On the hotly contested origins of the Sea People.

[Napoleon Bonerfart]

I have a really strong hypothesis about who to Sea People actually were. I have heard arguments from people who live in the Middle East, that really want a cope and seethe on the matter, about the see people being at worst Hittites in origin given the hypothesized Indo-European roots (the name Goliath might be a single Indo European fragment of the Philistine language.)

The Hittites hypothesis conflicts when tracing pottery traditions that suggest a more Aegean origin.

DNA tracing on the matter is difficult because it only took a few generations of mixing with the local populations to remove any unique genetic markers.

I will give both of the above arguments some credit but I think they break down with the idea that the sea people were Indo-European to begin with.

Now I understand that it may be controversial to say that the sea people were not Indo-European, however I have really good reasons and to explain why we first need to take a step back in time.

First, whoever the sea people were, they were fucked. Everybody else was also fucked. The world around them sucked. The climate was fucked. Nothing was growing. entire civilizations collapsed, so they were all like "let's get on boats and just kind of go like towards Palestine or some shit."

And it worked. By the iron age the Philistines have five Levantine city-states.

And then the parts of the Bible where any modicum of useful history was documented, the Philistines were defeated by an early weak 9th 10th century BC Yahwist kingdom.

This quick history recap points to the obvious origin of this enigmatic party of seafarers: They were Jews.

Yes I know Judaism didn't exist that early in the iron age yet. The Babylonian exile had not yet refactored the religion into pure monotheism and would not for several centuries, but the sea people were still jews.

Why would this be the case you ask? It's very simple. It's like that movie millennium; that really crappy late '80s movie that was supposed to be sci-fi but spent most of its time on a romance nobody gave a fuck about, and like they were sending people on airplanes into the past or something cuz the future was bad or some shit.

Well that's what the Jews are doing. They have access to time travel technology. they send all the bad Jews back to be slaughtered by their own proto Jew ancestors as divine punishment.

 

[Breadbassket]

If this theory is correct, would that mean that the Philistines fighting with the Israelites was Jew on Jew violence?

 

[Skitarii]

Jews sent hitler back in time to bootstrap paradox the holocaust bro

 

[Slap47]

This quick history recap points to the obvious origin of this enigmatic party of seafarers: They were Jews.

The most popular academic theory for the origin of the Jews is that they were Canaanites who developed a separate culture from the rest of the Canaanites.

Not all of the "sea people" may have been sea people. They could have also been hill peoples that came down to enjoy the fall of all of the great bronze age civilizations.

The Jews were also an amalgamation of many different groups. The sea peoples that were defeated by Rameses III were also resettled in Canaan so they could have become Jews.

 

[Nice Stick]

Exodus also makes a lot more sense if Israel was a band of mercenaries. The sight of Israel approaching their borders was sufficiently threatening to cause the local kings to muster and deploy their army. Their alarm was justified as the Israelites subsequently defeated the Amalekites, Amorites, and the Midianites. They were clearly well organized and well armed.

Egypt hired a lot of foreign mercenaries and had previously hired five of the nine groups of Sea Peoples as mercenaries (the Sherden (Shardana), Lukka, Peleset (Philistines), Shekelesh, and Tjekker (Tjeker)). Since several of these are from the Levant, one or more of them could have been Abrahamic groups of some sort.

 

[Napoleon Bonerfart]

Exodus also makes a lot more sense if Israel was a band of mercenaries. The sight of Israel approaching their borders was sufficiently threatening to cause the local kings to muster and deploy their army. Their alarm was justified as the Israelites subsequently defeated the Amalekites, Amorites, and the Midianites. They were clearly well organized and well armed.

Egypt hired a lot of foreign mercenaries and had previously hired five of the nine groups of Sea Peoples as mercenaries (the Sherden (Shardana), Lukka, Peleset (Philistines), Shekelesh, and Tjekker (Tjeker)). Since several of these are from the Levant, one or more of them could have been Abrahamic groups of some sort.

Empires typically asserted control of the Levant because it was in the fertile crescent and en route to Mesopotamia for trade with actual real human beings and real culture.

Egypt lost control of Canaan during the bronze age collapse.

 

[VM_]

David Astle has a interesting theory that it was just a combination of out of work mercenaries, broke/out of work peasants, and slaves from the Mediterranean and Middle East taking advantage of a chaotic economic situation. He posits that the Trojan War was a precursor instigated by the Babylonian and Levantine banking elite and that Egypt was next, but eventually it backfired due to the economic collapse and by Egypt successfully defending itself.

 

[Bunny Wigglesworth]

The jews came from ancient Semitic pirates & outcasts that the Egyptians called the "Habiru". Habiru - Hebrew.