<Tr> <Td> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> </Td> </Tr> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> <P> The Book of Genesis and Book of Exodus describe a period of Hebrew servitude in ancient Egypt, during decades of sojourn in Egypt, the escape of well over a million Israelites from the Delta, and the three - month journey through the wilderness to Sinai . The historical evidence does not support this account . Israelites first appear in the archeological record on the Merneptah Stele from between 1208 - 3 BCE at the end of the Bronze Age . A reasonably Bible - friendly interpretation is that they were a federation of Habiru tribes of the hill - country around the Jordan River . Presumably, this federation consolidated into the kingdom of Israel, and Judah split from that, during the dark age that followed the Bronze . The Bronze Age term "Habiru" was less specific than the Biblical "Hebrew". The term referred simply to Levantine nomads, of any religion or ethnicity . Mesopotamian, Hittite, Canaanite, and Egyptian sources describe them largely as bandits, mercenaries, and slaves . Certainly, there were some Habiru slaves in ancient Egypt, but native Egyptian kingdoms were not heavily slave - based . </P> <P> In the Elephantine papyri, caches of legal documents and letters written in Aramaic amply document the lives of a community of Jewish soldiers stationed there as part of a frontier garrison in Egypt for the Achaemenid Empire . Established at Elephantine in about 650 BCE during Manasseh's reign, these soldiers assisted Pharaoh Psammetichus I in his Nubian campaign . Their religious system shows strong traces of Babylonian polytheism, something which suggests to certain scholars that the community was of mixed Judaeo - Samaritan origins, and they maintained their own temple, functioning alongside that of the local deity Chnum . The documents cover the period 495 to 399 BCE . </P>

How do historians believe that the hebrews arrived in egypt
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