The Hyksos and the Exodus

Looking for misfortunes of Egyptians in attempting to find a suitable time frame to place the disasters described in the Book of Exodus inevitably makes researchers focus on the 15th Dynasty, also known as Hyksos. As the etymology of the word Hyksos clearly shows, they were ‘hekau khoswe, “the rulers of foreign lands”’ (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0009_0_09361.html) and this must have been one of the most humiliating misfortunes for ancient Egyptians. It is said that the Hyksos ‘exercised political control over Egypt between approximately 1655 and 1570 B.C.E.’ (ibid) from Avaris, the capital city they built, which is later identified as ‘Tell el-Dabʿa in the Northeast Delta’ (ibid). The people so-called the Hyksos are usually described as Asiatics, ‘the standard name for the inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean littoral, Canaan and Syria’ (ibid) and it is also known that ‘Most of the Hyksos personal names are west-Semitic, in the same language group as Amorite and the Canaanite and Aramaic dialects’ (ibid). Little more following things are also known relating to the Hyksos; (1) their culture belongs to ‘Middle Bronze Age Palestine and Phoenicia’ (ibid), (2) ‘The horse and chariot made their appearance in Egypt during the rule of the Hyksos, but there is no evidence that they were introduced specifically by the Hyksos’ (ibid) and (3) ‘At the beginning of the 18^th Dynasty (c. 1580 B.C.E.) Pharaoh Ahmes expelled the Hyksos from Egypt and pursued them to southern Palestine’ (ibid).

Ahmes

Information above may seem to be encouraging for researchers to attempt establishing a hypothesis for identifying the Hyksos with the biblical Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt led in by Joseph and led out by Moses. Actually, Josephus, a famous Jewish historian in the first century A. D., is one of known historians tried to do so, by directly quoting from Manetho, a Ptolemaic Egyptian writer lived during the 30th Dynasty, who had wrongly interpreted the meaning of the word Hyksos as ‘king-shepherds’ (ibid) or ‘captive shepherds’ (ibid). However, even though there is a further fact that ‘some of the Hyksos rulers bore names echoed in the Bible’ (ibid), attempts made by some scholars ‘to set the Exodus within the chronological framework of the 18^th Dynasty’ (ibid) achieve little success. It is said that ‘There is no warrant either in the Bible or outside it for simply equating the Hyksos with the later Hebrews’ (ibid) and as far as the biblical account of catastrophic damages allegedly left on Egyptian soil concerns, it would be relatively easier to find a counter argument such as; Egypt would  have eventually benefited ‘considerably from their experience of foreign rule, and it has been suggested that the Hyksos rule of Egypt was far less damaging than later 18th Dynasty records would lead us to believe’ (http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/hyksos.htm). In other words, through the experience of foreign rule, Egypt rather became ‘a stronger country, with a much more viable military’ (ibid).

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/the-exodus-in-the-history-of-ancient-egypt/