“Mahoney explained:

“Mainstream archaeologists would say that if the Exodus ever happened, it happened at the time of Rameses, because of the biblical text that said the Israelites were building the city of Rameses. Yet when people understood Rameses lived around 1250 B.C., they didn’t find evidence for this type of story in that time period.

“But other archaeologists said to look deeper,” he continued. “Beneath the city of Rameses, was another city, much older, called Avaris. And that city was filled with Semitic people.

It started very small, just as the Bible says, and over time it grew into one of the largest cities of that time. And that is where we find, I think, the early Israelites. That’s the pattern that matches the story of the Bible. It’s not at the time of Rameses, but it’s at the location of Rameses.”

Mahoney also told WND about one of the biggest surprises revealed by “Patterns of Evidence: Exodus” – a statue of a Semitic leader in Egypt, a man who may be none other than the Bible’s Joseph.

“The story of Joseph tells of how he was sold as a slave and came into Egypt and then he rose to become this leader, second in command in Egypt,” Mahoney told WND. “Well, in Avaris, the archaeology shows a small group of Semitic-type people came in, and then there’s this house that matches the area where they would have come from. On top of that house a palace was built. They had tombs behind this palace. And this palace had a statue, and it was the tomb of a Semitic leader.

“The interesting thing is this statue found in the remainder of this tomb, a pyramid tomb – which was only given to royalty types – why did a Semitic character have this?” Mahoney asked. “What some people are saying is that this matches the story, maybe that prestige that Joseph would have received.”

The research team also discovered another biblical parallel.

“In the biblical story, Joseph said his bones should be removed when they left Egypt,” Mahoney recalled. “When the archaeologists uncovered this [Semitic leader’s tomb], a very unusual thing was discovered: There were no bones in this tomb. The bones were gone. Grave robbers never take the bones; they just take the goods, the bones have no value.”

Could the missing bones be yet another confirmation the Semitic leader was Joseph?”

My Comment:

This blog summarizes the evidence that the Asiatic Israelites/Hebrews/Semitic people,  from the region of Canaan, were indeed enslaved by the Egyptians.

They were called the Hyksos  and they entered/invaded Egypt from around 1720 BC to 1570 BC.

The ruins at Avaris in the Nile Delta where the Hyksos settled were excavated as early as 1966, so it’s strange that it’s still widely believed that there is no evidence for a Semitic migration to Egypt.

There is.

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There are 18th dynasty wall paintings depicting enslaved Semitic people that appear to confirm the Biblical narrative of the Hebrew fall from grace under Egyptian rule.

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The terms Apiru (state-less person) is used to refer to these slaves, and it is considered by some scholars to be the origin of the word Hebrew.

Others dismiss the connection as “wishful thinking.”

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There are tablets from the region dated from the 14th century BC describing the invasion/entry of  the Apiru into Canaan and the pleas of the local people to the Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhenaten, to do something about it.

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A 1210 BC inscription describes the Egyptian conquest of “Israel” in the Canaan region.

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In the same century there was a tripling of the population of the Apiru in the Canaan are that cannot be explained simply by an increased birth-rate.

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There are claims that underwater archeology confirms that an enormous disaster was associated with the Gulf of Aqaba, which some believe is the site of the drowning of Pharaoh’s army when the sea was parted in Exodus.  Others consider these findings simply conjecture or exaggeration or distortion of what are really the remnants of coral reefs.