cajela

Couldn't you put some magical brownies in the poll so those of us with no clue can have something to pick? :Cheeky:

Jayhawker Soule

It's a faith-based response: even skepticism carries the baggage of an orthodox fringe.

Casper

On the other side of the coin, I can imagine their being no connection other than coincidence.

If I wanted to create a pseudepigraphic story about divine covenent and deliverance from some ancient oppressor of great proportion from the past, well I don't see any better choice than ancient Egypt in this case.

I mean, if "racial memory" has any part in it, what about from across the mediterranian? From the Caucasus mountains? From Asia Minor? The Hyksos expulsion fits only because it represents a West-to-East migration. Coincidence. IMHO of course.

Lugubert

Maybe I suffer from a diagnosable condition, but I just can't link the proved leaving of a conquering force to an invented exodus of slaves.

Just my 10%.

jeffevnz

Well, it's not clear that the Hyksos conquered Egypt by force. AFAIK, the only evidence for that is Manetho's account, which was written down more than 1000 years after the fact.

mit

I agree and I answered yes for just this reason.

I think there is little information to say either way whether the Hyksos were later to become the Israelis but it could be that the Moses myth was moulded from the Hyksos story, like the way the people who wrote the Bible probably adopted others flood myth.

Michael

judge

Amen is not only found in Hebrew but also Akkadian and Aramaic (and Arabic I think).

spin

Probably.

A garbled version of the Hyksos story was used by the Egyptians as an attack on the Hebrews who had come to live in Egypt after the fall of jerusalem (and the garrisoning of Elephantine with Hebrew soldiers by the Persians). Josephus mentions the sort of stuff in Contra Apion. The Hebrews there reacted to the attacks by repackaging the material in a nice way, constructing a glorious departure rather than an ignominious expulsion.


spin

jeffevnz

People probably think my choice of numerical cutoffs for the poll responses is a little odd: 0-10, 10-50, and 50-100. Allow myself to explain....myself.

When you're trying to gauge probabilities for questions on such a fuzzy topic like this, I feel that guessing the order of magnitude is more useful than trying to guess the probability itself. I mean, who the Hell knows whether the odds of King Arthur's historicity, eg, are 8% or 23%? OTOH, we can probably safely guess an order of magnitude of the probability that someone historical was at the root of his legend. Something on the order of 10's of %s or single-digit percentages, IMO. What about the chances that he had a castle at Camelot and was the King of all of Britain? That's down into the 1%, 0.1% or 0.01% range, given our knowledge of history. And the odds that he had a buddy, named Merlin who really could cast spells and crap like that? That's certainly less probable, in the 10^-(big number) % range.

So with the Exodus/Hyksos question, I wanted to have a log scale, with cutoffs at 100-10%, 10-1%, 1-0.1%, 0.1-0.01%, etc. But there's a couple problems with that. The first category is probably too coarse for a lot of people. It seems necessary to have a cutoff at 50, since some people will feel it's "probably" true. Also, the log scale would produce an infinite number of cutoffs, in theory, and when you get more than 3 or 4 options, people have trouble deciding anyway. So you have to fudge it a little. In the end, I went with these 3, to get a rough picture of how people break down on the question.

Now I find the results surprising. The overwhelming majority of people with an opinion on this either think it's likely that the tale of the Exodus was somehow inspired by the Hyksos rule in Egypt, or that it's very unlikely. Only 3 chose the 10-50% category ("fair chance"), one of which was me. There's a very hard split among views on this subject. The distribution is almost discontinuous. Glad I put in that 0-10% category, because a lot of people wanted it.