Who were the Hyksos? Strontium isotope analysis of remains from ancient Egypt

At this point in history, the folks who would become the Hebrews were living in what would become Judea. We know that Ramesses II conquered them and the surrounding area, using Hyksos-style chariots; and we know that at least one of their tribes, who Ramesses III called Peleset and we might call Philistines or Palestinians, were sea-faring and related to the Phoenicians.

In general, this all happened in the Bronze Age, but the Hebrew tradition didn't really form until the Iron Age, and there's a minimum of two centuries separating them, with Ramesses III not encountering the Sea Peoples after around ~1150 BCE and Iron Age Hebrew stories not being written down before around ~950 BCE.

So I'm curious if that is what the authors of this new study claim to be refuting. I think so, but it's unclear since they deliberately decline to mention the race they are referring to. Perhaps I should have quoted the sentence from the paper that I'm referring to (principally), "During this paper, we only refer to the dynastic rulers as the Hyksos, not the elite attendant to the rulers nor that ethnic group with which they are associated."

From my History Channel knowledge (not expert in any way), there has been a revival of interest in identifying the Hyksos with the Hebrews due to the location of a signet ring in Avaris by the archaeologist Manfred Bietak with "Ykb Hr" (Jacob?) inscribed on it. There is also a tomb with a statue of a Hyksos ruler who seemed to be almost as important as Pharoah himself, complete with what appears to be a multicoloured raiment painted on the statue.

Armed with this dumbed down version of archaelogy my interest in the paper is piqued. But they aren't so clear what they are refuting.

I'm also not clear how the use of Hyksos-style chariots by Ramesses II's is linked. The Hyksos rulers in Egypt were a couple of centuries earlier, right?

Anyhow, can you shed any light on the "the elite attendant to the rulers" and the "ethnic group with which they are associated" mentioned in the paper?

The monarchic period, even David and Solomon, reads a lot more political writing. The region enters into a historical period. The biblical stories start to relate more definitely to known historical events.

David and Solomon are kind of transitional, it's really just gradual. It gets more mythical as you go back.

Immediately following from the solomon period, the bible is referencing known assyrian emperors, pharaohs, and reporting on conquests that are historically known. There are dates.

By the end of the kingdom period, it's already the babylonian era... At that point it's basically modernity.

A reading of relevant biblical texts strongly suggests that the 'returnees' from Babylon were alien to whoever was living in Jerusalem. And the religion they brought back smacks of Zoroastrianism in its theological contours. Heaven, hell, resurrection, judgment, angels, and good and evil: these are Iranian elements. (Egypt also had judgment, heaven, and hell.) It took a few attempts to get the inhabitants to change their religion -- it's in the book, as they say, so don't take my word for it.

Those famous boundaries of lands promised to Abraham, for example, which stop right at the border of historic Greater Iran and Egypt, are basically the boundaries of the project 'temple state' the Persians attempted to create as a prepatory step to conquering Egypt. Heck, the Persian Emperor is even specially called "Messiah" (Divine King) in Isa. 45.

It is my opinion (and just that) that the sudden cessation of [imported Jewish] religious leaders from Babylon -- a seat of Persian Empire at that time lest we forget -- due to the collapse of the empire, is the basis of the mutatation of the work-in-progress so that the "divine mandate" of the famous Abrahamic lands were now in fact given by none other than "GOD" itself.

The irony of course, is the blowback of this Persian Imperial project 2500 years later.

[minor corrective edits]