How about the Mesopotamian evidence for a giant flood, a giant ziggurat, etc.?
The Egyptians stopped using foreign slaves after the Hyksos expulsion. 500 years of brutal rule by the Hyksos had made them extremely xenophobic.
Not everybody from Canaan was an Israelite. That’s a specific, identifiable cultural group who emerged from the Canaanites around the 12th century BCE and never left Canaan.
There was no Biblical conquest of Canaan during the alleged time of Joshua.
This is true. The fortified city of Jericho was already an archaeological site at the alleged time of Joshua. Kathleen Kenyan dated the last destruction of the city to the 16th century (although there is pottery suggesting that people may have been living in some sort of unfortified community on top of the ruins for awhile).
It’s true that since the Isrealites weren’t recognized yet as a distinct culteral group there is no mention of them until later. However, the Egytains relied heavily on slaves from that area during that period. It is sophistry to postit that of all the tribes only the proto-Isralites were not taken as slaves. From the “Oxford History of the Bibilca world” pg 74 “Similar parallels exist for an Isrealite “sojurn in Egypt”. Diverse second millennium BCE Egyptian records attest to Asiatics …living in Egypt and fuctioning in a wide variety of capacities ranging from the most menial of slaves to the highest of officials…A Dynasty 13 papyrus list 79 slaves belonging to a private household in Upper Egypt; of these 48 had foriegn names, most Semitic. Middle Kingdom Stelas in general often mention Semitic domestic slaves who apparently functions as trusted family retainers. In fact,so many slaves in Egypt were of Asiatic (Semitic) origin that the generic word for “Asiatic”, 'amw became synonymous in some cotexts with “slave”.”
First mention of Isreal is on the “Isreal stela” erected in 1209 BC by the Pharoah Merneptah “Isreal is laid waste and his seed is not”.
Of the 31 cities listed as taken by Joshua, 20 have been plausibly ID’ed from excavations. Of these only two actualy appeared to have been conquered from without during the “best guess” period.
There are 4 Hypothesis as to how the Isrealites came to “conquer” Palestine:
“Conquest”
“Pastoral Nomad”
“Peasant’s revolt”
“Ruralization”
Or some combo of these.
Certainly Isreal “emerged”. Exactly how and when we don’t know.
The word is Israel. Not Isreal. Drives me crazy. Just remember, “Israel is not real.”
One thing we do know is they they didn’t escape from Egypt, wander in the Sinai and invade Cannan. “Semitic” != “Israelite.” Whatever semitic slaves existed in Egypt before the Hyksos expulsion (after which Egyptians stopped using foreign slaves) were not Israelites, nor were they any recognized or identifiable group of “proto-Israelites” (whatever that means). The ISRAELITES never left Canaan. It is the mainstream view of contemporary archaelogists that the Biblical Exodus and conquest never happened, but even if you want to argue that it can’t be falsified, the fact remains that no part of that Biblical story is historically verifiable and so it cannot be cited to answer the question that was asked by the OP.
Sez who? I have cites. Where are yours? The Egyptians regularly looted Canaan/Palestine for slaves and kept those slaves in Egypt. There is scads of direct historical evidence for this in period Egyptian writings- Papyruses, Stelae, and so forth. To think that somehow the Egyptians went into Canaan/Palestine and took members of every other tribe but “that tribe that would later become the Israelites” is pure sophistry, and just plain impossible, unless you are positing a Miracle. The Egytpians took scads of Semitic slaves from that area during that period. Some of them must have been of “the Canaanite tribes that would later be called the Israelites”. How could they not have been? Oxford simply accepts that they must have, and does not doubt “the Canaanite tribes that would later be called the Israelites” slaves in Egypt. (There is considerable doubt about anything like the Biblical Exodus, however)
I used the term “proto-Isrealites” to avoid quibbles and to avoid “the Canaanite tribes that would later be called the Israelites”. :rolleyes:
Sez all of modern ANE scholarship. Read Finkelstein and Silberman.
Quick question, and this is a factual question, not a challenge: How do we know that use of foreign slaves stopped wholesale? And if a population was already present in Egypt as a segregated minority group (the way the family of Jacob was, according to the Biblical account), would it necessarily have been considered “foreign” for this purpose?
Well, I’ll be. Didn’t know that.
I have seen his mummy dead and in person at the Egyptian Museum. 
There are archaeological remains in Israel that are considered to date from the time of King Solomon. Legends say he was born in Jerusalem about 1000 BCE and reigned over Israel from about 970 to 928 BCE.
There are archaeological remains in Britain that are considered to date from the time of King Arthur (5th-6th centuries), yet that doesn’t support the historicity of said king.
Fair enough, but in a related point, in a grave from the (purportedly) Solomonic era, an amulet was found containing verses from the priestly blessing (Numbers 6:24-26). I think this is the earliest archaeological artifact containing a biblical verse, proving use of the Bible as a religious document in the Israeli community of the time.
Hopefully, I’ll be back with a cite soon-- I can’t remember the name of the museum where I learned this at the moment.
There are some buildings at Meggido that at one time were believed to be stables from Solomon’s kingdom. They are now more accurately dated to the Omride era and may not even be stables.
It’s late 7th Century at best. Not even close to Solomonic.
Was it the Israel Museum in Jerusalem?
Cite?
Here’s a book:
Book Description
Scholars of the Hebrew Bible have in the last decade begun to question the historical accuracy of the Israelite sojourn in Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus. The reason for the rejection of the exodus tradition is said to be the lack of historical and archaeological evidence in Egypt. Those advancing these claims, however, are not specialists in the study of Egyptian history, culture, and archaeology. In this pioneering book, James Hoffmeier examines the most current Egyptological evidence and argues that it supports the biblical record concerning Israel in Egypt…
Most scholars agree that Semitic peoples lived in Egypt during the New Kingdom, and that forced labor by war prisoners in state corvées was extensive, supporting the Penta-tuch claim that Hebrews were oppressed while they sojourned in Egypt subsequent to their arrival. Identification of the “barê mishkenôt" or "store cities" (Exod 1:11) had been an obstacle to acceptance of this story. But the discovery of Pi-Riamses at Qantir in the Nile Delta verifies extensive brick-construction during the 13th century BC. Central to the Exodus strides the figure of Moses.”
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-hebrew/1999-November/004757.html
"“The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert,”
proclaims my archaeologist friend Ze’ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University
(“It ain’t necessarily so,” Ha’aretz
Magazine, October 29). He thus aligns himself with* a small group of
scholars widely known as the “Biblical minimalists,”* … According to the minimalists, the
Bible is worthless as a source of history for the periods it describes;
the texts were written hundreds and hundreds of years after the events
they describe and thus can tell us, at most, about the period when they
were composed, but nothing about the events they describe.
. Among Israeli scholars, the minimalists
are perceived as including Herzog’s distinguished
colleague (and another friend) Israel Finkelstein, whom Herzog cites
approvingly in his article. While the minimalists have no
formal organization and they do differ in details, they share the basic
view that the Bible is essentially a fictionalaccount that served other
functions for the biblical authors, creating a glorious, but
false, national history at a much later time.
That the minimalists are motivated by interests other than pure
scholarship is widely acknowledged. Again, they differ somewhat from one
another. Almost all, like Herzog and
Finkelstein, are serious scholars. But most of them also have a
political agenda. Professor Avraham Malamat of Hebrew University
publicly described one of them as both
“anti-Israel and anti-Bible.” At the extreme, they can even be viewed as
anti-Semitic. One of their number has written a book entitled, “The
Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing
of Palestinian History.” That about says it all.
*
In short, just as Herzog accurately tells us that “the archaeology of
Palestine…sprang from religious motives,” so the position of the
minimalists often takes on a conscious anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian
cast.*
It is also true that, as Professor Herzog tells
us, no Egyptian document mentions the Israelites’ presence in Egypt, nor
the events of the exodus. That is really all he says to support his
grandiose lead: “The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in
the desert.” …
Instead, Herzog begins to contradict himself. He admits that “many
[Egyptian] documents do mention the custom of nomadic shepherds to enter
Egypt during periods of drought and hunger and to camp at the edges of
the Nile Delta.” This suggests that it is at least plausible that the
Israelites (or the Israelites in formation) were among these groups. And
Herzog fails to mention that the Egyptians tell us that these shepherds
(and others) came from Asia and
that they settled in precisely the area where the Bible tells us the
Israelites settled.
Herzog counters, however, that “this was not a solitary phenomenon: such
events occurred frequently across thousands of years and were hardly
exceptional.” Does this prove that the Israelites were not one of these
groups? Hardly. Herzog’s point is perhaps that the story could have been
invented years later. Of course that it is possible. But the reverse is
equally possible. He has surely not proved that Israel was not there.
Yet that is all he says to prove his
major point…
If you read Herzog carefully, *he grudgingly admits that there probably
was an Egyptian sojourn and an exodus: *“At best, the stay in Egypt and
the exodus occurred in a few
families,” he concedes. That poses a different question. Now we are
really talking about how big the group was, not whether there was such a
group. Perhaps it was only a few hundred, or a few thousand. But that is
a far cry from trumpeting as fact that “the Israelites were never in
Egypt, did not wander in the desert.”
So, not only are your two “experts” part of " a small group of
scholars widely known as the “Biblical minimalists,” but their positions are widely held to be political not scientific.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0279(195410%2F12)74%3A4<222%3ANNIALO>2.0.CO%3B2-9
In the Brooklyn Museum (p.276, fig. 310) resides a papyrus scroll numbered Brooklyn 35:1446 which was acquired in the late 19th century by Charles Wilbour. This dates to the reign of Sobekhotep III, the predecessor of Neferhotep I and so the pharaoh who reigned one generation before Moses. This papyrus is a decree by the pharaoh for a transfer of slaves. Of the 95 names of slaves mentioned in the letter, 50% are Semitic in origin. What is more, it lists the names of these slaves in the original Semitic language and then adds the Egyptian name each had been assigned, which is something the Bible records the Egyptians as doing, cf. Joseph’s name given to him by pharaoh (Genesis 41:45). Some of the Semitic names are biblical and include:- Menahem, Issachar, Asher, and Shiprah (cf. Exodus 1:15-21).
That 50% of the names are Israelite means that there must have been a very large group of them in the Egyptian Delta at that time…"
The **Oxford History of Ancient Egypt **also gives extensive evidence of Semitic slaves in Egypt during the “pre-Exodus” period. See the excavation at Tell el-Dab’a, and others.
There were many many Semitic slaves taken by the Egyptians back to Egypt. To think that they culled from every other tribe BUT those tribes that would someday be the Isrealites is ridiculous. I can see it now:
Ptahmoses “Hey, Hotepamun, you got that new batch of goatherd slaves from Canaan?” Hotepamun “Yes, but we are going to have to let that batch over there go.” Ptahmoses “Why? They look and smell exactly the same as the
other batches of goatherding nomad slaves. WTF?” Hotepamun “Yeah, but I got a feeling that if we take *these *particular smelly goatherds, they are going to write a book about us defaming our name for thousands of years.” 
Well there is that possibility of a sudden flood creating the Black Sea about 7000 years ago, and other flood events, possibly recently enough to figure in regional folklore and then to have been incorporated into the scriptures of various religions.
This list comes from the “Great Flood” article in Wikipedia, FWIW:
Contents [hide]
1 The Black Sea (around 7,600 years ago)
2 The lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley, reflooding the Persian Gulf (12,000 years ago)
3 Great Sunda wetlands, Indonesia
4 The Carpenteria plain (12,000 to 10,000 years ago)
5 The Aegean Basin
6 Doggerland
7 North America
8 The refilling of the Mediterranean
9 The Caspian Sea, Sea of Azov, Black Sea, Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea (around 11,600 years ago and about 5,600 BC)
10 Tollmann’s hypothetical bolide
What intrigues me about the Black Sea story is how much of the Biblical story of Noah seems to be essentially an exaggeration of how someone, or many someones, might have acted if they believed a flood was coming. They’d get or build boats, not an “ark”, but just a goodish sized boat; they’d gather animals–not a pair of every single species, but just some useful breeding stock, and so on. Of course the Biblical story says rain caused the flood, which wouldn’t appear to have been the case with any of these floods. And I’m not sure how anyone would have realized that there would be a flood. But if the flood really happened, then the pre-flood details would presumably have been filled in by storytellers later on.
Dr Deth: A link to a site where one can purchase an article written in 1954 is not a particularly useful cite. I’d also note that the title of the article is “Northwest-Semitic Names in a List of Egyptian Slaves from the Eighteenth Century B. C.” Now, I don’t know what dates you’re using for Moses and the Exodus, but those who accept it as historical fall in two groups: about 1450 BC and about 1250 BC, give or take a century either way. Your evidence does not contradict Diogenes in the slightest, being a list of Egyptian slaves with Semitic names from before the Hyksos irruption.
I believe the earliest person mentioned in the Bible who is a real historical person, is Nimrod, who is Sargon the Great of Akkad, founder of the world’s first empire. This was around 2300 BCE.