Joseph anticipatingly gave the famine-starved Egyptians a taste of their own future Oppression

by Damien F. Mackey “As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the LORD said to him, ‘Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions’.” Genesis 15:12-14 King Solomon referred to Joseph, “the upright man”, and his falling/rising in Egypt, in Wisdom 10:13-14: She [Wisdom] did not forsake the upright man when he was sold, but snatched him away from sin; she accompanied him down into the pit, nor did she abandon him in his chains until she had brought him the sceptre of a kingdom and authority over his despotic masters, thus exposing as liars those who had traduced him, and giving him honour everlasting. The wise King of Israel also excoriates Egypt for what he considered to have been its base ingratitude towards the Hebrews (15:14; 19:13-22): But most foolish, more pitiable even than the soul of a little child, are the enemies who once played the tyrant with your people, …. On the sinners, however, punishments rained down not without violent thunder as early warning; and they suffered what their own crimes had justly deserved since they had shown such bitter hatred to foreigners. Others, indeed, had failed to welcome strangers who came to them, but the Egyptians had enslaved their own guests and benefactors. The sinners, moreover, will certainly be punished for it, since they gave the foreigners a hostile welcome; but the latter, having given a festive reception to people who already shared the same rights as themselves, later overwhelmed them with terrible labours. Hence they were struck with blindness, like the sinners at the gate of the upright, when, yawning darkness all around them, each had to grope his way through his own door. A new attuning of the elements occurred, as on a harp the notes may change their rhythm, though all the while preserving the same tone; and this is just what happened: land animals became aquatic, swimming ones took to the land, fire reinforced its strength in water, and water forgot the power of extinguishing it; flames, on the other hand, did not char the flesh of delicate animals that ventured into them; nor did they melt the heavenly food resembling ice and as easily melted. Yes, Lord, in every way you have made your people great and glorious; you have never failed to help them at any time or place. The following article by David Porush offers an interesting view of Joseph’s severity. Taken from: https://davidporush.com/2022/12/29/why-is-joseph-so-cruel-to-the-egyptians/ Why Was Joseph So Cruel to the Egyptians? Posted on December 29, 2022 by David Porush Joseph has prophetic gifts and uses them to preserve Egypt. But he radically transforms his host nation. The average Egyptian, we are told, was grateful to be saved from starvation. But today, we would see Joseph as a tyrant. He interprets Pharoah’s dreams to foresee seven years of plenty will be followed by seven years of famine. He advises Pharaoh to make all Egyptians give him part of their crops during the years of plenty. When the famine strikes, Joseph wields his power with uncompromising ruthlessness. When they run out of food, Joseph sells their own food back to them from Pharaoh’s storehouses that they stocked. When they run out of money, they sell him their livestock. When they run out of livestock they sell him their land. Finally, the only thing they have left to sell is their own their bodies and their labor, and they agree to indentured servitude to Pharaoh. Pharaoh already has supreme authority, but now Joseph has used the famine crisis to consolidate everything into Pharaoh’s grasp. It’s an amazing saga and the first in human history of the orderly transition from what was an open agrarian society of landowners under a monarchy to totalitarian rule by an absolutist, an autocrat. All Egyptian citizens – except priests who already serve Pharaoh as god-king – lose not only all their possessions, but the most precious thing, their freedom. They no longer own themselves. What follows is one of the most disturbing scenes of all, another turn of Joseph’s screw: Joseph now forcibly re-locates whole Egyptian towns to new ones, playing a cruel game of mixmaster with them for reasons that seem gratuitous and harsh. So Joseph gained possession of all the farmland of Egypt for Pharaoh. Every Egyptian sold his field because the famine was too much for them, so the land passed over to Pharaoh. And he [Joseph] removed the population town by town, from one end of Egypt’s border to the other. (Gen 47:20-21) We might say Joseph uprooted the Egyptians for strategic reasons. …. His measures saved Egypt from starvation, but the result is effectively enslavement of the entire populace. We could say he was averting a revolution against Pharaoh but he created a totalitarian regime. Everyone has a visceral attachment to his or her own land and home and local culture. When they made the deal, the Egyptians did so willingly. They were starving and even declared their gratitude to Pharaoh for saving their lives so they might live until the Nile flooded again and they might prosper and maybe even buy their old land back. But how long before the formerly free landowners and farmers chafe against their servitude to Pharaoh? Joseph wanted to make sure they were completely detached, dislocated, disunited. …. Ibn Ezra, a 12th century Spanish commentator even says Joseph was staging a notorious tactic – it was used used by Mao in China’s Cultural Revolution of the 20th century – to move urbanites from the major cities to farms, “from the capital to villages so that they would till the soil” as Ibn Ezra says. In both instances, it still seems cruel. Americans old enough will remember Depression-era dislocation in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and in towns across the country when banks repossessed mortgages. Think of movies like the Grapes of Wrath or It’s a Wonderful Life. In The Plot Against America (2004), Philip Roth imagines an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh, a Nazi, becomes president in 1940. In league with Hitler, he implements a much subtler plan to destroy the Jews than burning them wholesale. He separates individuals from their families in Jewish enclaves like Newark and re-settles them in places like rural Kentucky. It’s a form of cultural and psychic extermination. It’s also what nations do to each other. A bully country invades and if they haven’t slaughtered the natives, make them slaves or force them into exile. Some natives escape and take to the hills to fight a heroic guerrilla war. Every nation has this story. It is the story of the American Revolution against the British. It’s the story of the Americans and their cruelty to both African slaves and Native Americans. And long before white men slaughtered and herded them onto reservations, Native Americans did this to each other. In the 19th and 20th centuries we celebrated British rule over an empire of brown-skinned peoples as a victory of civilization. Now, we treat their subjugation of indigenous people as a paradigm of imperialist crimes, including colonialism and racism. …. Why shouldn’t we be outraged by Joseph rule in Egypt? Naturally, we root for the underdogs, the scrappy, poor natives fighting against wealthy cruel rulers with overwhelmingly larger, better-equipped armies. Why shouldn’t we be outraged by what Joseph did in Egypt? How could we possibly redeem Joseph from these accusations of cruelty and violence? What justification could he have had? Goshen was the most fertile region in Egypt and closest to Sinai and Canaan. Let’s dismiss the fact that we’re being cultural narcissists and judging history anachronistically by our overly-refined standards today, like accusing Shakespeare of being a male chauvinist. We could simply say Joseph was getting revenge for what he saw the Egyptians were going to do to his people down the road. Like I punch my brother in the nose because I know he’s gonna beat me up next week. …. We could look at it as clever strategy. While Joseph is staging his Maoist-like Cultural Revolution, Pharaoh also grants Joseph’s brothers their own region. They are shepherds, abhorred by the Egyptians who worshipped animals as gods, not just commodities. Perhaps out of hospitality and enthusiasm for Joseph, and to protect the strangers, he gives Joseph’s brothers the fattest land in Egypt, Goshen. East of the Nile delta, it is still the most fertile part of Egypt. Its very name in Egyptian, Pa-qas, or the modern Faqous, means “pouring forth.” The fact is, it was either a fabulously lucky accident or yet more evidence of God’s finger stirring the pot of history and fate, or at least Joseph’s prescience. Goshen allowed the Hebrews to prosper and multiply. …. Goshen was the first Jewish ghetto, both good and bad for them. It kept them apart from the Egyptians, the perennial “other.” When the new pharaoh resolves to crush the Hebrews generations later, it became easier to slaughter their first born, and round the Hebrews up for slavery. But it also had the effect of preserving Hebrew ethnic purity and cultural integrity so they could ultimately receive the Torah and be forged into a nation. Rashi says we should give Joseph credit for uprooting the Egyptians. By making them “strangers in their own land” Joseph might have been preparing the way for the Hebrews, his brothers, to be aliens, “strangers in a strange land.” If everyone is dislocated then no one will notice the foreign invaders. …. So in conquering Egypt he makes it more congenial for the Hebrews. …. In the same way, by making the native Egyptians into slaves, he is giving them a foretaste of what they will eventually do to the Israelites. Supporting this interpretation is a secret signal in the Hebrew of our verse, Gen 47:21, which reads “וְאֶת־הָעָם הֶעֱבִיר אֹתוֹ לֶעָרִים וְעַד־קָצֵהוּ׃ [v’et-ha’am he’evir oto larim…] Translators struggle with the meaning of the he’evir oto l’arim usually translated as “town by town” but more literally implying something like “and [Joseph] moved over [the Egyptians] from their towns. But “evir” contains the same root that gives the Israelites their names, Ivri – Hebrews. It comes from the nickname for Abraham, who is called ‘HaIvri” because he came from “the other side” [of the Eupherates river]” in Genesis 14:13.[5] This makes the translation much more comprehensible. Joseph is literally “hebraicising” the Egyptians, making them into ivri when he uproots them. ….