The Exodus story relies on Moses being raised and accepted as an Egyptian. Did the Hebrews and other levantine people look similar enough to pass as Egyptian?
Seeing images like this and this makes it seem like the Egyptians viewed themselves as physically distinct from other peoples, like the Phoenicians, the Nubians, and the Hittites. Is this an accurate assumption? Was there a lot of mixing among these peoples?
You would be hard pressed to find direct evidence of Moses or 'Israelites' ever existing in Egypt. The best historians can do is say that it could be referring to the Hyksos, but the group's ethnic makeup is debated as well. Moses has been posited as being taken from the legend of Osarseph, who was a bandit leading a leper army that ravaged Egypt with many plagues. I'm not an expert so I'll stop talking on the matter, there are a million theories with almost no actual archeology.
I thought that it was accepted that Exodus was not based on historical events. Or is this still controversial?
It doesn't necessarily rely on Moses being accepted as an Egyptian, but being adopted and raised as an Egyptian. It doesn't say that he was assumed to be an ethnically Egyptian baby. He was clearly an abandoned male child at a time when the Hebrews were being forced to kill their male children, so it would have probably been pretty obvious what his ethnicity was at any rate.
