The Exodus Saga – 2

Manetho, a priest who wrote a history of Egypt in the third century BCE, placed Joseph’s entry into Egypt and his rise in the early part of the reign of the Hyksos king, Apophis. The Hyksos were expelled, and then Moses called them back to help the later Israelites escape from Egypt (see the Hyksos articles).

To ask whether Manetho corroborates the Joseph story is to invert the actual relationship: Manetho relied on the Bible, probably at secondhand, since he concluded that the Israelites were lepers (cf. Numbers 11) and that Moses was Osarsiph, priest of On (cf. Joseph, who married the daughter, we are told, of a priest of On). Yet the Hyksos interlude impressed itself indelibly in Egyptian memory. Pharaoh Kamose, predecessor of Ahmose who expelled the Hyksos, accused them of widespread destruction, and there are indications of famine in the period [1].  Egyptians accused the Hyksos in hindsight of neglecting all the gods but Seth, and of imposing heavy taxes. Manetho echoes these claims, and complains that the Hyksos accumulated grain at their capital Avaris and enslaved the population.

Joseph is said to have imposed a harsh regime of taxation in Egypt to accumulate grain to weather an approaching famine.[2]  Genesis is suggestive: “To this day,” it claims, Egypt’s peasants have the status of tenant farmers, and must pay 20 percent of their produce to their landlord, the pharaoh (Genesis 47:18–26 [J]). The text thus deflects complaints about Hyksos oppression: Joseph introduced the system in order to avert a worse catastrophe, starvation. Joseph’s name in Egypt reflects this interpretation—resisting any convincing Egyptian etymology, the name should be understood as a portmanteau of Semitic and Egyptian: saphnat pa-aneah, the “cool north wind of life.” Like the north wind relieving the oppressive heat down the Nile Valley, Joseph is the Semite blowing in from the north who gives new life to Egypt.

What’s more, the Bible claims that no subsequent pharaoh has reformed Joseph’s tax. The Egyptian regime in the Iron Age is the legatee of Joseph’s policies. This claim of continuity between Hyksos Egypt and Iron Age Egypt reflects the exposure of Israelite merchants and diplomats to Egyptian culture, as we shall see.

The portrayal of the Israelites as “shepherds” in Genesis is no coincidence either: The Egyptians remembered the Hyksos as “shepherd-kings.” Joseph is introduced as a shepherd, destined to be a ruler.[3]  The Israelites are associated with herds, and when they enter Egypt are settled in Goshen, based on their belief that it furnishes good pasturage.

Some scholars claim that the location of the Israelite herders falsifies the biblical reports. Goshen was the Wadi Tumilat, just south of the Delta. The natural point of entry for Canaanites bringing flocks into Egypt was through the Wadi Tumilat.[4]  But an Egyptian pharaoh of the XVIIIth Dynasty (c. 1575–1318 BCE on the high chronology)—after the Hyksos expulsion—would have been 350 miles away, in Thebes. How, then, did Moses, or, for that matter, Joseph, enjoy almost daily contact with the pharaoh?

In one source, Joseph instructs his brothers that they will settle in Goshen, so as to be close to him.[5]  The implication is that Joseph, the viceroy, resides near Goshen, in the eastern Delta. In the continuation,[6]  Joseph is reconciled to his brothers, “And the sound was heard in the pharaoh’s house” (Genesis 45:2). In other words, the pharaonic residence is close to Joseph’s, in the Delta. There are several other texts with the same implication. [7] This can only be the case during the period of Hyksos rule in Egypt (c. 1800–1550 BCE). The biblical tradition thus identifies Israel’s descent into Egypt with the Hyksos.

The Hyksos capital of Egypt has now been located—at Tell ed-Dab‘a in the eastern Delta, just north of Goshen. Semitic settlement there started by the mid-18th century at the latest. [8]  Assume that Joseph worked for the Hyksos: J’s idea of a 400-year sojourn places the Exodus under the Ramessides (13th century BCE).

It was just in that era that Ramesses II relocated the capital from Thebes back to Tell ed-Dab‘a. The Ramessides reconstructed the Hyksos capital at Avaris—and called it Ramses; they were conscious of the Hyksos connections.

This same consciousness seems to underlie the biblical accounts, which locate the Israelites in Goshen in the Hyksos and the Ramesside periods. Settlement in Tell ed-Dab‘a persisted into the 11th century BCE [9]. So Egyptian memories probably affected Israelite tradition. The author of the J source, after all, was no hillbilly: He was a literate adjutant of the court in Jerusalem, with the historical knowledge of a member of the elite. He simply located the Joseph story in a particular historical milieu, rather than in a vacuum. One of the kings of the XXIst Egyptian Dynasty (c. 1075–948 BCE), possibly Solomon’s father-in-law (1 Kings 3:1, 9:16), transferred the capital from Ramses to Tanis. The transfer brought innumerable Ramesside and Hyksos monuments to Tanis.[10]So traditions of Ramesside and Hyksos activity just north of Goshen, at Tell ed-Dab‘a, survived into the period when the Israelite court developed formalized relations with Egypt.

The mediation of these Egyptian memories to Israel either fostered a tradition that Israel’s ancestors ruled in the Delta region, or attached itself to such a tradition. At the same time, the presence of the Hyksos monuments at Tanis misled Israelite tradition into the conviction that Tanis, founded in the 11th century, was a Middle Bronze II (1800–1550 BCE) site—hence the claim, in J, that Hebron—a Middle Bronze fortress—was founded seven years before Tanis, and later references to an Exodus setting out from “the plain of Tanis” (Numbers 13:22; on the plain of Tanis, see Psalm 78). Significantly, one of the monuments moved to Tanis was a stele of Ramesses II celebrating the inauguration of the cult of the Hyksos god Seth 400 years earlier. [11]  The idea of a four-century span between the Hyksos (and Joseph) and the pharaoh who built the city Ramses using Israelite labor must be traced, directly or indirectly, to that monument.

Overall, the Joseph story is a reinterpretation of the Hyksos period from an Israelite perspective. Admitting a relationship between Israel and the Hyksos, it affirms that the episode was part of a divine plan to preserve both the Asiatics and the Egyptians. The framework of the Joseph story, then, is plainly apologetic: It offers up the perspective of the despised “Asiatics” against centuries of Egyptian opprobrium. The tradition’s date is uncertain, but its most probable time of origin is in the tenth century, under, or just after, Solomon.

So far, we can conclude that Israelite tradition associated the descent into Egypt with the Hyksos period of Middle Bronze IIB–C (c. 1800–1550 BCE). This association is not limited to the texts about Joseph. Abraham, for example, is thought to have settled in Hebron—which the Israelites knew to be founded on a rich Middle Bronze site.

But are these connections to the Hyksos era purely literary and folkloristic? Two groups of data support the view that the Israelite nexus to the Hyksos has some historicity to it. The first is striking. The name “Jacob” appears on a number of scarabs as the name of at least one Hyksos king.[12]  All Israel claims descent from an ancestor named Jacob. The connection between the eponym, Jacob, and the forgotten name of the Hyksos king, in the context, is a tantalizing one.

NOTES:

[1]  Under the Hyksos, Hatshepsut recalled later in the early 15th century BCE in her Speos Artemidos inscription, temples and monuments went to ruin; the Hyksos ruled “without Re” (the Egyptian sun-god).
[2]   The rate of taxation was 20 percent: Genesis 41:34–36, 48–49; cf. Vergote, Joseph en Egypt, pp. 190–192.
[3]   One verse relates that “Joseph was shepherding (with) his brothers among the sheep” (Genesis 37:2 [I]: roeh et ehav can mean either “he was shepherding his brothers” or “he was shepherding with his brothers.” The ambiguity is deliberate: he shepherds sheep, but, as a shepherd, is also destined to be a ruler; he is destined to shepherd his brothers: Donald B. Redford, A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph (Genesis 37–50), Vetus Testamentum suppl. (Leiden: Brill, 1970), pp. 15–16.
[4]   See below, and Genesis 46:29. In Genesis 46:28, the Septuagint (LXX) identifies Goshen as Heroonpolis, identified in late sources as Tell Maskhuta. In Genesis 46:34, 45:10, LXX places it in Arabias, the 20th nome of Lower Egypt, whose capital was located at Faqus. John Van Seters (The Hyksos [New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1965] p. 148) correspondingly locates Goshen in the region between the Pelusiac branch of the Nile and the Wadi Tumilat. H. Cazelles (Autour de l’Exode [Paris: Gabalda, 1987], pp. 233–239) argues a location outside Egypt, placing the Goshen of Joshua 11:16 in the zone between Kadesh-Barnea and Gaza, between Judah and Egypt. This approach lays too much stress on the putative implication that any “land of Goshen” must be outside Egypt (against Genesis 45:10, 20, 47:11, 27). Interestingly, the Bohairic, a Coptic text, relates Goshen in Genesis 46:28–29 to Pithom. Pithom has been identified with some confidence as Tell Maskhuta, on the Wadi Tumilat (below). In all, the location of Goshen on the eastern Wadi Tumilat and to the north of it seems to claim the balance of probability. But see Gerhard von Rad, Genesis, Old Testament Library ( Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), p. 394f; Vergote, Joseph en Egypte, pp. 183–186.
[5]   “Close by me, you and your sons and your sheep and your cattle and all that is yours” (Genesis 45:10 [J]).
[6]   E? Cf. Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Summit, 1987).
[7]   Especially instructive is the exchange when Joseph brings his family into the pharaoh’s presence (Genesis 46:31–47:11 [J]). Joseph instructs his brothers to say, “‘Your servants have been herders from our youth until now, both we and our fathers,’ so that you may settle in the land of Goshen, for all shepherds are an abomination to Egypt.” In contrast to the earlier explanation of the narrator that the Egyptians abominated all “Hebrews” (Genesis 43:32 [J]), the significance of the identification of shepherds as an abomination to Egyptians is unmistakable: the reference is to the Hyksos, and Joseph’s strategy involves an expression of solidarity with the Hyksos: E. A. Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible 1 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), p. 345.
Consider that, in the storyteller’s imagination, the purpose of the Israelites’ declaring themselves shepherds to the pharaoh is to secure a land-grant in Goshen, “close by” the capital in which Joseph and the pharaoh rule. To announce that the brothers, and, indeed, Joseph himself, are things abominable to the pharaoh does not, however, seem a strategy devised to elicit an award of “the best part of the land,” where the pharaoh’s own herds are pastured (Genesis 47:6). The text thus presupposes that the Israelites are making the declaration to a pharaoh who, like themselves, is not at home with native Egyptians—a Hyksos king, to be precise.
 [8]  The Hyksos capital, Avaris, was first occupied in the 18th century BCE: the lowest stratum (G) produced a radiocarbon dating of 1870–1720 BCE
[9]  Manfred Bietak, Avaris and Piramesse (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 236237, 271. There was a break in occupation, however, apparently from LB I to the last part of LB IIA.
[10]  Bietak, Avaris and Piramesse, pp. 278–279. It was silting in the Pelusiac branch of the Nile that forced the kings of the XXIst Dynasty to remove the capital from Avaris/Ramses.                                              [11] The Four-Hundred-Year Stele records the appropriation of the Seth cult by Ramesses II, whose image and titulary are attached to it; see Breasted, ARE 3.539–540. An enormous XVIIIth Dynasty temple, surrounded by large numbers of trees (a grove to Asherah?) persisted into the XXIst Dynasty and may be identified as the temple of Seth (Bietak, Avaris and Piramesse, pp. 269–271, 282). But cf. Breasted, ARE 4.362, indicating that Ramesses III constructed a temple to Seth there. On the popularity of the Canaanite goddess Astarte in LB Egypt, see Wilson, “Egyptian Historical Texts,” ANET, p. 250 (a).
[12]  See Aharon Kempinski, “Jacob in History,” BAR 14:01. Y‘qb-HR, possibly Jacob-’el or, less probably, Jacob-haddu (“‘El/Haddu will/should protect/prosecute [enemies]”). Kempinski has argued, on the basis of finds in tombs from Tel Cabri on the northern coast of Israel, that Jacob was in origin a Canaanite dynastic name of the 18th century B.C.E., later adopted by the Hyksos dynasty, see “Some Observations on the Hyksos (XVth) Dynasty and Its Canaanite Origins,” in Pharaonic Egypt. The Bible and Christianity, ed. S. Israelit-Groll (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985), pp. 129–137. More recently see “Two Scarabs of Yakabum,” in Studies in Egyptology presented to Miriam Lichtheim, ed. S. Israelit-Groll (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990), pp. 632–634. There is the possibility, however, that the Hyksos Jacob was a nomarch during the early stages of penetration of the Delta in the late Middle Kingdom and that the seal at Cabri derives from relations there with his dynasty.