God Yahweh Allah was a volcano.

[popeyespappy]

Most are in Hebrew, many in Aramaic and some in Greek which doesn't mean much as Aramaic was the common spoken language and the upper classes all spoke Greek.

A lot of them are copies of religious texts and some are quite general in nature.

You know, you can transcribe between related languages with a fair degree of justice to the original text, say Italian and Spanish as an example. However, when you start with English to Chinese you can get some bizarre translations. There are web sites dedicated to fucked up advertising slogans of English rendered into Chinese.
I suggest that Greek and Hebrew were different enough that easy translation back and forth would have been difficult but probably not impossible.

So we have a story called Exodus about a bunch of people who fled Egypt then founded the nation of Israel

Right, but we now know that is horseshit because the chain of evidence is that the villages which arose in the eastern hill country and which grew to be Israel and Judah were not founded until around 1200 BC at the start of the Iron Age. But that does not mean that there might now have been some folklore recollection of the Hyksos expulsion among the Canaanites. Remember the name of the pharaoh who chased them out was Ahmose... which is pretty close to Mose ( or Moses ) in English. When the Egyptians controlled Canaan there might have been some control on the story of how Ahmose chased the Hyksos out and conquered Canaan. My guess is the story was more popular with the Egyptians than the Canaanites! But once the Egyptians are gone who knows how the story could have been garbled or edited to suit the needs of the powers that be?

When Egypt had the power to control Canaan in the LBA she did so, for 4 centuries which included the reigns of Amenhotep II and Thutmoses III, the absolute peak of Egyptian imperial expansion was attained. As can be judged from the Amarna letters, Judah was an unimportant backwater. After the arrival of the Sea People, mainly the Philistines, Egypt had only two periods of short-lived military expansion into Canaan and they could not consolidate their gains in either case. Finkelstein's assertion that the gist of the story was used at the end of the 7th century to motivate the nation against Necho makes sense inasmuch as it is the only time, prior to the arrival of the Greeks, when Judah and Egypt were in expansionist mode at the same time. Its a compelling argument but it has nothing to do with "Judaism." Yahweh was the local boss hooter anyway in Jerusalem. As Dever discusses there was a perpetual power struggle between the traditional Canaanite religion in the countryside and the new Yahweh Is Cool school in Jerusalem. What better P.R. for ole Yahweh than to assert that he helped the nation escape from the big bad Egyptians once before? We all know that priests lie like rugs!

OK, Just a couple of more things then I’ll let it go. Unlike our Hannah, I’m not married to the idea, and even if I was divorce is still legal for atheists around these parts.

Most of the merchants, skilled labor and even slaves would probably be able to relocate within Egypt when Armarna was abandoned. Many would have had skills or resources that made them useful elsewhere. In the case of slaves they would have been valuable property. However there would have been one class of people in Armarna that probably wouldn’t have been nearly as welcome in places like Thebes or Luxor. The priests of Aten would have become pariahs practically overnight in Egypt upon the death of Akhenaten.

These priests had been part of the ruling class. They were educated and had access to resources. Hell, if they were smart they would have looted the temples before sneaking off into the night, crossing the desert and the Red Sea before setting off across the Sinai Peninsula in the direction of Petra with their families and retainers. Perhaps even with Pharaoh’s army in pursuit. From Petra trade routes headed both north and east. It would have been a good initial destination for a small group of people looking to make a new life anywhere other than Egypt.

Once out of Egypt they found they didn’t have to go far to find sanctuary. The new boy king back home had other things to worry about. The old priests had to be placated, and the capital needed to be moved. The fugitives quickly found a new home in the hill country north of Petra with the Bedouin. Their wealth and education served them well by allowing them to become quickly ensconced among the ruling class. From there it wasn’t hard to effect changes in the dogma of the people in their new home. They were after all already intimately familiar with the process of usurping a religion for their own purposes.

There is no archeological record of their journey because; well there wouldn’t be. Their travel party was no bigger than the small trading caravans that traveled the same route they did on a regular basis. There is no evidence of immediate increase in the population of the area because there wasn’t one. There were no new villages yet because the people that would populate those places weren’t there yet. They wouldn’t come until later when they abandoned the population centers affected by the Bronze Age collapse. They brought their Canaanite belief system with them when they did come. It literally took centuries to rid them of the remnants of that polytheistic dogma.