Why don't the Egyptians have any record of Passover?

 

In biblical times, Canaanites of all sorts would routinely move down to northern Egypt during times of drought, where the reliable waters of the Nile Delta provided secure food sustenance. When the drought ended, often they didn’t return to Canaan. Over time, a sufficient number of these Canaanites—referred to collectively by the Egyptians as heqa-khaset (‘rulers [of] foreign lands’)—reached a critical mass in northern Egypt (Nile delta region), that enabled them to establish a state of their own. This state initially coexisted in uneasy peace with the ethnic Egyptian state to the south, but eventually (around 1650) took it over, and established the Fifteenth Dynasty.

Source: Wikipedia/Hyksos

A hundred years later (ca. 1550 BCE), the ethnic Egyptians to the south managed to overcome the Canaanite kingdom to the north, laid siege to their capital, and gave them an ultimatum: either leave en masse and return to Canaan, or stay and we’ll overrun and kill you all.

The Canaanites, wisely, opted to leave—240,000 men, women, and children, with all their belongings—returning to original ancestral lands throughout Canaan and further north. The victorious ethnic Egyptians established the Eighteenth Dynasty, marking the beginning of the ‘New Kingdom’ era of Egyptian history.

This story is well documented in the Egyptian annals, as well as in the history by Egyptian historian Manetho in the 3rd c. BCE, as quoted by Flavius Josephus (see summary in Hyksos - Wikipedia).

According to a recent, supplementary paper by modern Israeli biblical scholar Israel Knohl

[1]

, the story of Moses originates in a separate set of historical events, nearly four hundred years later:

Moses is an Egyptian name, and according to Exodus, it was given him by his adopted mother. The name means “son” and is unusual since it is not preceded by the name of an Egyptian God as illustrated in names such as Rameses (son of Ra, the sun god), Thutmose (son of Thoth, god of wisdom), Ahmose (son of Iaḥ, the moon god) etc.[19] Moses is thus, a son of nobody. This fits well with Papyrus Harris calling the usurper “the self-made man,” i.e., a son of nobody.

Although Moses is raised in the palace, he is a Levantine (Hebrew/Israelite) foreigner, as is [Egyptian chancellor] Irsu the Kharru. This dual identity would help explain the rise of Irsu.

When [Queen] Tausert died without an heir, Moses/Irsu saw himself as the appropriate person to take over and ascend the throne of the pharaohs. To do this, he conscripted his people who were living as dominated foreigners in Egypt, and brought in reinforcements from abroad, whom he paid with gold and silver.

A struggle for power between opposing forces in Egypt followed. Moses and his men lost, were expelled from Egypt, and left for Canaan. This also gives us a specific year for this exodus, 1186 B.C.E., the second year of Pharaoh Setnakhte’s reign.

The two stories—the expulsion of the Canaanites by the founders of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and the story of Irsu the Kharru in 12th century BCE Egypt—provide all the ingredients for the Passover story as we now know it.