Some scholars think that the ancient Israelites were Hyksos. Others say Israelites were slaves to them. They claim the Israelite enslavement in Egypt and their exodus under Moses’ leadership never happened.

 

Israelites

The Hebrew Bible called the Torah, states that the Bnei Yisrael, translated as “children of Israel” and “Israelites,” were enslaved in Egypt, rescued by Moses, and brought home to Canaan, the name Israel had at that time, by Moses’ successor, Joshua.                      

The Torah does not reveal the years of the enslavement and who the Pharaoh was, the title given to the Egyptian leaders at that time.

However, relying only on the numerical values of Hebrew letters, rabbis in a Midrash quoted by Rashi state that the enslavement was 210 years. In Genesis 42:2, when Jacob first instructed his sons to descend to Egypt, he said, “Go down (“רדו”) there and buy [food].” The numerical value of the Hebrew letters of the word “רדו” (“redu,” “go down”) is 210.

Two problems make this rabbinical decision faulty. First, Genesis 42:2 has nothing to do with the Israelite enslavement. Second, it is based on a midrashic technique to support lessons for proper behavior. The method is called gematria; gematriot is the plural form. It assigns a numerical value to a name, word, or phrase by reading it as a number.

The rational thinking sage Abraham ibn Ezra (c. 1092-1167) mocked gematriot, saying, “God does not speak in gematriot–[1]

Many Jews, even rabbis, agreed with ibn Ezra and had different numbers for when Israel was in Egypt.

Besides the problem of disagreements about the dating of the exodus in Jewish writing, ancient Jewish sources other than the Bible do not mention the Israelite slavery and exodus from Egypt, and ancient Egyptian documents do not mention it.

In short, there is no historical support for the story of Israelite slavery outside the Bible.

 

Hyksos

However, Egyptian documents mention the Hyksos.

Hyksos is the Greek version of an Egyptian title, Heka Khasut, meaning “rulers of (or, from) foreign lands.” While much is unknown and misunderstood, and there are widely different ideas about them, some scholars think the Hyksos were Semitic people in Ancient Egypt who originated in the Levant region of the Mediterranean.

The Hyksos ruled over Lower Egypt and the Nile Valley around 1650–1550 BCE, although the actual dates are unknown. They were expelled from Egypt around 1550 BCE.                                     

It was not until over a thousand years after the Hyksos existed that Manetho, an Egyptian priest in the third century BCE, originated the idea that the Israelite exodus and the defeat of the Hyksos were related in some way.

Only pieces of his lost work exist today. Josephus quoted them several centuries later in his Contra Apionem (1:14.73–92, 1:26.227-250), as did other ancient writers.

Manetho’s writings contain obvious errors. He misunderstood the meaning of the name “Hyksos.” He said it meant “shepherd-kings.” He included a garbled account of their expulsion. Furthermore, the quotes and paraphrases from his history make it difficult to disentangle his work from how Josephus and other later Jewish and Christian writers interpreted his work that the Israelite exodus and the expulsion of the Hyksos were related.

 

Debate about dates

The faulty midrashic Anno Mundi, counting years since creation, is based on a literal reading of the Bible as interpreted by Midrashim and guesswork. Traditional Jewish dating uses the Anno Mundi and dates the exodus to 1313 BCE. The Anno Mundi in 2014 is 5784. According to it, Abraham was born in 1948, Isaac his son in 2048, and the exodus occurred 400 years later in 2448.[2]

Scholars such as William F. Albright, in his 1935 article in Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research 58, date the Israelite enslavement around 1200 BCE.

Other scholars, such as Joseph Einstein in Torah. Com “We were slaves to Hyksos in Egypt” dates the enslavement to the fifteenth century BCE and claims the Israelites were enslaved by the Hyksos, who were not in Egypt in 1200 BCE. Still, other scholars and Jewish traditions offer other dates.

According to Dr. Einstein, Hyksos were expelled from Egypt around 1535 BCE, and many of their slaves accompanied them in the exodus. He writes that the Egyptians indicated that many disasters occurred when the people fled from Egypt; disasters claimed to have been brought by the gods. He speculates that these disasters could be the plagues mentioned in the Torah.

 

What conclusions can be derived from this discussion?

  • We should note that an Egyptian priest developed the idea of the relationship between Hyksos and Israelites over a thousand years after the alleged Hyksos expulsion from Egypt. We have no idea what he based his idea on.
  • His writing exists today only in fragments, most of which are indecipherable and some clearly wrong.
  • The idea is interesting, but no sensible person can conclude that the priest has proven his idea beyond a reasonable doubt. Similarly, although the scholars who address the matter are intelligent and knowledgeable about all we can know about ancient history, they cannot prove their conclusions about this matter.
  • We should recall that the Greek philosopher Socrates was considered the most intelligent person in Athens because he realized he did not know everything. So, while Manetho’s idea is interesting, we should not accept it as accurate.
  • Yet, it raises many questions. One is, should we believe the Torah story of the enslavement and exodus? Another is whether we should celebrate Passover, which commemorates these events. Another question is: Should we study and obey the Torah? Yet another is, if we believe God did not reveal the Torah but that it is a human document, is this a reason to abandon Judaism?
  • Once we recognize what the Torah did for our ancestors and what it can do for us, we realize the benefits Judaism gives us.
  • The Torah and Judaism emphasize proper behavior, to act and not sit back passively and rely on beliefs that are no more than what we hope to be true. The primary Torah teaching, repeated later as the basic teaching in the New Testament, is to love all others as you love yourself, meaning to treat others as you want them to treat you.
  • Judaism impacted and, in a sense, is the father of Christianity and Islam.
  • The Torah and Judaism emphasized education, which helped society and led to Jews being found in large numbers among Nobel Prize Winners in medicine, science, and other categories. These Jewish contributions saved the lives of many people all over the world.
  • The Torah gave humanity the concept of a day of rest, which, although not observed today by non-Jews as the Shabbat who lose many benefits Shabbat gives, still gives them satisfaction, a time for joy and rest.
  • Torah was written at the time when Jews and other nations had primitive ideas such as the need to appease gods with sacrifices, slavery, and the inferiority of women, and had to allow Jews to practice these ideas or the Jews would not, indeed could not, accept the Torah.
  • Yet it gave multiple hints that these primitive ideas must be abandoned, such as restricting sacrifices to only certain animals and specific places. Jews began to understand these hints and stopped these ideas and practices.
  • Other cultures learned this from the Jews, and this helped people move toward being all they could be. (This despite some anti-Semites ignoring the hints and criticizing the Torah.)
  • The Ten Commandments of Judaism are posted in many non-Jewish sites, schools, and courts.
  • Judaism invented the basic Noahide Commandments, which emphasize proper behavior. Many non-Jews accept them as guides for their lives and call themselves Noahides.
  • Passover taught Jews and non-Jews the need for and meaning of freedom. It is no surprise that enslaved blacks in the US sang songs such as:

“Go down Moses

Way down in Egypt land

Tell old Pharaoh

To let my people go!”

  • There are more than a hundred other Torah lessons that teach Jews and non-Jews, teachings in the prophets, such as the idea of what life should be like in a messianic age, ideas different from those proposed by politicians today, and depictions of individuals in the Hebrew Bible of people, none of whom are perfect, each making mistakes. Still, in many ways, they are like us. We can learn from their behavior.
  • Aristotle and Maimonides stressed that we must always act according to the Golden Mean, never acting according to one extreme or another. For example, we should not act like soldiers who hide cowardly or rush into battle overzealously but act with caution. They said we should develop habits that ensure we do not go to an extreme. Many Jewish laws do this. Keeping kosher is one of them.
  • Maimonides tells us that besides keeping us from the danger of consuming animals that live in filthy areas and eat foul foods, the kosher laws develop our health concerns and habituate us to control ourselves. Current thinkers put it this way: We are what we eat.

 

In short, it is sensible to learn about non-Jewish matters because we are prompted to think and improve, but we need to be careful, question what we read, and find answers.

Even if we find it difficult to accept the ideas of enslavement and exodus and that God revealed the Torah, we have much to gain by observing Judaism.

 

[1] Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Pentateuch: Genesis, by Norman Strickman and Arthur M. Silver, 1988.

[2] See my essay on the Anno Mundi in Rational Ideas Two.