Quote: THe earliest mention of the Israelites is from about 1209 BCE
And even that seems to be little more than wishful thinking......
From John Romer's "The First Israelites" Pg. 72
Quote:Six years after his work at Tell el-Hesi, Flinders Petrie was digging at Thebes, sifting his way through ton upon ton of sharp stone fragments, the pitiful debris of royal temples. It was, he recalled later, disastrously dull labour, and he was tempted to leave it. Then, all at once, objects that had been buried for millenia among the rubble started to turn up. A fine portrait sculpture of the king who had built one of the temples was found, the first ever discovered of the Pharaoh Merneptah, that son of Ramesses II who in those days was widely believed to have been the 'Pharaoh of the Exodus'. Then his men came across a huge rectangular granite block lying face down in the rubble, a great grey stela covered in small lines of hieroglyphic (see Plate 3). The block was massive and Petrie did not have the equipment to move it; but what a fascination! A huge new monument, well preserved and covered in history. Petrie had his men clear some of the rubble out from under the stone so that, as he says, 'one could crawl in and lie on one's back, reading a few inches from one's nose'. Then he asked a visiting scholar, who specialized in inscriptions, to examine the lengthy text. 'There are the names of various Syrian towns', he reported after a miserable afternoon on his back in Petrie's trench, 'and one which I do not know, Isirir'. 'Why,' said Petrie, 'That is Israel'. 'So it is,' his friend replied, 'and won't the reverends be pleased'.
It is over a century and we really do not know what the Egyptians ( the stele was written in Egyptian ) mean by the word "Isirir." That doesn't stop anybody from cumming in their pants thinking it means exactly what they oh-so-desperately want it to mean.
