One of the rabbit holes I've gone down over the past few years has been the sea peoples.

Specifically, the fact that while a bunch of the claims of the Exodus for the Israelites are anachronistic and dismissed as being true at all, that's not exactly the case if the stories had been absorbed into the local tradition and appropriated following the forced relocation of the sea peoples into the Southern Levant.

Following Kadesh there's twelve tribes of Anatolian peoples brought into Egyptian captivity (one group of captives for each of Ramses II's 12 sons with him).

At least one of these tribes is later allied with Libya fighting against Ramses II's successor. At this battle the sea peoples are described as being without foreskins.

The Greeks themselves have a number of stories of someone coming from North Africa and being appointed king or prophet over themselves or the Thracians, whether Eumolpus (put in the water as a babe and raised by a different family), Danaus (leader of Libya and sibling to the Pharoh with 50 sons, like Ramses II who is described in his forensic report as appearing to be a Lybian Berber and who had 50 sons), or Zalmoxis (ex-slave who learned prophecy and predicting celestial events in Egypt).

In the Argonautica there's even a story of how their prophet Mopsus died by a snakebite as their normally sea-faring adventure was instead wandering back through the desert from North Africa by foot. Shortly after this they even tell a story about how a shepherd killed one of their elite warriors with the cast of a stone.

In Homer Odysseus seems to mention this one day battle against Egypt that was historically the sea peoples battle where they didn't have foreskins. In that story he's captive in Egypt for 7 years until "a certain Phrygian" shows up. Seven years after the actual historical one day battle is when a guy nicknamed 'Mose' conquered Egypt as an usurper which the following dynasty claimed involved outside help. Events the bear a striking resemblance to Manetho's story of the Exodus preserved in Josephus.

In fact, the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the Exodus all involved a mixture of people with the Greek historians claiming it involved their own ancestors too, contrary to the Biblical claims of ethnocentrism.

We're now finding things like Aegean style pottery made with local clay in early Iron Age Tel Dan, which lends itself to the theory that that Denyen sea peoples were the lost tribe of Dan and why the Song of Deborah refers to them "staying on their ships" or how Ezekiel 27 has them trading in what seem Anatolian goods with Tyre alongside the Greeks.

Perhaps the most mind blowing is that Tacitus's claims of Jews having been people from Crete hiding out in Libya is pretty much spot on a description of certain non-Semitic features in the Ashkenazi genome, from the prevalence of G2019S LRRK2 mutation which originated in the Berbers and seem to have been acquired around 4,500 ybp +/- 1k years, or the similarities between Ashkenazi genome and Cretean DNA, with one individual on Athrogenica finding their closest genetic match was 3,700 year old remains from a Minoan graveyard that had just been added from a 2017 study. I've now been wondering if the matrilineal endogamy present in the Ashkenazi went back much further than we currently think, and reflected an endogamous subpopulation tracing back to the sea peoples even in Judea, which might explain oddities like 2 Kings 5:27 explaining the existence of a group ancestrally white as snow as a curse.

Even things like the book of Joshua, completely anachronistic in describing a recapture of ancestral homelands may have been instead an appropriated story of Jason (one of the hellenizations of Yeshua). So while there were no walls to Jericho at the time that came crashing down, maybe those stories originally related to the destruction of Mycenaean sites where we're now finding it wasn't earthquakes: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/article-abstract/1...

Been a fun rabbit hole.