The Hyksos and the Bible.
We all know, at least a little, the accounts of the Bible. I am referring to how the Hebrews came to Egypt.
The story is more or less like this. Joseph was mistreated by his brothers and given up for dead, thrown into a well.
Some merchants found him, healed him, and sold him as a slave in Egypt.
There, little by little, he prospered until he was able to interpret the dream of the Pharaoh. The seven fat cows and the seven thin cows. Joseph interpreted it as seven years of prosperity and seven years of drought.
Because of this, the Pharaoh granted him the highest title and from this position he made his brothers come to Egypt. The Hebrews in the Nile delta prospered. This is the story told by the Bible.
But there is a gap of almost two centuries until Moses, who managed to free the people of Israel enslaved by the Egyptians.
What happened in these two centuries? Why is nothing written in the Bible?
Fortunately, there are other sources, those of the Egyptians.
Those two centuries coincided with what were called the Hyksos pharaohs, those who took control of northern Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period. Their name is usually understood as “foreign rulers.” They were a foreign elite made up of various groups from the Near East who already lived in the Nile delta before coming to power. Their political center was in Avaris, in the eastern delta.
According to Egyptian chronicles, they came with war chariots and horses, unknown in Egypt at that time, and with the composite bow, much more powerful than the weapons of the natives of the land of the river. Their rule lasted approximately from the 17th to the 16th century BC.
For the pharaohs of Thebes, a very long reconquest began that occupied at least three pharaohs, always fighting with the Hyksos of the north. The Hebrews.
This struggle of generations reached its culminating point with Apophis, one of the Hyksos pharaohs of Upper Egypt, who gave himself that name.
Apophis. He is the king of the night. The serpent that tries to destroy the barque of Ra, the Sun god. Throughout the whole nocturnal period he attacks Ra, but he never manages to kill him and the sun is reborn the next day.
To call oneself Apophis means to be like the Antichrist in Egyptian theology. Ra and Apophis. The eternal struggle between good and evil.
Apophis maintained international relations in almost the entire known world and sent messengers through the desert to convince the black king of Punt to attack Lower Egypt. This combined attack did not come to pass because soldiers of the Pharaoh intercepted the messengers, according to the chronicles. Fortunately for the Egyptians, since it would have meant the total destruction of their river kingdom.
The capital of Pharaoh Apophis was Avaris. The capital of Israel of the Nile delta was called Avaris and it was a magnificent city. Due to its strategic position, they opened trade routes and there was great prosperity in this city, according to archaeologists.
But in the end, Pharaoh Ahmose I, founder of the 18th dynasty, managed to take Avaris. He did not burn it, as was customary at the time, but instead destroyed the palace of the Hyksos and built a new one over it. Perhaps it was also the first Hebrew temple joined to the palace.
The Egyptians did not annihilate the Hyksos after the victory. Very probably it was the defeated ones, the Hebrews of that time, who had to build the new palace of Ahmose with the stones of the destroyed old Hyksos palace.
It was then that Moses appeared. The Bible does not mention anything about these two centuries of Hebrew domination in Upper Egypt.
Moses was probably the son of a noble or of a Hyksos king, abandoned and raised at the court of the Pharaoh.
He wanted to place his capital in the new Avaris as a symbol of power. It is very probable that, as he grew up, he saw that his features were not those of the Egyptians and that he belonged to another race, which were precisely the recently enslaved Hebrews—the same people who had previously been the owners of the whole kingdom of Upper Egypt.
Then came the destruction of Atlantis, the plagues of Egypt, the invasions of the Sea Peoples that violently ended the flourishing Bronze Age, and finally the flight of the Hebrew people from Egypt. But all that I will tell in the next chapter.
