Jan Assmann, Donald Redford, Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman, Richard Elliott Friedman, and Israel Knohl—they’ve all circled around the same fire: trying to piece together the old stories. Not the written ones, but the ones scattered. The ones left behind in names, borders, broken cities. They’re not chasing bloodlines—they’re watching behaviors, movements, and ruptures. You could call it history by following breadcrumbs.

The Hapiru come first. Not a tribe, not a country. Just a label—used by whoever held the pen, usually Egyptian or Mesopotamian scribes. It meant those people out there—the ones without walls, without kings, without a fixed place. Landless, sometimes hired, sometimes hunted. Maybe a few tribes were folded in, but mostly, it was a status: outside.

Then the Hyksos—foreign rulers in Egypt for a time, eventually driven out. That memory lingers. Then the Shasu—nomads from the south, maybe whispering the name Yahweh before it was ever carved in stone.

Some think the Hapiru might’ve helped the Sea Peoples. They didn’t have ships, but they were already inside—they knew where the grain was stored, and they had been holding back their anger for generations. Not invaders, but helpers of collapse. Not a wave from the sea, but the pressure outside the stones, already cracking the walls.

The Hyksos were Semitic-speaking people with sophisticated chariot warfare, coming in from the northeast. They may have shared roots with Ḫapiru populations, or drawn strength from similar unrest. But they had organized themselves—militarized, governed. They entered Egypt as a foreign power, and their eventual expulsion was remembered not just politically, but mythically—as a trauma, and maybe as a layer behind the Exodus story.

The Shasu may have overlapped with Hapiru, especially as borderland dwellers and desert people pressing into Egypt from the south. Again, not a nation, but a people outside the system. Some scholars see their movement, and their association with the name Yhw, as early signals of the Exodus tradition taking shape.

And finally, there is the idea—unprovable but worth holding—that Abram was from Sumer, speaking Akkadian, reading cuneiform, trained in warfare. A perfect leader—not of an empire, but of the Ḫapiru. A man who left the city and moved through Canaan toward Egypt, and whose descendants may have become known as the Shasu. From urban breath to desert covenant.

So, was the Shasu Yhw carved in the Soleb temple during Amenhotep III, the same as the the Merneptah Stele, carved in 1208 bc, which mentions Israel? Was some of the Hapiru led by a man named Abram? Was some of the Shasu led by Moses?

Someday the breadcrumbs will give us the answer.