Lecture 1: Abraham, Joseph and Jacob in Egypt (2)

[Music] so in this section we will talk about abraham coming to egypt and joseph coming to egypt one thing we learn in the stories in the book of genesis is that egypt was a place that was very attractive to the peoples who lived in palestine and syria because of the nile the nile ensured that almost always there was water and green plants so that the bedouin the shepherds could come to egypt during times of famine when there was no rain you have to know that in in ancient canaan and syria everything depended on rain whereas in egypt of course everything depends on the nile meaning everything depends on the rain in central africa not the rain here the nile gets its water from central africa canaan and syria is altogether different you have no rivers like the nile and so the rain is what makes plants grow if you have no rain we have famine people die and what happens people move so the idea of people coming to egypt during a time of famine as the bible suggests makes very good sense now let's pick up the story of abraham in genesis 11 and verse 31 where we read that tyra took abram his son and lot the son of heron his grandson and sarai his daughter-in-law his son abram's wife and they went forth together from ur of the chaldeans to go to the land of canaan but when they came to haran they stayed there if we look at a map we can determine where this is ur of the chaldeans is in the southern part of what is today iraq along the euphrates river and you can see the red line represents the roots of travel as much as possible beside the euphrates river all the way up to haran today haran is just over the border of syria into turkey so it's actually in turkey today we don't know for sure why tira and his family decided to stop in this area or why tira and his family left ur to go to canaan over here we're not told that in genesis 11. if we looked a little bit at mesopotamian history the history of ancient babylon we know that there were people from northern syria and this area who over a period of maybe 100 years had migrated down into southern iraq and we call these we know them from ancient inscriptions as the amorites the great king hammurabi was an amorite several generations before his ancestors migrated to southern iraq now it could be that tyra and his family had been part of the migration several generations earlier and now they're saying we want to go back and live in our old land and so this may be why they moved to this area and decided to stay but then god comes along and tells abraham to go on to the land that i would show you. so genesis 12 9-10 abram journeyed on still going towards the negev which is the southern part of canaan now there was a famine in the land so notice in the book of genesis every time there is a famine abraham isaac considers going to egypt but god in the dream says to him genesis 26 don't go to egypt stay here i will take care of you jacob once again there's famine and jacob sends his family to egypt so this is what i'm talking about that this was a well-known practice and that the bible is describing a reality when it comes to famine the lack of water and egypt of course has plenty to drink so abram went down to sojourn there and the word in english sojourn in hebrew gore means to live temporarily the idea was not to come to live a latul straight on but to live temporarily until the bad weather ended and then to return for the famine was severe in the land so this description is very makes very good sense now what you're looking at here is a picture of a papyrus this is the long page this is an enlargement it is the papyrus in the british museum called anastasi papyrus anastasi many of the papyrus will receive the name of the person who discovered them so if i were to find a papyrus in my excavation it would be papyrus hoffmeyer okay so papyrus anastasi was purchased in egypt many many years ago before zai hawas and it was taken to britain and it is written in a script egyptologists call hieratic it's not hieroglyphics but hieratic on papyrus this kind of writing is is it's hieroglyphics but is very quickly written not nice pictures but very quickly written so it's best for writing on papyrus they don't use hyratic to write on stone on temple walls but this is for letters for documents here's what and there are about 10 different papyri called anastasi so this is from anastasi papyrus 6. the man writing the scribe writing his name is ineni inena and he is writing from a fort in the waditum a lot to his director his superior name kagab okay we'll show you a map in a moment of the wadi tu milat and this is what the letter says now we're gonna look at this text now for one reason and later today we're gonna come back and look at the text for another reason okay so part of it i won't comment on until later now this is a letter written from a fort on the border of egypt to the commander military commander probably back in the delta in egypt another matter for my lord we have just let the shasu this is an egyptian word shasu would be best to translate as badu like the bedouin of egypt it's the the people who live in the desert who live in tents with their sheep and their goats the bedu the shastu these shasu are from edom and if you recognize the name edom edom is the name of the descendants of jacob's brother jacob and esau and esau was named edom his descendants are called the so here we actually have the name of one of the peoples in the bible and they are coming to egypt why so the shasu of edom or the bedouin of egypt passed by the fortress of and there you have the name of the pharaoh mernepta of chaku to the pool the word is birket pithom of mernepta of czecho we're going to go over the names later okay all i want you to see is this in order to revive themselves and be and revive their flocks to revive themselves and to revive their flocks so here you have a group all the way from edom on the other side of sinai southern jordan who've come with their flocks and the egyptian military has allowed them to come to water their flocks okay again so this is very similar to the situation with abraham or later jacob in a time of famine they want to bring their sheep and their goats to egypt for water we also learn about the life of people like abraham isaac and jacob how they lived in the lands of canaan and syria from a very important egyptian papyrus named the story of sunuh it's one of the most important pieces of ancient egyptian literature and i'm sure many of you have read the story of sunuhi in your school but here is one of the copies of sunuhi in the berlin museum and here you can read the description of the life in the land now let me just say that sunuh was an egyptian officer he worked for the king amenemhat the first a little bit after 2000 bc and the king was assassinated the king was assassinated and sunuh felt that he might be connected to the plot to kill the king and so he fled egypt and he fled and he went to palestine and up into syria and he lived during his time with bedouin type people people like abraham isaac and jacob people like the the edomite shasu who came to egypt so he lived the lifestyle that the book of genesis is describing so it's very interesting to read what his life was like he said land gave me to land i traveled to biblos which is biblos's lebanon today northern lebanon i returned to kedem not sure exactly where that is but apparently it's east of biblos i spent a year and a half there then amunenshi this was the man he was friends with the ruler of syria operetchnu said to me you will be happy with me he set me at the head of his children he married me to his eldest daughter he let me choose for myself his land and the best of what he was his on his border with another land it was a good land called yah figs were in it and grapes it had more wine than water abundant was its honey and plentiful it's olive oil all kinds of fruits were on its trees barley and emmer which is like wheat and no end of cattle of every kind so he had lots to eat food honey all sorts of good things so the picture we get from this is that life was was good we think perhaps of abraham and isaac uh as very poor we feel very sorry for them but the picture we have of the lifestyle at the time of the tent dwelling uh i use the word pastoralists those who take care of sheep and goats and cattle was a very rich life so the story of sunuj gives a nice background information about the lifestyle of abraham isaac and jacob from roughly the same time period from an egyptian perspective there's something else interesting going on in the story of sunuj in that he becomes a warrior and fights much like david and goliath will fight the story tells us that there came a hero a fighter from retinue which is syria to challenge me in my tent now we notice that they're living in tents just like abraham isaac and jacob lived in tents a champion without equal was this man he had subdued all of them he was most powerful sheikh in the area he said he would fight me he planned to plunder me to take my possessions he meant to seize my cattle for his tribe then the ruler that is the father-in-law of sunuhi spoke with me and i said i do not know this man i am not his ally that i should walk about in his camp so i don't know who he is he is not my friend he is not my ally i would not walk around in his camp why is he coming to my camp so basically the other man was challenging sunuhae to fight much like goliath is challenging david or whoever king saul would put forward to fight him one-on-one and if i win your whole nation submits to me if you win the other way around so the next part the fight took place the next day and sunuh shoots him with an arrow and then takes the man's axe and kills him much like david shot goliath with a stone and then took goliath sword and killed him with his own sword lastly then then i carried off his goods i plundered his cattle what he had meant to do to me i did to him i took what was in his tent i stripped his camp so i became great and wealthy in goods and rich in herds so what we see here is that we have a man who's become very rich and very wealthy in this case because he fought against another champion defeated him and took his possessions now one small point that might be noted here is that in genesis chapter 14 abraham experienced a battle in order to protect or to save his nephew lot if you remember lot left abraham and went to live in the city of sodom and then a group of kings came and attacked the city of sodom and lot and other people were taken prisoners and moved all the way up to the northern part of canaan abraham decides he wants to rescue his family member how is he going to do this we come to learn in in genesis chapter 14. in verse 13 then one who had escaped from this army came and told abram the hebrew who was living by the oaks the oak trees of mamre the amorite okay we've spoken already about the amorites the oak trees of mamre the amorites brother of eshkol and anar these were allies of abram so when we think of abram abraham we must not think of him as a man all by himself we see here he had three allies from other tribal leaders and the word ally in english is the same word we will talk about later and it's the word for a covenant berit the word for a covenant or a treaty in other words these abraham and his friends had made a treaty so they would fight together against this group of kings okay earlier sunuh says i am not an ally of this man who wants to attack me so this is the world of abraham isaac and jacob where different tribal chiefs will make friendship will make alliances and protect themselves against other hostile forces we also learn here in chapter 14 that the size of abraham's force from him alone was 314 soldiers he had over 300 soldiers abraham and his friends also had soldiers so it's possible that when abraham led this army to rescue his family members he had an army of 1 000 which is a good-sized army so the picture we have of abraham i think has to change he's not just a poor man with a small tent and a goat he is a powerful sheikh he's a a warrior chieftain with other tribal leaders supporting him and so this is important because when he comes to egypt we realize he's not just a poor uh insignificant person near uh aburras in minya you can go to the tomb of khnum hotep at benihasan and here is the entrance to it and in it is the painting that's very famous in many books but this shows us a group of amorites coming to egypt [Music] in the 1800s bc and this line is one after the other okay this is not one on top of the other but just to get it on the same picture so uh the people down sorry the people down here are here okay so you have this line of this people and clearly when you look at them you see how the egyptians are dressed with their white linen gowns their black dark hair their brown skin and these people have very different clothes very different hair styles very different beards for the men and so on so we learned from the inscription here that these were minors they came to work in the desert to dig and to find um kohl for the eye makeup you understand that the call yeah uh so so the uh sorry the egyptian word here you can see it's mess genet and you see the picture of the eye mesjennet so they were digging for this mineral the mineral is called galena in english they pound it and make the the powder now uh so they were here actually with a visa to work and you see here is the egyptian uh scribe and he's holding a visa and in front of him is the governor of the this area and so they have permission to come and we learned there were 37 in this group 37 and they're amu or aramites amorites and they've come to work in egypt what's beautiful about this picture it gives us a wonderful idea of how abraham isaac and jacob must have looked these are people from the same time period the same ethnic background so in terms of beard hair style travel all of this we have a nice idea now one other interesting thing is you all know the word hexos the hixos period we'll talk about later today but this man here he is the leader of the group and above his head we have the word heka khasut means foreign ruler foreign chieftain so heka khasud is where the name hexos comes from so hexos really means foreign rulers so when you say the hixo's period in egypt you're talking about the period when egypt was ruled by foreign rulers okay so the chieftain is called a hexos and we have his name ibisha or ibishar which is interesting because the name ib shah would be very similar to the type of name as abraham of ram shah it's the same family of names so again it points us to the world of abraham now a question that many people have and i have is how is it that a pharaoh of egypt would think abraham so important that he would want to have relations with him and how is it that he was so impressed that he would want to take abraham's wife now we have to understand a few things the first is we have to understand that there are different times in egyptian history where the kings the rulers the pharaohs are very different than the picture we have of the periods when the pharaohs were very powerful like ramses the great or khufu who can make great pyramids now here is our map we can see here is beersheba where abraham was living have brought jerusalem at the very top this is on a road that goes across sinai and comes in about to what today would be esmalia and on the other side there's a little lake and on the other side of this is the wadi tumalat that i referred to earlier this is going to be very important for us later today and tomorrow because the waditum a lot is one of the ways that you get in and out of egypt the other way to get in and out of egypt is this road which the bible calls the way of the land of the philistines this we'll see in exodus chapter 13. the practice in the bible is that a road is named after its destination jani if i'm in asut and i'm driving to cairo i'm on the road to cairo if i'm in cairo and i'm driving on the same road to assute it's called the route use okay so here the way of the land of philistines is the name of the road if you're coming from egypt towards the land of canaan the road the other way was probably called by the egyptian name the ways of horus tariq horus the ways of horus this road is known in the book of genesis this is the road that haggar travels on when she wants to go back to egypt with ishmael it's called the way of sure sure is the name of the area right beside egypt in the desert so the road in the bible is called the way to shur so because abraham is here in beersheba i think he was traveling on this road to come to egypt now the question is where would he go after that we'll we'll look at some ideas in a moment oops there he goes okay now here's a look at the waditum a lot close up here here is this malia today here is lake tim and you have a low valley a wadi and just in this area here there were ancient lakes today there's no lakes but there was an ancient lake one of the archaeological sites very important one is at more at the entrance of the wadi and it's called tel al in this case the term mashup is the name of the village we'll come back to this later and the other important archaeological site is tel el ratabi these two sites tela mascuta tel al ritabi have been dug by archaeologists ever since the 1800s they worked for a few years then stop maybe twenty thirty years somebody comes back and they dig a little now tel al mascuta is being excavated by italian uh mission and teleritaba by a polish and slovak mission so they're working very diligently in this area now i mentioned the name of this zone in arabic is wadi tumalat and this is because it's named after the god atum the god atum who you see here on the right this is this is a drawing of a a stone a stone inscription that was found at p at telarataba many many years ago 1906 i think and we have the name of the atum and so atum is the name of the god who is is responsible for this area and so as often is the case the ancient name survives to the modern day so tumilot represent atum now as you know abraham comes to egypt and you may not know that the name egypt itself derives from the name and of course the word copt comes from the name of the god was the main god of the city of memphis south of cairo here is a temple wall still standing of ramses ii at mitrahina and a couple statues here's a statue from the tomb of turanka moon a painting on one of the walls in the valley of the kings and so when you say egypt or copt the pata is from the name of this god so gupta means the the temple of the kaa the spirit of pta the main temple in memphis and the europeans and greek travelers like herodotus and those even before him took this name hekipta and turned it into a giptus and he get us into egypt so when abraham comes to egypt he's coming to this land associated with the god so now we come back to this question of abraham entering egypt and how is it that he establishes a relationship with the pharaoh when abram entered egypt the egyptians saw that sarah was very beautiful and when the princes of pharaoh saw her they praised her to pharaoh and the woman was taken into pharaoh's house and for her sake he dealt well and i put the hebrew word tov in there tov in hebrew is the same word in arabic as tayyip same root he dealt well or did good with abram and he had sheep and oxen male donkeys male servants female servants female donkeys and camels all these things pharaoh gave to abram so the question is why does pharaoh do this one important key is that the word taken in hebrew if you take a woman you are taking her to mary so why would pharaoh want to take abraham's wife now remember abraham said it's my sister right so he lied a little bit uh but what's going on here what i suggest we have going on here and this only makes sense if we understand number one that abraham was a powerful sheikh if you will a tribal leader and pharaoh at this time was rather weak throughout the ancient near east we have many many examples where kings marry the daughters of other rulers we call them diplomatic marriage diplomatic marriage from the period roughly 3200 to 1200 bc we have 92 known diplomatic marriages in the near east 92 for which we have documentation and i know that number because one of my students just finished his doctoral research on the subject so brand new study we remember how many kings in the bible married other women for diplomatic reasons david married makkah of gesher gesher was a small kingdom north of on the today on the sea of galilee ii samuel three solomon of course married many many women as you remember uh these were kings from nearby kingdoms uh the daughters of kings from faraways egypt we'll talk about that later king ahab married jezebel the daughter of the king of sidon said on first kings 1631 so we know that this kind of diplomatic marriage was going on and this was to secure political relationships between nations whether they be very small or even very large nations so why would abraham and the pharaoh want to have relations i think i have an idea but one more piece of evidence here here is one of the famous cuneiform babylonian cuneiform tablets that was discovered at telemarna in the menya area tel alamarna these are letters sent from different kings all over the middle east as far away as turkey and babylon so large kings and very small kings sent letters to the pharaohs ammon joseph iii and his famous son ahnathan so these letters have been all translated you can see the tablet on the right and the translation on the left so it reads this one is actually written to tutankhamun very few were written in the tutankhamun from tushratta the king of metani matani is northern syria today and into iraq iraq and northern syria he writes my brother said this so tusrata is writing saying my brother said this just as you always showed love to my father aman hotep so now show love to me and your father aman hotep said this on his tablet when the official mane brought the bride price thus spoke my brother aman hotep these goods i have sent to you i have sent to you with this understanding that when my brother hands over my wife whom i have asked for then i will send him ten times more what we have going on here is this king of matani is writing to the new king tutankhamun saying your father had agreed to send a wife and i sent him gifts but you haven't sent me the princess yet when you send to her send me this woman i will send ten times more gifts to you so when pharaoh is giving abraham donkeys and camels and all these things this is part of the exchange in a marriage and so notice too that in this letter the king refers to the pharaoh as my brother this is because in this kind of of treaty relationship the two kings were seen as men of equal status their brothers through marriage however if the king was very very important and the king the other king was very very small they would not refer to each other as brothers but father and son father and son so this is very important when we think about the language in the old testament about covenant god as father and the king is the son it's thinking of this kind of language that god is superior over the king one last thing i wanted to point out to you is notice the use of the word love ahav ahab ahav in in hebrew ahav in babylonian this word love unfortunately in modern times we read this word in the bible and we easily think in romantic terms ahav is used in diplomatic language so when we read that david loved jonathan jonathan loved david or that the the king of tyre hiram loved david it means that they had a diplomatic relationship they had a treaty and they were faithful to the to keep the treaty so these are very very important now where does bible history and egyptian history meet this is the big problem in genesis in exodus we meet egyptian kings only called king or pharaoh never a name if we had the name of a pharaoh then we would know roughly when that king lived if we look at the numbers we're going to talk a little bit tomorrow about how egyptian chronology helps us to establish the chronology or the dates in the bible one of the important one is the year 967. this has to do with the building of the temple during the reign of solomon so for today just take my word that this is uh an accurate date tomorrow we'll explain how egyptian sources help us establish that date so this this is straight forward numbers from the bible 1st kings 6 1 tells us that the exodus took place 480 years after the beginning of the construction of the temple 480 years i'm sorry before the construction of the temple would be the year 1447. however this is based on the hebrew based on the greek translation the septuagint the numbers are different it's 440 which would make the exodus 1407 not 1447. there's another difference between the greek and the hebrew and of course scholars will debate which is the number that's most accurate the hebrew or the greek how long were the hebrews in egypt 430 years according to the hebrew tradition meaning that jacob arrived in egypt around 1877 and then we'd have to go back maybe another hundred years for abraham's visit now a big difference the length of the stay in egypt according to the greek is 215 half making jacob's arrival in 622 okay so remember these two dates 1877 and 1622 there's a big difference 255 years difference so you can see the challenge how do you line this up with an egyptian pharaoh it's very difficult the twelfth dynasty dates from 1963 to 1786 bc during this period egypt was ruling from the the city of lisht in the fayyum area this city by the way is yet to be discovered and excavated in fact only in the last couple years has its location been established by satellite radar but we haven't started to excavate yet the 13th dynasty also rules from licht and it lasts from 1786 to 1763 so conceivably if we just go back here according to this 1622 could be at the very end of the 13th dynasty however and this is difficult you have to follow me because we tend to think that the dynasties because they have numbers one two three four five that they all come one after the other but in some cases especially during a period of weakness there can be more than one dynasty at the same time okay and so what you see here is that before dynasty 13 ends dynasty 14 has already begun and dynasty 14 is in the in the area of the delta and the rule the people are the canaanites and we also know them as hixos and they rule from a town of avarus which i'll show you in a minute but this is uh in the area of fa us the 15th dynasty from 1648 to 1540 again as canaanite hexose rulers from avarus what this means is that for a period of a hundred and fifty 160 years there were pharaohs in the northeastern delta who were of canaanite origin and we may understand then that abraham coming to egypt speaking the same language sharing the same heritage may have been much more warmly received by these kings than the kings enlist who were egyptian only now here's a map to show you uh where we are um here is a varus facus here is tel al-masghuta in the wadi tumulot where hixos material has been found and also in recent years up here just east of of the suez canal at a site called habwa more information has been found about the kings of the 14th dynasty so this seems to be the area of the kingdom of the these foreign kings while egypt is still has its pharaoh down here in ichitawi or lisht okay so in other words which king did abraham see my suggestion is if he came in the if he came in the wadi tomb a lot from beersheba he would have had connections right away with these hicksos kings now here is a statue of one of these kings that was found at hebwa in 2005 a king named seth m and another king called the son of ray nasi here you see him making an offering before this ram-headed god so these are two of these kings of dynasty 14 who were very small they weren't big area they didn't control all the delta but they would have been in the very area that abraham would have come into so yemen this may be the possibility that the pharaoh that abraham met was one of the kings of the northeastern delta not the egyptian pharaohs in lisht it's taue and this may explain why they're friendly because they come from the same ancestry the same syrian background even here uh this is an inscription discovered at teledabba from the end of the hixos period and it's interesting that you can see the hixos were writing inscriptions in hieroglyphs the kings wrote their name in cartouche you see the bottom of cartouche and enough remains that we can read the name khayan and khayan is a semitic name not an egyptian name and we have here the name of the son of the king the eldest son of the king yanis again not an egyptian name a semitic name so the hixos kings came from canaan lived in egypt and were really bi-cultural they were half egyptian half semite and they preserve both elements of the culture and i think that may explain why abraham and then later joseph was well received by by these people so here is um this is uh tala daba in the sharkaya here's the waditum a lot you can see and over here is avarice the hixo city and then just beside it just to the north of it ramses the great ramses ii will build a special city called pyramids the house of ramses which we'll talk about later today but archaeological work has been going on off and on in this area since the 1960s and one of the great tools used to understand this area you realize you're in the fields of farmers so the archaeologist must negotiate with the village and pay rent for one year to use their fields they excavate they photograph they document and then they fill it back up again and now it's fields what they're doing here with these instruments is taking a magnetometer reading below the surface of course this is mud and what they're doing is identifying mud brick because the mud brick has iron in it and this is a very large area that they they did this magnetometry and here i'll show you in a moment the green lines represent walls of a fort we'll go there in a moment over here are large palaces we'll talk about them this afternoon here you can get a good look at the results of this magnetometer survey and you can see the lines you can see there's a large building here there's another building here and you can see that there's two buildings and they're not uh one is turned slightly one way the other turns slightly the other way meaning there are two buildings one built on top of the other one earlier one late one um so before the professor manfred bitock began excavating he knew based on this that it was a palace and uh here is professor bitock showing us and we're standing on the area where he's excavating and here you can see the bricks but you can see it's right in the middle of a field and one of the challenges is because the delta the water is so high they have to use pumps they put pipes down into the water with a pump trumba and suck the water out and that allows them to excavate maybe down a half a meter before there's too much water so here you can see the bricks but what we have then is the palace of the hixos from the 15th dynasty so first of all bear in mind now that archaeological work in this area has been going on for 40 years and only recently did they find the palace and because everything was made of mud brick mud does not last in the delta because of the moisture because of rain so the bible tells us that joseph is a very important person he is elevated to almost the top spot after pharaoh and so why is there no evidence of him first of all we remember that the information about this period as we were just talking is very limited only recently are we beginning to find about this period in this location even in periods that are well documented like the 12th and the 18th dynasties we do not know the names of many officials we do not know the names of important officers and the delta where joseph lived is very poorly excavated and because of more and more towns growing archaeological sites are being destroyed so we may never get to many of these places now what can we say about the genesis text itself in terms of background in terms of linguistic details the bible has a lot of egyptian information what i like to say is that we may not have evidence for the hebrews in egypt but we have lot of egyptian evidence in the hebrew bible there's a lot of evidence of egypt or egyptians in the hebrew bible so for instance many details in the story illustrate the egyptian setting of the story including the personal names the people we meet in the narrative of joseph all have egyptian name potty fair or potiphara everyone agrees this means padi para that which rey the sun god has given so the name of joseph's father-in-law is a good egyptian name of course the name pharaoh pera means great house literally great house and became the term for the king so pharaoh great house i.e the king the wife of joseph her name is asinat which in egyptian means she belongs to you so pharaoh says here take and marry asi not she belongs to you which is what her name means the name that pharaoh gives joseph egyptologists have wrestled with the meaning of this for a long time what we all agree everyone agrees is this last element a-n-e-a-h is the word ankh so the last word is ankh and so the question is does it mean something like ipiank which was a known name so joseph who is called ipu ankh or ipiank maybe it means something like that this formula joseph who is called and by the way saf and not in egyptian means something like who is called and we see this in other egyptian papyrus i'll show you a picture of one we have the name of and typically this is when you have a man with or a woman within it who's been given an egyptian name but the name from birth is a foreign name a semitic name so for instance here's a guy named amenhotep good egyptian name who is called palawi now if you've gone to saqqara before to visit the step pyramid on the road inn you pass by this stone formation and the sand covered it until the 1980s and the french move the sand away and found all these tombs one of the tombs here is of a man named oper l discovered in 1987 an opera l there it is there's his picture he looks like an egyptian but his name upper l is semitic el god opera el or abed el abdullah so here is a man who was buried at saqqara and archaeologists had worked at zakar for 200 years and this tomb was never found until 1987. and who was this man with a foreign name he was the vizier the prime minister under ahnathan very important man and yet we knew nothing about him until 1987. so when we think about joseph we can understand if he's buried in in the delta things do not survive very well things get covered up even here it took a long time until this man was discovered so archaeology can always bring us new things now there are other details in the story of joseph that is very interesting we are told when joseph is sold by his brothers into slavery his brothers received 20 shekels of silver 20 shekels of silver and so the question is does this fit the price of slaves uh for what period now if you look at the red line this represents the price of slaves in the bible the green line represents the price of slaves in the ancient near eastern market and so here's joseph and if price corresponds to the old babylonian period when it was 20 shekels when we get to the period of moses and the exodus the price goes up to 30 which is what we have at other near eastern sites such as nuzi and ugarit when we get to the eighth century the time of assyria the price becomes 50 shekels so interesting the small detail that the price the brothers received for joseph is exactly the price in the old babylonian period not the period of moses not the period of the kings of israel so it does really reflect a very old date one more papyrus of of interest is the brooklyn papyrus fragments you see on the right and from these we learn and this dates to around 1700 bc 1750 bc but it is a document from thebes from luxor and it contains the names of servants and officials working in a very large household and we're told in genesis that joseph when he first worked for potiphar he was in the house um which means working in the house and we have on this egyptian papyrus a title called hairy pear house servant he was then promoted to be the overseer of the house that is he became a boss of other servants and we see this also in this document the emmy air hair repair overseer of house servants what this papyrus shows us is that joseph's position as a servant and then after he showed his master how good he was he was promoted above the other servants it's the same kind of structure of leadership for house servants in in a well-to-do household one of the women named as a household servant here is a called a semite named tutwit who is called anku m hasut the female slave or house servant so here again you have a woman who has a semitic name given an egyptian name probably because her master wants to use an egyptian name and she is a house servant just like joseph so the picture of what joseph did when he first came to egypt we have exact same evidence for other semites who came to egypt and worked in the home of very well to do egyptians in the joseph story we have references to the magicians the priests who were called to try to interpret pharaoh's dreams and were unable to do so and the the hebrew word which we translate magicians actually derives from the egyptian word harry hebb which is the kind of priest and the priest the harry hebb is the one who reads papyrus documents he recites magical and and poetic uh sayings to make magic or for uh worship or for different things so it's interesting that the hebrew word is the actual egyptian word for the magicians so a very nice illustration of the egyptian background and these har to meme priests will also appear in the moses story where they try to oppose moses miracles so these same har2 memes show up so i think that would be a good place to stop but a nice egyptian picture here to end our first session [Music] you

Channel: Alexandria School Foundation

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Length: 64min 34sec (3874 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020