Hyksos; Israel-Japan connection?

by AllAlongTheWatchtower 3 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  AllAlongTheWatchtower

  Let me first establish that this is pretty shaky ground, and speculation on my part, so please don't flame me if I have things all wrong. A couple weeks ago I think, I remember a post about Moses, and the authenticity of the bible, in which it was mentioned that the Tribes of Israel may have actually been an Asiatic people called the Hyksos. I found it interesting, but had never heard of the Hyksos before. Somewhere in the back of my mind though, I remembered something I read a couple years ago that attempted to give credence to a Jewish-Japanese connection. It took me until now to dredge it up:

  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/losttribes3.html

  http://www5.ocn.ne.jp/~magi9/isracame.htm

  After comparing what I read about the Hyksos, and then reading the other info about a possible Jewish- Japanese connection, I started wondering if the two subjects could be related. Plus, people are always talking about possible answers to 'the king of the north' and 'king of the south' as in Armageddon, made me wonder; what if all that Revelation stuff was about some feudalistic Japanese civil war or something?

  Some of the things on these sites are interesting, but I have no idea of the credentials of the guy who wrote the second page (not the PBS one), so his motives and knowledge are unknown. And since I'm atheist, whatever the answer is isn't really important, I just find it intellectually interesting. Since I was brought up in the Worldwide Church of God (Armstrong) which draws on British-Israelism for a lot of it's doctrine, when I was growing up lots of people were always trying to guess and theorize stuff like this, guess that's sorta stuck with me.

  Feel free to comment, shoot it down, consider the possibilities...I'd especially be interested in opinions by some of the 'heavies' like Leolaia et al.
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  Flowerpetal

  I remember seeing something like this on TV...maybe it was on PBS. Sounds reasonable to me!
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  Leolaia

  First of all, the Hyksos were Canaanites, i.e. Northwest Semitic peoples; the term "Asiatic" is used in Egyptology to refer to those of a Semitic background as opposed to an African background like the native Egyptians. Thus, many of the names of the Hyksos kings are recognizably Semitic.

  Second, the "lost tribes" mytheme as expressed by many various groups has much less to do with Israelite history and more with the long struggles over ethno-religious identity that confronted indigenous peoples in Africa and Asia in the face of European and Islamic imperialism and colonialism. The parallels between a given people and the "lost tribes" of Israel tend to be specious, unhistorical, or steeped in legendary traditions -- though there may be exceptions (such as the Lembe of Africa). But in the case of the exceptions where there may be valid evidence of a link to the Jewish people, it is more likely due to later Jewish diasporas (such as those in the sixth century BC, which led a significant number of Jews to migrate to Africa, those in the Hellenistic period across the Mediterranean, those in the Roman period into Europe, etc.) than the deportations under the Assyrian conquest of Samaria. The evidence of far-flung relationships between native peoples and the Israelites consist of superficial similarities of cultural practices (which could exist between any two cultures and which sometimes involved post-exilic innovations of the Jews) without paying attention to the more notable differences, modern legends and stories (as opposed to linguistic, archaeological, and anthropological evidence of origins), and especially strained linguisitic "similarities" between phrases and words from Hebrew and a given culture's language. Having a background in linguistics, this last point is especially obvious in most cases. Historians generally believe that the exiles from the Northern Kingdom (which represented only a proportion of the total population) were largely absorbed into the local population of Mesopotamia, with some Israelites eventually returning to ancient Palestine. The Samaritans certainly considered themselves as descended from the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom (see John 4:12, for instance). The fate of the peoples of the Northern Kingdom is probably not much different from that of any of the other ANE tribes of the era. Where are the descendents of the five tribes of the Philistines? Absorbed into the Palestinian population. Where are the descendents of the Kassites and ancient Assyrians? Absorbed into the Iraqi and Syrian population. Where are the descendents of the ancient Hyksos tribes? Absorbed into the Palestinian and Middle Eastern population. Where are the Elamites today? Absorbed into the Iranian population (at the very least). Where are the descendents of the Sumerians, Amorites, Moabites, Hurrians, etc. etc. today? It is very hard to say because shifting cultural/political identities and cultural migrations over the past two or three millennia. Jews, Samaritans, Mandaeans, and certain other groups maintain a longevity of cultural and religious identity because of their own traditional institutions and on account of how they are recognized by other neighboring groups.

  There are two interesting books I would recommend on this subject: The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth by Tudor Parfitt (2002), and Judaising Movements: Studies in the Margins of Judaism by Tudor Parfitt and Emanuela T. Sevi (2002).
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  compound complex

  BTTT - I found it, AATW! Interesting topic....

  CoCo