-baal, 'May Baal protect'. Most scholars now agree that there is some connection between the Hyksos rule of Egypt and the settling of the Hebrews there. It seems reasonable to assume that the Hyksos, who themselves had traveled the caravan routes to Egypt for centuries before they finally took power there, favored other 'Apiru groups and encouraged them to settle. When the Pharaoh Amosis (c. 1552-1527) captured Avaris and expelled the Hyksos from Egypt, pursuing them to Palestine and opening the way to Asia and so the great age of the Egyptian empire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties (the New Kingdom), the Hebrews in Egypt were left without protectors. Contemporary documents show that the Hyksos who escaped slaughter were enslaved. It is reasonable to suppose that the Hebrews, now unprotected by the Establishment, were also enslaved at this time."
- David Daiches, Moses - Man in the Wilderness
"The Hyksos ruler Sheshi, whose nomen appears on numerous MBA scarabs from southern Palestine (and in Tomb H13 at Jericho), is to be identified with the biblical king Sheshai of Hebron who was forced to flee from his homeland because of the invasion of the Israelite tribes in circa 1410 BC. The archaeological concentration of Sheshi scarabs at Tell el-Ajjul indicates that he fled to Sharuhen. There he probably built 'City II' and a new royal residence ('Palace II') for the Early Hyksos dynasty of southern Palestine of which he was the founder."
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 312
(3) Expulsion and Slavery
"As he [Manetho] says, 'kept possession of Egypt five hundred and eleven years.' After these, he says, 'That the kings of Thebais and the other parts of Egypt made an insurrection against the shepherds, and that there a terrible and long war was made between them.' He says further, 'That under a king, whose name was Alisphragmuthosis, the shepherds were subdued by him, and were indeed driven out of other parts of Egypt, but were shut up in a place that contained ten thousand acres; this place was named Avaris.' Manetho says, 'That the shepherds built a wall round all this place, which was a large and a strong wall, and this in order to keep all their possessions and their prey within a place of strength, but that Thummosis the son of Alisphragmuthosis made an attempt to take them by force and by siege, with four hundred and eighty thousand men to lie rotund about them, but that, upon his despair of taking the place by that siege, they came to a composition with them, that they should leave Egypt, and go, without any harm to be done to them, whithersoever they would; and that, after this composition was made, they went away with their whole families and effects, not fewer in number than two hundred and forty thousand, and took their journey from Egypt, through the wilderness, for Syria; but that as they were in fear of the Assyrians, who had then the dominion over Asia, they built a city in that country which is now called Judea, and that large enough to contain this great number of men, and called it Jerusalem."
- Josephus Flavius, Against Apion, Book 1:14
The son of Sequenere Tao II, "King Kamose, eventually inflicted crushing reverses on the 'wretched Asiatic' and the Hyksos were soon routed out of Memphis. The women of the last Hyksos king, Apophis's successor Apepi II, had the terrifying experience of watching the Theban fleet, led by a general by the name of Aahmas, sail up the Pat'etku Canal to the very walls of the Hyksos capital Avaris. The Hyksos were finally driven completely out of Egypt by Kamose's younger brother and successor, Ahmose, who chased them back to Jerusalem. Unable to escape by sea, no less than two hundred and forty thousand households are said to have made their way across the Sinai and Negev deserts. Strangely the route they took was known as 'Wat Hor' - the Way of Horus."
"After the expulsion of the Hyksos, Semites of all kinds, including the Habiru, must have been more than a little unpopular and it would explain why the otherwise friendly Egyptians suddenly enslaved many or even all of those who remained in the country during the decade 1560 to 1550 BC. Inscriptions from the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries BC have been found giving details of these Habiru slaves and their forced labor. One tells of how large numbers of these people were forced to work in turquoise mines, which must have been extremely dangerous and unpleasant without ventilation and with naked flames burning up the oxygen...These mines were just a short distance from the mountain of Yahweh, Mount Sinai in the southern mountains of the Sinai Peninsula."
- Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas, The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus
The "Hapiru"
"This word 'Hebrew' ('ibri) is now thought to be related to a similar-sounding word which appears in a variety of forms throughout documents of the ancient Middle East. The Egyptians transcribed it as 'a-pi-ru, or (since Egyptian hieroglyphic script can be written only in consonants) 'pr.w, or simply 'pr. It is Habiru or Hapiru in Akkadian cuneiform. The Amarna letters refer frequently to the 'Aipiru (also sometimes referred to as SA.GAZ) as making trouble. An administrative letter of the time of the Pharaoh Ramesses II refers to providing corn for the 'pr who were drawing stones for the great gateway of one of the buildings of Raamses. Who were these Hebrew, 'Apiru, Habiru people? The word appears not to be the name of a race or a nation, but of a class of people who worked the caravan routes of the Middle East; the word probably means something like donkey-men or caravan-men, perhaps originally dusty men (the Hebrew for dust is 'afar, and Hebrew f and p are closely related). They traveled and traded with their families and their flocks and herds, never settling for very long in one place. They operated sometimes as smiths and traded among other things in musical instruments."
- David Daiches, Moses - Man in the Wilderness
"And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and the organ. And Zillah she also bare Tubal-cain, and instructor of every artificer in brass and iron."
- Genesis 4:20-2
"On Egyptian temple walls and tombs, the inhabitants of Syria and Palestine are depicted as vassals of their Egyptian overlords. Asiatics bring tribute and produce into Egypt, are captive slaves or mercenary soldiers, and work as corvee laborers assisting Egyptians in obtaining raw materials like timber. Of particular interest to archaeologists are the types of goods offered to the officials, for many of these items we know from excavations. Lastly, the Egyptians did not hold Asiatics on a high-level of esteem and often depicted them as a pack of dogs doing the bidding of their Egyptian masters..."
- "Ancient Palestine Gallery with Biblical References"
"The Hebrews who entered Egypt in the time of Jacob and Joseph became Israelites through their common heritage as they endured their prolonged slavery under the pharaohs. When they finally settled in the Promised Land, other groups with similar ethnic origins and status to the Israelites were already populating the more barren parts of the Levant. These stateless peoples had remained 'wanderers' and were therefore true Habiru/Hebrews, whereas their ancestral kin, the Israelites, regarded themselves as a distinctive entity - 'the chosen people'."
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 209
One explanation for the origin of the ancient Israelites is that they were actually peasant Canaanites who revolted against the excesses of their wealthier urban counterparts.
"Egypt imposed heavy taxes on Canaan, but in return the Canaanite cities gained security and better access to international markets. In the reign of Ramses II (1304-1237 BC), the empire was reorganized. Key strategic cities like Beth Shan and Gaza were strengthened, others were allowed to decline. Many people were made homeless and migrated to the Judean hill country, where they established small farming settlements. These dispossessed Canaanites, known to the Egyptians as Hapiru (or Hebrews), formed the basis of what was to become Israel."
- Bible Lands
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