These were Israelites from the tribe of DAN who were living in Egypt.
Hi Blam! There is lots of support for the theory that they were part of the Tribe of Dan which left Egypt by sea with parts of the Tribes of Asher and Judah, several hundred years before the overland Exodus.
I don't have any good numbers for the tribal sizes at that time, but if you made a conservative estimate of 1.2 Million Israelites, and assumed that number was split equally among the tribes (which it was not), that would indicate 100,000 members of the Tribe of Dan. (They were in fact probably bigger than 1/12.)
If half of them left be sea, that's a goodly number of people to be cruising around the Med, looking for trouble, even without adding the cousins from Asher and Judah. The Tribe of Dans trail is so strong at that point in history (and later) it seems well within the realm of reason.
"Greek legend holds that an Egyptian king named Danaos sailed a war fleet to the Peloponnese, conquered Greece and ordered the natives to call themselves "Danaans" in his honor. "
"These were Israelites from the tribe of DAN who were living in Egypt."
I am interested in this 3 year old conversation. Any new thoughts?
Doesn't Heyerdahl lend credence to the "possibility" that Biblical history is true? Certainly he would not agree with Biblical history, but his feats strike me as a type of proof.
I cannot also help but think of Heinrich Schliemann, the man who found the Troy of the Iliad. NO ONE in his day believed that the Iliad was true. Yet...he found it. He freaking found Troy! In Turkey, buried under 8 other layers of cities that have come and gone...Absolutely amazing isn't it?
OK, if the Biblical hypothesis can't be stomached...surely we can agree on this.
Men like Heyerdahl and Schliemann - the true Indiana JOnes' of the world - tell us more about antiquity than all the pin-headed elites in the universities do combined. Agreed?