[Hae-Joo] Uncovering the History of the Jews – The Biblical Patriarchs, Hyksos Pharaohs of Lower Egypt.

Quoting from the BBC

The history of the Jewish people begins in Bronze Age times in the Middle East when God promised a nomad leader called Abram that he would be the father of a great people if he did as God told him. Jews regard Abraham (as he was later called) as the first Patriarch of the Jewish people.

So where did Abraham come from in the Bible?

Quoting from Slate

There's only one problem: The Bible doesn't say where Abraham was born. Abraham first appears in the Bible in Genesis 11:27, which says that Terah, a descendant of Noah's son Shem, begets three children: Abram, Nahor, and Haran. (Abraham is called Abram at the moment, which means "the father is exalted."

As the text makes clear, Terah and his family were pastoral nomads, wandering from place to place for varying periods of time. So, it's not inconceivable that Abraham and even Nahor might have been born someplace else. But where? And where was this place called Ur of the Chaldeans?
The answer is: We don't know. Despite two centuries of searching, there is no archaeological evidence that the events in the first five books of the Bible ever took place. As a result, everything on this question is conjecture.

This is where I would like to begin this story.

The Slate article is a perfect introduction to this topic of who Abraham was, because it reflects, in my opinion, the pervasiveness of the historical fallacies that drive so much of the sectarian bigotry that continues to divide billions of people around the world, often leading to violence between the followers of the: Exact. Same. God.

Seems crazy right?
That’s because a lot of what the religious followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam believe is based on a misunderstanding…
A misunderstanding that has been purposefully exaggerated over the last two thousand years, in order to create divisions amongst the flocks of sheep that fill the pews of the various ‘Churches’ (organized religion is all about power), which is to say the keepers of the Old Order.

For the first time ever on Steemit, I present to you the real story of the Biblical Patriarchs

But before we can go into that, a brief timeline to try and get an idea of the time and place in which all of this was happening.

Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3150 BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology) with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Menes. The history of ancient Egypt occurred as a series of stable kingdoms, separated by periods of relative instability known as Intermediate Periods.

Brief Timeline

2686-2181 BC - The Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age
2181-2055 BC - The First Intermediate Period.
2055-1650 BC - The Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age.
1650-1550 BC - The Second Intermediate Period.
1550-1069 BC - The New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.

2055BC-1650BC: The Middle Kingdom Period

During this period, Egyptian culture flourished. Politically stable, this unified Egypt was certainly the superpower of its day. No civilization in the Middle East could even compare.

The stories that are told through the Jewish Bible all begin with a socio-political shift that took place at the end of the Middle Kingdom.

By this time, Egypt had been basking in a Golden Age that spanned over 400 years, having enjoyed the fruits of many technological revolutions such as the irrigation of Fayoum and other farming methods, quarrying and stone-cutting, as well as achievements in the arts and aesthetics.

The apparent Golden Age came to an untimely end when the 13th Dynasty petered out of existence due to lack of any heirs. The 14th Dynasty which took its place was politically much less stable and could do nothing to stop a migrating horde of horse and chariot riders equipped with composite bows from invading all of Lower Egypt, establishing a concurrent Pharaonic Kingdom with a capital at Avaris.

This shift marks the beginning of the Hyksos Rule of Lower Egypt and the beginning of the Second Intermediary Period.

Now what I am about to reveal is of tremendous historical importance.
This could very well be one of the biggest secrets in History.

And though there still exists much controversy and uncertainty surrounding the story of the Hyksos, careful analysis of the records indeed reveals the true story of their rule over Lower Egypt.

Quoting from Ralph Ellis

The five books of Moses, as these texts are sometimes known, are simply the story of a royal bloodline, but it is a story that has branched off in different eras and into slightly different sects.
This most ancient of stories first divided in Babylon in about the 6th century BC and the Torah was founded; the story divided again in the first century AD, forming the Bible; and it branched off once more in the sixth century AD and the Koran evolved.

So who were the Hyksos?

A quick Wikipedia glance will tell us what mainstream Egyptologists have advanced in their conventional and academic theories

The Greek name "Hyksos" was coined by Manetho to identify the Fifteenth Dynasty of Asiatic rulers of northern Egypt. In Egyptian Hyksos means "ruler(s) of foreign countries", however, Josephus mistranslated Hyksos as "Shepherd Kings".

Though there exists a first century account about the etymological origins of the Greek word Hyksos, the supposed academic authorities disagree with it. They claim Josephus was simply mistaken and that his incredibly astute observations (which can be verified in many other writings that predated his life) should be dismissed.

They claim Hyksos comes from the Egyptian Hekau Khaswet, meaning ‘Rulers of foreign lands’.
Well, by ‘they’, the earliest case I was able to find of someone refuting Josephus and Manetho’s grasp of the Ancient Egyptian language comes from George Steindorff in the 1940s, in his work When Egypt Ruled the East, page 24.

Supposedly the chief theorist advancing this idea today would be Israel Finkelstein, Professor of the Archeology of Israel from the University of Tel Aviv. He is hailed as an authority figure on the subject. Though I have not yet taken a look at his work, his rationale for this translation can be found in his work The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, on page 54.

They justify their assertion saying they found the earlier word describing Nubian and Canaanite chieftains, but I really would have to be convinced with a stronger argument than ‘look, the word looks the same, so it must be that word’.
Language is much trickier than that. Meaning is all about nuance, and we choose certain words because they have a clear meaning that makes sense. The fact that translating it ‘Shepherd King’ as opposed to ‘Foreign Ruler’ would completely change the way the Jewish faith is understood in the world, and that most scholars who happily contradict Manetho and Josephus are Jewish, means we should at least be sceptical of simple dismissals of interesting theories, at least until we take a look at the actual evidence.

That’s why I would like to present to you an argument that makes a lot more sense, and takes into consideration the high level of intelligence of the Ancient Egyptians, as opposed to simple ways to dismiss and rationalize away facts that are too strange to be mere coincidence, and indeed point to a much bigger picture.
These short passages are taken from Ralph Ellis’ Jesus, Last of the Pharaohs, which argues against the ‘foreign leader’ hypothesis.

Manetho, as quoted by Josephus, says that the patriarchs of the Jewish people were both shepherds and captives. This account, and the parallel record in Genesis and Exodus, forms the basis of the standard story-line with which we are all familiar. It is from these roots that we now have the folk-tale of the poor Israelite shepherds being captives in a foreign land where, as slaves, they had to make bricks for the nasty and brutal Egyptians.
Finally, after many generations, their great leader, Moses, came to the rescue and initiated the great exodus of the Jewish nation, from slavery in Egypt to their promised land- Israel. Northwards and eastwards they fled, as poor and starving wretches, up into Israel and the city of Jerusalem
Unfortunately, that perception is pure nonsense; it is just a story for the children. The real biblical story is far more interesting, much more subtle and a lot more important than that.

Here, Ellis offers incredibly insightful analysis.
In his book, he shows how Josephus offers us an incredibly pertinent part of the story regarding the origins of the ‘captive’ theory for the Israelites; which he gets from Manetho.

Josephus described the Jews as being captives in Egypt, as does the Bible. He then gave the derivation of the Egyptian word for this term, although it seems that he missed some huge ramifications in doing so, for he made no mention of the following coincidence.
The Egyptian word from which ‘captive’ is derived is known as hyk. However, Manetho, through Josephus, explained that hyk has two meanings in Egyptian, depending on how it was pronounced. If the word is aspirated as the rapid sounding word ‘hik’ (as in tick), the result is the traditional word ‘captive’.
But if the word is given a longer, more rounded sound, the resulting word hyk (as in bike) means ‘king’ instead.
This is confirmed by the modern translations of Egyptian in which the word hyk can be seen either as being a ‘ruler of a pastoral people’ or a ‘prisoner of war’.
The inference is quite plain: there are two meanings to this word and they have been interpreted quite differently in the disparate disciplines of history and theology – each to suit their own story. The historians choose the term ‘Shepherd King’, because they are dealing with a lineage of pharaohs and the word ‘king’ fits their story rather well.
The religious texts are not so comfortable with this notion, they wish to portray a pastoral tale of simple folk, so they choose the term ‘captive shepherds’.
The ancient historian, Jospehus, also told us a very interesting story about the origins of this ‘captive’ theory for the Israelites; a story which he again took from the Egyptian historian, Manetho.
Even if the Old Testament had taken up the term ‘ruler of a pastoral people’ (king of Shepherds), this would not have assisted their cause in the portrayal of a tribal people. For the term Hyksos does not refer to any old tribal leader, but to a very specific line of kings. In this new interpretation, Abraham would not just have been a minor Asiatic king, controlling some of the wastelands bordering the Negev desert, with a couple of thousand subjects and a few starving sheep No; the problem with this alternative interpretation is that the word Hyk is associated with a specific line of kings, the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings; pharaohs of Lower Egypt.
Historians usually describe the Hyksos as Semitic invaders from Palestine and Syria, who conquered Egypt in the early seventeeth century BC. They are said to have taken Memphis at first and then established a capital at Avaris, a place historians tentatively identify as the city later known as Pi-Ramesse. This in turn is identified as the biblical city of Ramesses.
The military superiority of the Hyksos and their followers can, in part, be attributed to their use of cavalry, the horse having been previously unknown in Egypt. They are said to have established a kingdom on the northeast border of the Nile Delta, leaving the territory to the north of Memphis to the remaining nobility of the indigenous sixteenth dynasty. It is thought that these northern princes were probably subservient to the Hyksos. To the south, an independent Egyptian seventeenth dynasty ruled the territory between Elephantine and Abydos, with their capital at Thebes.
The Hyksos are said to have ruled their northern Egyptian kingdom (Lower Egypt) from 1680s to 1560s BC. They were finally driven out of the country by a nationalistic revolt by the vassal princes of the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt, under Ahmose I, who was the founder of the eighteenth dynasty.
Little archeological evidence of the Hyksos kingdom has been found, but fragments of pottery and sculpture dating from this period suggest that the Hyksos kings used Egyptian customs and names As I have indicated, Egyptologists originally interpreted the word Hyksos as meaning ‘Shepherd Kings’, but it has also been suggested that the name means ‘Foreign Rulers’.

As the former appellation seems to be meaningless, white the latter apparently has obvious relevance for an invasion of rulers from Palestine, historians have recently gravitated towards the term ‘Foreign Ruler’ as an explanation for the title Hyksos. However, it is my contention that they are mistaken, as the hieroglyph used to denote hyk – the disputed term for shepherd – is actually the shepherd’s crook.

Thus, it is more than likely that the true translation for Hyksos is ‘Shepherd King’. What is required, and what the historians have not previously had, is a convincing explanation as to why the term ‘shepherd’ was used by this line of rulers.

In conclusion/TLDR:

I think that this debate about the meaning of the word Hyksos, especially the way that arguments are made in favour of one translation without referencing the actual glyphs is in it of itself a kind of obfuscation of the facts, made to perpetuate what is probably one of the longest on-going cover-ups in human history.

But of course, I hope all of you wonderful readers will make up your own mind about this.

In any case, if this theory is true, and everything in the historical record does seem to confirm it, then our understanding of religion has been dead wrong for a very long time.

Surely the Freemasons have known about this, but as for the population at large?
It has remained a complete secret.

Now that I’ve attempted to bridge the gap between the ‘Bible story’ of Abraham and his descendents, and begun to place it in its broader historical context, in future pieces I will attempt to highlight the extreme significance of this ancient knowledge, with the aim of spreading awareness and wisdom amongst you all, my fellow Brothers and Sisters.

Indeed, it is my hope that we could draw a clear line through Abraham to Jesus, and possibly even figure out the truth about the Prophet Muhammad and what Islam has to do with this epic story.

There is never anything new under the Sun.

The old secret orders of Egypt, and the knowledge that was contained within the Ancient World’s various Mystery Schools, still exists today and indeed is still used to rule the world by those who would pretend to be 'Illuminated', much like a Hyksos pharaoh.

So many mysteries to explore and figure out, and I can’t wait to get right down to it.

In my next piece, I’m hoping to purely write about the historical and mythological Abraham, and try and learn everything we can from this most fascinating of characters.

Stay tuned guys!
And hit me up with any questions or thoughts you guys have! Would love to hear other people’s take on this.

Peace

Hae-Joo