Who Were the Israelites?
In the past scholars have identified the Israelites with the Apiru which is linguistically connected to Hebrew. They are mentioned in the Amarna letters. Another group called the Shosu or Shashu are also thought to be the Israelites. The Shosu were pastoral nomads. For more details see The Archaeological Evidence for the Exodus. Finkelstein and Silberman believe that the Israelites were actually the Canaanites. Surveys of Israel reveal that there was no conquest, nor infiltration, but a revolution in lifestyle (107). There is a shift from earlier tent camps to villages to rectangular pillared houses. There was a shift from pastoral nomads to a permanent agricultural life (112-13). Finkelstein and Silberman state, The process that we describe here is, in fact, the opposite of what we have in the Bible: the emergence of early Israel was an outcome of the collapse of the Canaanite culture, not its cause. And most of the Israelites did not come from outside Canaan they emerged from within
