Are there any Egyptian records that show Joseph being the second in power only to Pharoah?
Are there any records at all showing when the jewish people came to Egypt?
Any record of Joseph being in Egypt?
by VM44 6 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Nathan Natas
I've got a nickel that says "no."
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Leolaia
Are there any Egyptian records that show Joseph being the second in power only to Pharoah?
No, neither by his Hebrew name nor the Egyptian one. Of course, records on such officials are incomplete for much of Egyptian history, and we don't even know what dynasty if any Joseph would belong to. If he lived under a Hyksos ruler, during the Second Intermediate Period (when many wish to place the Israelite "sojourn"), the records were even more incomplete. But since "Joseph" is a literary character in a story written a thousand to 700 years later than the time he supposedly lived, there is much cause for skepticism that "Joseph" is a historical personage. There is nothing improbable however in an Asiatic rising to such a position of power. There are a number of well-known examples, such as that of Chancellor Bay in the twelfth century BC.
Are there any records at all showing when the jewish people came to Egypt?
First of all, there wasn't any such thing as a "Jewish people" before the Babylonian exile. There were Judahites, but perhaps "Israelites" is a better term. Second, there was not a single time when Asiatics ancestral to later Israel came to Egypt. There were population movements back and forth for centuries. The biblical notion of the entire nation of Israel being descended from a single family had a unifying political objective, but it isn't history. The swelling population of Semites in Egypt during the New Kingdom was not due to a single family growing to a whole nation but because of successive deportations of captives from military campaigns in Canaan to Egypt, as well as normal immigration during the time when Canaan was an Egyptian province -- leading to a significant population of Egyptian-born Asiatics. The Hyksos came to Egypt in the 18th and 17 centuries BC, and these people after being expelled from Egypt contributed to the population of Canaan. The Semites living in Lower Egypt during the 13th and 12th centuries BC (including those descended from exiles taken by Ramesses II and Merneptah) who left Egypt during the political turmoil of the 20th Dynasty also likely contributed to the population of early Israel. There are no early records of an "exodus" along grand biblical lines, although later writers associated Manetho's description of two major exoduses from Egypt (the expulsion of the Hyksos at the outset of the 18th Dynasty and the expulsion of "defiled" priests in the 19th or 20th Dynasty) with the Israelite exodus. Many records exist of Semites taken captive into Egypt, although these are not of Jews or Israelites per se -- with the exception of the Israelites exiled by Merneptah. These were taken captive in 1206 BC when the people of Israel was already present in the highlands. The literary and historical evidence persuades me that if there was a historical basis of the exodus (other than the older Hyksos traditions), it occurred in the twelfth century BC when Israel was already in place in the highlands, and it largely involved just the tribe of Levi (as opposed to all twelve tribes, although the Levities may have been accompanied with others exiled from the other tribes). This explains why the key players in the exodus-wilderness traditions were Levites, why many of these Levites have Egyptian names, why only Levites have Egyptian names, why there are striking similarities between Levites and Egyptian priests, why the Levites don't have a tribal allotment since the land was already settled when they arrived, why the Philistines were in the land at the time of the exodus (probably not an anachronism, since this is found in the Song of the Sea which dates to the twelfth-eleventh centuries BC), why Moses and Aaron are placed only 5 generations before David in the genealogies, why the grandsons of Moses and Aaron (Jonathan and Phinehas) were depicted as still alive in the time of Samuel, why the Manetho story of an exodus of Egyptian priests in the 19th or 20th Dynasty is so similar to the biblical story of the exodus, and many other things.
The main thing is that the biblical story assembles traditions from different tribes into a single, linear narrative -- such that the whole nation participates in the saga of exodus and conquest, with the descent of all the tribes (or rather sons of Jacob) into Egypt occurring at the same time, the escape from captivity occuring all at the same time (therefore requiring improbable numbers of Israelites wandering in the wilderness), and conquest of all the cities of Canaan occurring in one fell swoop (as it is presented in Joshua). And this is why no one will never find evidence for one single catastrophic exodus from Egypt in history and archaeology, or evidence of a single devastating "conquest" of Canaan. In the case of the latter, there is no doubt that the various cities mentioned in Joshua were destroyed at different times in the fifteenth to the twelfth centuries BC. And the biblical data itself contains countless discontinuities and details that betray the independent origin of traditions outside the "canonical" narrative. So what we have in the OT is a conflation of reminiscences of events spanning over several hundred years across a dozen or more tribal groups compressed into a single epic story. It is natural for this to be case, as simplification is a basic process in folklore and oral tradition.
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VM44
Thanks Leolaia for your informative reply.
I was thinking if I should have written "Semite" instead "Jewish". I obviously went down the anachronistic path!
The important observation that several ancient tribal stories were "consolidated" into a single Biblical account is the proper way to view the OT Bible.
Any other view will lead one to erroneous conclusions!
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BurnTheShips
There is the Egyptian Ipuwer Papyrus:
"Nay, but the heart is violent. Plague stalks through the land and blood is everywhere . . . Nay, but the river is blood. Does a man drink from it? As a human he rejects it. He thirsts for water . . . Nay, but gates, columns and walls are consumed with fire . . . Nay but men are few. He that lays his brother in the ground is everywhere . . . Nay but the son of the high-born man is no longer to be recognised . . . The stranger people from outside are come into Egypt . . . Nay, but corn has perished everywhere. People are stripped of clothing, perfume and oil. Everyone says 'there is no more'. The storehouse is bare . . . It has come to this. The king has been taken away by poor men."
That is very suggestive.
The eruption of Thera as a possible connection to the Exodus account.
The Hyksos emigration is dated about 1570 BC, very close to the dating for the Exodus account.
In other words, there is remarkably similar information outside the Biblical text. The account did not develop in a vacuum.
The eruption of Santorini has been connected to the Israelite Exodus from Egypt and to the Ipuwer Papyrus, which in turn have been connected to each other. These theories would tie the eruption to Pharaoh Ahmose I in the Second Intermediate Period of Egyptian History.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thera#Development_of_the_Exodus_Connection
Santorini Eruption Much Larger than originallyBelieved.
A Storm in Egypt During the Reign of Ahmose.
Incidentally, Ahmose means "brother of Moses" in Hebrew.
Funny that.
BTS
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BurnTheShips
That was a fascinating post, Leo. Is there any good material out there that develops this idea? Any books?
BTS
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Leolaia
Just a few comments....
1) I think the plague traditions may well have drawn on Egyptian Typhonic disaster literature like the Ipuwer Papyrus. But one should be careful not to claim that the Ipuwer Papyrus itself describes what happened in the biblical exodus -- it was probably written in the Middle Kingdom to describe the First Intermediate Period, and the account it gives is not strictly necessarly historical but fictionalized to some extent to depict the kind of Typhonic chaos that Seth may bring to the land. There are parallels in the Potter's Oracle from much, much later.
2) The eruption of Santorini probably did not occur during the expulsion of the Hyksos at the beginning of the New Kingdom but a generation or two earlier in 1650-1625 BC, as suggested by ice cores and dendrochronology. Older theories that attributed to the eruption almost every aspect of the plague/exodus traditions (e.g. darkness, hail, river turning to blood, pillar of cloud and fire, parting of the Red Sea) are also not scientifically plausible.
3) Ahmose is not a Hebrew name but Egyptian (as is Moses).
That was a fascinating post, Leo. Is there any good material out there that develops this idea? Any books?
Oh yes, Hoffmeier's Israel in Egypt and Ancient Israel in Sinai are some good places to start. Rendsberg has a good article in VT on the exodus occurring in the 1100s, and there is a very good chapter on the subject in John Bright's History of Israel. My thinking is also influenced by others such as Frank Yurco on the subject.