Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [45]
A scorned woman, Potiphar’s wife cries “rape” and Joseph is thrown into prison, even though execution of a slave so accused would have been a reasonable outcome. Joseph’s encounter with Potiphar’s wife is apparently a revision of an Egyptian folk story known as “The Tale of Two Brothers,” in which one brother is falsely accused by his brother’s wife. In the Egyptian tale, the two brothers are reconciled. While in prison, Joseph rediscovers his skills as an interpreter of dreams—the very thing that got him into trouble with his brothers. His ability to explain dreams is so great that Joseph is brought to the Pharaoh, who tells Joseph his dreams. With God’s help, Joseph explains that Egypt will experience seven years of good crops followed by seven years of famine. He advises the Pharaoh to store up grain during the good years to have it available during the bad years. Pharaoh is so impressed, he sets Joseph up as the prime minister of Egypt with authority to administer the food program.
Again Joseph prospers and marries the daughter of an Egyptian high priest who bears two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. When the predicted famine comes, Joseph’s brothers are sent by Jacob to Egypt, hoping to buy food. More than twenty years have passed since they sold Joseph as a slave, and the brothers do not recognize their brother, now an Egyptian official, when they come before him.
Joseph has no difficulty realizing these are his brothers. Instead of vengeance, Joseph secretly plans to reunite his family but first lays out an elaborate trick in order to teach his brothers a lesson. He has a gold cup placed in the brothers’ baggage, and when it is discovered, Joseph demands that Benjamin, the youngest, be left behind as punishment. Troubled by his conscience over what he had done to his brother Joseph twenty years earlier, Judah offers himself in Benjamin’s place.
Having seen that Judah had indeed learned his lesson, Joseph finally reveals his identity to his brothers and even tells them that his being sold into slavery was part of God’s plan. At Joseph’s insistence, his father, Jacob (Israel), and all his descendants make the trip to Egypt. They are given a prime piece of Egyptian real estate in Goshen, a fertile area on the Nile Delta. In a long poem, each of the twelve sons is given a blessing by their father, Jacob. This is an accounting of sorts for the twelve sons, and it is not good news for everybody. It actually reflects events as they occur a few centuries later, in King David’s time.
Who was Joseph’s Pharaoh, and could a Semite slave become the Egyptian prime minister? We know a lot about the Egyptians and how they lived, including how the pyramids were built by skilled wage laborers, not slaves. Elaborate court records survive of many of the Pharaohs before and after the presumed time of Joseph. But none of them mentions a Semite slave becoming a high official who had translated the Pharaoh’s dreams and helped save Egypt in a time of extraordinary famine. Periodic drought and famine were not unusual in ancient times, and several periods of severe shortages are recorded, although none exactly matches the biblical scenario. So we don’t know who Joseph’s Pharaoh was. Many elements in the biblical story are consonant with what is known of Egypt at the time. Although considerable scholarship has been devoted to the question, the one widely accepted guess is that Joseph was in Egypt during the period of the Hyksos, a Semitic group that invaded and conquered parts of Egypt, holding onto the Nile Delta section for about a century.
Apart from the historical impact of the Joseph story and its consequences for the future of the Israelites, there is also a more significant spiritual meaning. Throughout Genesis, there has been a succession of stories about brothers mistreating and betraying one another. The first brothers, Cain and Abel, produced the first murder. Later brothers supplanted or tricked each other. And