Secrets of the Hellenic Hebrew: Apiru, Hyksos, and Shasu, Oh My
The Jewish Bible recounts how the “Hebrew” Israelites escape slavery in Egypt to resume their life as slaveholders in Canaan, led by Moses and his faithful deputy Jesus (aka Joshua).
The word Hebrew (Ebraio in Greek) appears to be a rendering of Apiru, a name given to nomads and bandits in the Middle East beginning in the 18th century BCE. Per the Amarna letters, in the 14th century BCE, Apiru mercenaries and laborers helped the Pharaoh Akhenaten to pioneer his monotheism. Apiru soon overthrew the Egyptian client cities of Canaan, even as Akhenaten himself was deposed by angry Egyptians and mostly erased from their history.
Akhenaten was the heir of the first dynasty of the “New Kingdom”, which came to power after kicking Canaanite kings called Hyksos out of the Nile delta. Although “Hyksos”, thanks to distortions by Josephus and others, was once thought to be an ethnonym (ie “Israeli shepherd kings”), it is now thought to simply mean “foreign rulers”. Modern archaeologists cast doubt on the Hyksos’ reputation for brutal subjection of the Egyptians, suggesting their influence had built up peacefully over centuries.
The oldest possible attestation to YHWH is found in Egyptian hieroglyphs in the Soleb inscription on the banks of the Nile, commissioned by Akhenaten’s father Amenhotep III to represent his conquest of the “Shasu” of Judah. Shasu, like Apiru, has the basic meaning of nomad, making the two terms synonymous. Shasu may be a separate term for the expelled Hyksos. Indeed, wikipedia says “after Egyptian abandonment, Canaanite city-states came under the mercy of the Shasu and the 'Abiru, who were seen as 'mighty enemies'.” They were no longer called Hyksos because they no longer ruled Egypt; in fact, for a while, Egypt ruled them. It seems the Hyksos were Apiru all along.
Incredibly, the word Apiru could actually be cognate with the word Epirus, the region of Greece that plays a critical narrative role in both Alexandrian and Roman history. In Greek, Epirus is spelled Apeiros or Hpeiros, exactly analogous to Apiru/Habiru (depending on how you pronounce the “A”). Apero in Greek means “coast”, making an Epirote (Apeirotan) a “coast dweller”. But I think it actually means “summit dweller” due to its primal association with Zeus and Olympus. YHWH and Zeus appear to be the exact same name, derived from the proposed root of dyaus or dju, from which we also get the Roman name Jove/Jupiter. Thus the Apiru and the Epirotes honored the same god. Judah is named after Zeus or vice versa.
The earliest cultural roots of Hellenism are found in Epirus, including the oldest oracle of Zeus at Dodona and Mycenaean artifacts dating back to prehistory. Aristotle calls Epirus the very birthplace of the Hellenes. Wikipedia says, “In the Neolithic period Epirus was populated by seafarers along the coast and by shepherds and hunters from the southwestern Balkans who brought with them the Greek language”. Did these proto Greeks later invade the Middle East, becoming the Apiru? Did YHWH first hail from a mountain and not a desert?
One of the most telling facts about the word Hyksos is that it was used again during the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, when it was adopted by the Hellenes themselves, including Philip III of Macedon, the royal heir who was poisoned and thus retarded by his stepmother Olympias to make way for her son Alexander the Great. Olympias was a princess of Epirus, a neighbor of Macedon. Thus Epirote royals were calling themselves Hyksos during the same time period that they were amassing and or composing world history at the Library of Alexandria. The Jewish Bible was first published in Greek by these Ptolemaic pharaohs; no earlier scriptures exist in any language.
The conclusion becomes inevitable. Evidence of civilization in Epirus precedes the Apiru entry into the Middle East, which precedes the Egyptian dynasty of Hyksos, which precedes their defeat by Amenhotep III and his conquest of the “Shasu” (nomads) of Judah. Wikipedia notes Hyksos “have been credited with introducing several technological innovations to Egypt, such as the horse and chariot, as well as the sickle sword and the composite bow”.
Then Amenhotep’s successor Akhenaten became an iconoclastic ideologue who used the Apiru to reform the old Egyptian religion. The Egyptians kicked Akhenaten out of their country around the same time that the Apiru (re)gained control of Canaanite cities. Akhenaten’s life work provides the obvious blueprint for the legend of Moses in the Bible. Akhenaten even had an older brother named Thutmose, which means “child of Thoth”. Moses simply means “child”, his name itself a victim of iconoclasm. Perhaps Thutmose was the real heir of Amenhotep III, and Akhenaten himself was another Apiru.
It’s so hard to tell, because the Jewish Bible is a historical fantasy commissioned by the Ptolemaic conquerors of Egypt. Jews don’t even claim to be natives of Canaan; they claim to be Semites entitled to possess Canaan as foreigners. The bible is based on real history and filled with real meaning, but that doesn’t necessarily make a word of it true. With this caution in mind, we will let the name “Sem” or Shem (father of all Semites) take us back to the beginning of this story.
Circa 1850 BCE, a pharaoh named Senusret III conquered a city in Canaan called Shechem. Apiru are first mentioned only a few decades later. Shechem is also known in the bible as the place where Abraham built his altar, and the first capital of divided Israel, demonstrating its central importance. Around 1740 BC, a Syrian king made peace with an Apiru warlord named Shemuba. So it could be that the Semites were originally Shechemites, foreign settlers in Canaan who became known as Apiru after Egypt overran their city.
Judaism and Hellenism are often regarded as mortal enemies. But more and more they seem like Siamese twins. Does history really repeat itself, or is that only the habit of historians? We know that both Jerusalem and Rome were sacked in a civil war that gave rise to Roman Christianity, 69-70 CE. By that time librarians had already been writing fake history for centuries.
Soon I will prove that Mark’s Christ is based on both Paul’s Christ and Josephus’ Caesar. Caesar in turn evolved to bear more and more resemblance to Mark’s Christ (which became everyone’s Christ). Eventually Caesar even became known as Julius, the son of Jove instead of the son of Jehovah.
Do any of us know who we really are?
Mind blown. Somehow the Phoenicians tie in here as well.
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew first though. Hebrew is a completely different language family than Indo-European which birthed the Greeks, Scythenians etc. While the New Testament was written in Greek and the Old Testament translated into Greek in the 3rd century BC (the sepucla), the original bible was Hebrew. So a complete dislocation from the Indo-Aryans who went on to form the European peoples.