The equating of the Hebrews (who were held as slaves by the Egyptians) with the Hyksos (who invaded Egypt and ruled over it) is a dangerously stupid idea, and not original to Jacobovici.'Exodus Decoded,' Aug. 20, History ChannelJacobovici believes that archaeology does support the Bible, though his arguments are based on a rethinking of the events and some chronological tinkering.
by David DiCerto
Catholic News Service
First, he sets the Exodus some 300 years earlier than the traditional timeline – to around 1500 B.C. – and identifies the ancient Israelites with the Hyksos, a Semitic people living in Egypt at that time who, according to the program, suddenly fled the country en masse.
The earlier date of the Exodus proves key to Jacobovici's thesis, as it places it at the time of the cataclysmic eruption of the volcano on the Greek island of Santorini, the linchpin to many of the theories proposed. Citing documented modern parallels such as the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster in Cameroon, he believes that much of what the Book of Exodus describes can be explained by a chain reaction of natural phenomena, triggered by the Santorini eruption and a related earthquake.
'In Ages in Chaos I have exposed the untruth of Manetho's identification of the Israelites with the Hyksos. Manetho was an Egyptian historian of the third pre-Christian century writing in Greek. The hatred that until then was directed against the almost legendary Hyksos, the early conquerors and exploiters of Egypt, was from then on directed against the Jewish people. I showed also that the Hyksos, known to the Egyptians as the Amu, were the same as the Amalekites of the Bible who dominated the Near East, as well as Palestine, during the long period of the wandering in the desert and of the Judges; I quoted numerous old Arabian authors who describe the conquest of Syria-Palestine and Egypt by the Amalekites and the domination of Egypt for four or five centuries by the Amalekite dynasties of kings.
'The mode of exploitation of Egypt by the Amu as described by the Egyptian sources, and of Palestine by the Amalekites as described by the biblical books, was identical; and, most important, it was shown that it was King Saul, the first king of the Israelites, who succeeded in terminating the Amalekite rule by capturing their stronghold, el-Arish, which is but the ancient Avaris, together with their last king, Agog.
'The Jewish people harboured a deep hatred of the Amalekites from the days of the wandering in the desert, where the former, tired and thirsty, were mercilessly pillaged by the Amalekites and Medianites who would regularly invade the country with their numerous cattle before the harvest. This hatred was kept alive not only through all the centuries of Israel's and Judah's life in their own land, but also through the long period of their diaspora, or world exile, down to our own days.
'The Jewish historian of the first century of the present era, Josephus Flavius, accepted Manetho's identification of the Israelite's with the Hyksos, and by that time the anti-Semitism of which Manetho three centuries earlier was the first known literary source had already spread in the ancient East.'
Ages In Chaos. Immanuel Velikovsky.
http://www.specialtyinterests.net/hyksos.html