“Hyksos Period.” Many commentators place Joseph’s entry into Egypt and that of his father and family in what is popularly known as the Hyksos Period. However, as Merrill Unger comments (Archaeology and the Old Testament, 1964, p. 134): “Unfortunately, [this period] is one of great obscurity in Egypt, and the Hyksos conquest is very imperfectly understood.”

Some scholars assign the Hyksos to the “Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Dynasties” with a 200-year rule; others confine them to the “Fifteenth and Sixteenth Dynasties” during a century and a half or only one century. The name Hyksos has been interpreted by some as meaning “Shepherd Kings,” by others, “Rulers of Foreign Countries.” Conjectures as to their race or nationality have been even more varied, with Indo-Europeans from the Caucasus or even in Central Asia, Hittites, Syrian-Palestinian rulers (Canaanites or Amorites), and Arabian tribes all being suggested.

Some archaeologists depict the “Hyksos conquest” of Egypt as northern hordes sweeping through Palestine and Egypt in swift chariots, while others refer to it as a creeping conquest, that is, a gradual infiltration of migrating nomads or seminomads who either slowly took over control of the country piecemeal or by a swift coup d’état put themselves at the head of the existing government. In the book The World of the Past (Part V, 1963, p. 444) archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes states: “It is no longer thought that the Hyksos rulers . . . represent the invasion of a conquering horde of Asiatics. The name seems to mean Rulers of the Uplands, and they were wandering groups of Semites who had long come to Egypt for trade and other peaceful purposes.” While this may represent the present popular view, it still leaves the difficult problem of explaining how such “wandering groups” could take over the land of Egypt, especially since the “Twelfth Dynasty,” prior to this period, is considered to have brought the country to a peak of power.

Regarding this period of Egyptian history, C. E. DeVries noted: “In attempting to correlate secular history with the biblical data, some scholars have tried to equate the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt with the Israelite Exodus, but the chronology rules out this identification, and other factors as well make this hypothesis untenable. . . . The origin of the Hyksos is uncertain; they came from somewhere in Asia and bore Semitic names for the most part.”​—The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, edited by G. Bromiley, 1982, Vol. 2, p. 787.