Was the Exodus natural or supernatural, fact or fiction?

[Confused Ape]

If Hyksos refugees eventually merged with the Israelites,

Bible-thumpers aside, current archaeological evidence has led to this:

http://rense.com/general12/decon.htm

The Exodus from Egypt, the wanderings in the desert and Mount Sinai: The many Egyptian documents that we have make no mention of the Israelites' presence in Egypt and are also silent about the events of the Exodus. Many 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. However, this was not a solitary phenomenon: such events occurred frequently over thousands of years and were hardly exceptional.

Very interesting article. Anyway, back to the Hyksos

Hyksos, group of mixed Semitic-Asiatics who immigrated into Egypt’s delta region and gradually settled there during the 18th century bce. Beginning about 1630, a series of Hyksos kings ruled northern Egypt as the 15th dynasty (c. 1630–1523 bce; see ancient Egypt: The Second Intermediate period).

The Hyksos seem to have been connected with the general migratory movements elsewhere in the Middle East at the time.

The story of Joseph and the famines etc could be a fictionalised account of how this mixed group (the Hyksos) came to settle in Egypt. Maybe it even started out as a Hyksos legend. If Hyksos refugees merged with tribes in Canaan who ended up as the Israelites it means that some Israelites did have ancestors who came from Egypt. The story then got changed to say that all of the Israelites went to Egypt.

Now to the mysterious Habiru

As more texts were uncovered throughout the Near East, it became clear that the Habiru were mentioned in contexts ranging from unemployed agricultural workers and vagrants, to mounted mercenary bowmen. The context differed depending upon where the references were found.

Though found throughout most of the Fertile Crescent, the arc of civilization "extending from the Tigris-Euphrates river basins over to the Mediterranean littoral and down through the Nile Valley during the Second Millennium, the principal area of historical interest is in their engagement with Egypt."[3]

Carol Redmount who wrote 'Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt' in The Oxford History of the Biblical World concluded that the term "Habiru" had no common ethnic affiliations, that they spoke no common language, and that they normally led a marginal and sometimes lawless existence on the fringes of settled society.[4] She defines the various Apiru/Habiru as "a loosely defined, inferior social class composed of shifting and shifty population elements without secure ties to settled communities" who are referred to "as outlaws, mercenaries, and slaves" in ancient texts.[4] In that vein, some modern scholars consider the Habiru to be more of a social designation than an ethnic or a tribal one.[5]

Sounds like the kind of social class who could have ended up making Egyptian Mud Bricks out of mud and straw. It's likely that the Hyksos had some Habiru in their kingdom and they could have been refugees as well. I wonder if making bricks for the Hyksos rulers got turned into the Israelites being enslaved and forced to make bricks for the wicked Pharoah.