> Good try sport, you only missed it by a few centuries and an entire dynasty. It was Ahmose I that overthrew the Hyksos. His dynasty, with pharaohs like Thutmose I and Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun, came before the Ramesside. I do appreciate your wishful thinking about your bible myths though.

Yes, I meant the 18th dynasty. Whatever. The point remains. Everybody knows that the Pharaoh of Exodus 1 is a composite figure and not just 1 guy. Well, maybe you don't.

> I am afraid the archeology doesn't support that. The archeology of the Hyksos areas in Egypt shows that they were similar to Canaanites, and Canaanites in the Levant worshiped Yahweh and El among their gods, and Hebrew is a Canaanite language. The consensus among scholars is that Hebrews are a branch of Canaanites, and the Hebrew religion is an offshoot of Canaanite religion. I am sure it is painful to learn this for people who are emotionally invested, but that has no bearing on the evidence.

More debunked 1960s nonsense from people who can't even read the text and more imaginary sources. Israelite sites are clearly distinguishable from Canaanite sites in the stratigraphy. This comes from the idiots who can't read Joshua properly and think the Israelites are said to have destroyed and rebuilt all of their settlements.

Joel Hoffman points out that Yahweh isn't attested anywhere other than in Israelite sources. The claim that he was worshiped by Canaanites is absolute fantasy. And you have the audacity to accuse me of "misrepresenting the evidence". You're literally just making shit up.

> What other languages are you talking about here? Aramaic? Greek? Arabic? I didn't consider it before because it's something that doesn't mean anything without context, which you have not provided.

The other Bronze age Levantine languages like Akkadian and Moabite. All of them have Egyptian loanwords and, but none have as much as are used in the Pentateuch. Later Hebrew writings don't even have that much.

> There can be a debate about the meaning of Empire, but in general it is a position above king, a king of kings, as the Persians would say. The first pharaoh was Narmer, who united the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of Egypt. Over the millennium the land of Egypt would fragment into smaller kingdoms and then be united again. Various pharaohs would extract tribute from and station troops in the Nubia and the Levant and Libya. If you don't understand that to be an Empire, then fine, pick a different word, but Egypt still had a massive presence in what later became, for very short periods of time, an independent Israel.

The point is that Egypt never ruled over it directly like you implied. No, they didn't have a "massive presence." They had influence, and even that was waning by the 19th dynasty.

> I could go on but there is a lot of reading you need to do before you can catch up. Good luck buddy. Maybe don't get your information from "Biblical Archeology", because those folks start out with the answers and try to find evidence they can force to support.

This entire field is "Biblical Archeology", idiot, since the OT is one of the largest written sources we have for the this region at this time.

But just keep sticking to your 20th century nonsense. Whatever makes you feel better.

We're done here.

> Avaris was the Hyksos capitol, and as the Hyksos were from the Levant it is likely that they were semitic people,

Yes, and the Hyksos were overthrown by the Ramesside dynasty and they did their damndest to erase them from Egyptian history, hence why Exodus says a Pharaoh arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph (who would have been a Vizier under the Hyksos) and then the Hebrews became slaves.

> but there is no evidence that the Hebrew ethnicity had split off from the other Canaanites at the time of the Hyksos.

Cool, and I never said they had. Obviously they would have been as Egyptian as the Hyksos were until the Thebans took power. The previous theory was that the Hebrews split off from the Canaanites, which is laughably false. Israelite material culture is clearly distinguishable from all other Canaanite material culture and it just appears suddenly during the early Iron Age. A complete coincidence, I'm sure. It was probably just placed there by a later redactor, isn't that the typical minimalist response? When in doubt, make up another redactor.

> Egyptian loan words makes a lot of sense, because Egyptians controlled and dominated the Levant for the vast majority of the Bronze Age, and never once noticed the Hebrew people or religion until after the Bronze Age Collapses.

You missed the part where I pointed out that the percentage of loan words is much higher than literally everybody else living in the Levant, even in correspondence sent TO the Egyptians. Some languages have 0 Egyptian loan words and even later books of the OT have less than the Pentateuch. And then you get the absolutely laughable conjectures of the Documentary Hypothesis with omniscient redactors who know 19th dynasty Egyptian place names and customs that fell out of use 400 years prior but who also can't see blatant "contradictions" in the text.

Of course they wouldn't have recognized them until after the Bronze Age Collapse, since Israel didn't exist yet and Yahwehism was largely unknown prior to the Israelite adoption of it.

> The people who would eventually become Hebrews likely picked up the language and customs from the empire that ruled over them and that they paid tribute to.

Ok, so you have no clue what you're talking about. There was never an Egyptian empire. The only direct control of the Levant Egypt exercised was a few small garrison towns. That is why so many kings went on campaign to bring back tribute to Egypt and is also why Ramses II lack of campaigns after the proposed Exodus is consistent with the Exodus narrative. Even by the time of his reign Egypt was unable to oppose the incursion of the sea people, but Ramses still went on campaign. After his 25th year however, he stopped. Obviously something happened, and the loss of his chariot core could be a reason why he lacked the military strength.

> There is nothing at all that indicates Rameses lost his chariots or that they have anything to do with his campaigns or why he went on them.

Except for the Exodus account and that such a blow is an explanation for why Ramses stopped going on military expeditions as opposed to "we don't know lol, but it definitely wasn't the Exodus". Like I said in my other comment "except for the evidence, there is no evidence".

I also like how you ignored my refutation of "extensive record keeping". If they kept such extensive records, then where are they? All of our sources for the 19th dynasty are inscriptions. Those records would have been kept at Pi-Ramses and Avaris which are close to the Nile in an extremely wet environment, not in sealed jars in a cave out by the Dead Sea. There's no reason to expect that they would have survived until today, if they even existed.

What's really wishful thinking is the lengths skeptics go to to invent imaginary sources so they can cling to the dying dregs of crap 19th century German higher criticism.

> The Mernephtah Stele does not mention the defeat of Isreal, it mentions the defeat of nomadic foreign people called Isiriar, among others.

Just completely glossing over the fact that the majority of scholars agree it mentions Israel. Yeah, people didn't think it was Israel back in the 1960s.

> The oldest seals for Hebrew kings use Egyptian symbolism, indicating they were still beholden to the Egyptians even into the Iron Age around 700 BCE.

Yes, which is consistent with my position and not yours, since nobody else in the Levant did that as you go on to point out. Did you even read my comment where I said that the Israelites have much more in common with the Egyptians than anybody else living in the Levant does, even though they were all supposedly beholden to the mighty Egyptian Empire which never existed?

Do some basic reading before commenting on this again. Like I said, people spouting off this nonsense are completely ignorant of the last 50 years of Scholarship.

The Hebrews didn't grow grain though (Edit: if that's what you mean by grain records. If you're talking about storage records, then even then we might not find mention of the Hebrews since they weren't involved in that either). Exodus clearly states they helped construct the store cities at Pithom and Pi-Ramses. They also likely lived at Avaris, which we know was occupied by Asiatic people before it was suddenly abandoned during the reign of Ramses II. Avaris also had an imperial palace there where Seti I lived while he was Vizier, so it's not like it was a small town. The scriptorium at Avaris was excavated and no written records were found.

There's plenty more evidence than just "grain records". Even so, most of the sources for the 19th dynasty of Egypt are inscriptions on temples, stele, and stone tablet. The climate of the capital region is simply not conducive to the long term survival of paper documents so it's not surprising that we don't find any such records.

The Pentateuch has a higher number of Egyptian loan-words than the other Levantine languages and mentions 40 place names that are specific to the 19th dynasty. This suggests that the author was more familiar with Egyptian language than people living in the Levant. Many Israelite traditions are also distinctly Egyptian such as the purification rituals, the dietary aversion to pork, and the design of ritual furniture like the Arc of the Covenant and Tabernacle.

We also have the Mernephtah Stele, which records Mernephtah's defeat of Israel in 1208 BC, the late bronze destruction of Hazor, the late bronze destruction of Jericho, and the Mt. Ebal altar, which are all consistent with the conquest of Canaan as described in Joshua. Kathleen Kenyon's middle bronze destruction doesn't fit with the text and we now know from Lorenzo Nigro's excavation that Jericho was occupied during the late bronze age before being destroyed. Kenyon's finding indicate site leveling during the Iron Age, which could be what is mentioned in 1 Kings 16:34 where Hiel of Bethel lays a new foundation and rebuilds Jericho.

Ramses II also stopped going on campaign during the later part of his reign and Egyptian influence eroded so much that the Philistines were able to move in and take over the coast. This is consistent with the loss of a major part of his chariot core as described in Exodus.

It's not conclusive, but to say there is no evidence of the Exodus basically ignores the last 50 years of scholarship.

It used to be thought that David and Solomon were legendary figures since the only sources for them are the Old Testament (aka "except for the evidence, there is no evidence"), but then the Tel Dan stele was discovered in 1993.

The stele only exists in fragments and dates to the 9th century BC, likely erected by Hazael, King of Aram-Damascus, though the speaker is unknown. The relevant portion of the stele likely reads "I killed Jehoram, son of Ahab King of Israel, and Ahaziah, son of Jehoram King of the House of David". Jehoram and Ahaziah are referenced as kings of Judah in 2 Kings 8:16-29. Ahab is mentioned as the King of Israel in 1 Kings 16:28-29, on the Kurkh Stele documenting the Battle of Qarqar, and on the Moabite Stone.