While Jacob was keeping the sheep of his Aramæan father-in-law, Esau was making a name for himself among the mountains of the Horites. Half robber, half huntsman, he had gathered about him a band of followers, and with their help had founded—if not a kingdom—at all events a nation to the south of Moab. It is true that the ‘red’ land he had occupied was rocky and barren, but the high-road of commerce from the spice-bearing regions of Southern Arabia passed through it, and the plunder or tribute of the merchants who travelled along it brought wealth to him and his well-armed Bedâwin. What David did in later days, when he made himself the head of a band of outlaws, and with their assistance eventually raised himself to the throne of Judah, had already been accomplished by Esau among the barbarians of Seir.
The message of Jacob led him northward by the desert road which ran to the east of Moab and Ammon. It is clear from the story that Jacob knew little about his brother’s power. When news was brought that he was coming with a troop of four hundred men, Jacob’s heart sank within him, and his only thought was how to save himself and at least a portion of his wealth from the powerful robber-chief. The event proved that his precautions were needless. Esau behaved with a magnanimity which it must have been hard for a Hebrew writer to describe, and pressed his brother to accompany him to Seir. Jacob feared to accept the invitation, and equally feared to refuse it. With characteristic caution and craft, he promised to come, but urged that the cattle and children that were with him made it necessary to follow slowly in Esau’s track. So the Edomite chieftain departed, and Jacob took good care to turn westward across the Jordan into the land of Canaan. There, among the cities and fields of the civilised ‘Amorite,’ he felt himself secure from the pursuit of the desert tribes.
Was it fear of Esau which kept him in Central Palestine and prevented him so long from venturing near that southern part of the country where his father and grandfather had mainly dwelt? At all events, while Abraham had bought land at Hebron, the land purchased by Jacob was near Shechem. Moreover, it was the ‘parcel of a field where he had spread his tent,’ not a burying-place for his family. It would seem, therefore, that it was intended for a permanent residence; here the patriarch determined to settle and to exchange the free life of the pastoral nomad for that of a villager of Canaan.[88]
The field was bought from Hamor the father of Shechem, the founder of the city which was destined to become the seat of the first monarchy in Israel, and on it was raised the first altar consecrated to the God of Israel. El-elohê-Israel, ‘El is the God of Israel,’ the altar was termed, a declaration that the El whom the Canaanites worshipped was the God of Israel as well. But though the field was bought for one hundred ‘pieces of money’—an expression, be it noted, which is not Babylonian—we are assured also that Jacob had gained land at Shechem by the right of conquest. In blessing Joseph he declared to him that to the tribe of his favourite son there was given ‘a Shechem above’ his ‘brethren which’ he had taken ‘out of the hand of the Amorite with’ his ‘sword and bow’ (Gen. xlviii. 22); and the story of the ravishment of Dinah recounts how the sons of the patriarch massacred the men of the city, how they enslaved their women and carried away their goods. The terrible tale of vengeance was never forgotten; it is alluded to in the Blessing of Jacob (Gen. xlix. 5-7), and the disappearance of Simeon and Levi as separate tribes was looked upon as a punishment for the deed. It would seem that after the Israelitish conquest of Canaan the population of Shechem remained half Canaanite, half Israelite,[89] and the Canaanitish population would naturally remember with horror and indignation the crime of the sons of Jacob. That the deed should have been attributed to the ancestors of two of the southern tribes instead of to those of Issachar or some other tribe of the north is evidence in favour of its truthfulness.
The sons of Jacob were twelve in number, like the twelve sons of Ishmael, and corresponded with the twelve tribes of Israel which were called after their names. And yet the correspondence required a little forcing. It is questionable whether, at any one time, there ever were exactly twelve Israelitish tribes. In the Song of Deborah Judah does not appear at all, Ephraim taking its place and, along with Benjamin, extending as far south as the desert of the Amalekites, while Machir is substituted for Manasseh and Gad. Levi never possessed a territory of its own; had it done so, the tribes would have been thirteen in number and not twelve. At the same time, it had just as much right to be considered a separate tribe as Dan, whose cities were in the north as well as in the south, where, however, they were absorbed by Judah; more right perhaps than Simeon, which hardly existed except in name. The territory of Reuben lay outside the boundaries of Palestine, and was merely the desert-wadis and grazing-grounds of the kingdom of Moab; the country can be said to have belonged to the tribe only in the sense that the wadis east of the Delta belong to the Bedâwin, whom the Egyptian government at present allows to live in them. Manasseh, lastly, was divided into two halves, in order to bring the number of tribes up to the requisite figure.
It is clear that the scheme is an artificial one. Israel, after its conquest of Canaan, could indeed be divided into twelve separate parts, but such a division was theoretical only. There were no twelve territories corresponding to the parts, while the parts themselves could be reckoned as thirteen, eleven, or ten, just as easily as twelve.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is obvious. History credited Jacob with twelve sons, and it was consequently necessary to bring the number of Israelitish tribes into harmony with the fact. Modern criticism has amused itself with reversing the history, and assuming that the twelve sons of the patriarch owed their origin to the twelve tribes. It has accordingly drawn inferences from the fact that some of the sons of Jacob are said to have been the offspring of concubines, and not of his two legitimate wives, and that Joseph and Benjamin were the youngest of all. But such inferences fall with the assumption that in the twelve sons we have merely the eponymous heroes of the twelve tribes. It is a cheap way of making history, and, after all, what we know of the tribes does not fit in with the theory. There is nothing in the history of Dan and Naphtali, or Gad and Asher, which would have caused them to be regarded of bastard descent, if that bastard descent had not been a fact; indeed, in the Song of Deborah, which is almost universally allowed to go back to the early age of the Judges, Naphtali and Zebulun are placed on exactly the same footing. The distinction between the sons of Leah and those of Rachel does not answer to the real cleavage between the tribes of the south and those of the north of Palestine: Benjamin, after the age of Saul, followed Judah and Simeon, while the sons of Joseph were joined with Zebulun and Issachar. Moreover, had the sons of Jacob been mere reflections of the tribes, it would be difficult to account for the existence of Joseph, or to understand why Machir takes the place of Manasseh and Gad in the Song of Deborah.
The critical theory is the result of introducing Greek modes of thought into Semitic history. The Greek tribe, it is true, traced its origin to an eponymous ancestor, but that ancestor was a god or a hero, and not a man. Among the Semites, however, as the history of Arabia may still teach us, the conception of the tribe was something wholly different. The tribe was an enlarged family which called itself by the name of its first head. It began with the individual, and to the last styled itself his children. The Greek tribe, on the contrary, began with the clan, and its theoretical ancestor, accordingly, was merely the divine personage whose common cult kept it together. In the Semitic tribe there could be no cult of its ancestor, for the ancestor was but an ordinary man, who worshipped the same form of Baal and used the same rites as his descendants after him.
Nevertheless, there may be an element of truth in the ‘critical’ assumption. The names of the ancestors of some of the Israelitish tribes may have been the reflex of the later names of the tribes themselves. It does not follow that the name by which one of the sons of Jacob became known to later generations was actually the name which he bore himself. Had Jacob been uniformly called Israel by the Hebrew writers, we should never have known his original name. And it is possible that the name of Asher is really a reflex of this kind. The Travels of the Mohar, written in Egypt in the reign of Ramses II. before the Israelitish conquest of Canaan, speak of ‘the mountain of User’ as being in the very locality in which the tribe of Asher was afterwards settled. And in the case of one tribe at least there is evidence that its name must have been reflected back upon that of its progenitor.
This is the tribe of Benjamin. In the book of Genesis (xxxv. 18) Benjamin is represented as having received two different names at his birth. The statement excites our suspicion, for such a double naming is inconsistent with Hebrew practice, and our suspicion is confirmed when we find that both names have a geographical meaning. Benjamin is ‘the son of the South’ or ‘Southerner’; Ben-Oni, as he is also said to have been called, is ‘the son of On,’ or ‘the Onite.’ On, or Beth-On, it will be remembered, was an ancient name of Beth-el, the great sanctuary and centre of the tribe of Benjamin, while ‘the Southerner’ was an appropriate title for the lesser brother tribe which lay to the south of the dominant Ephraim. It is of Ephraim that Deborah says, in her Song of Triumph, ‘Behind thee is Benjamin among thy peoples’ (Judg. v. 14).
The etymology suggested in Genesis for the name of Ben-Oni is a sample of those plays upon words in which Oriental writers have always delighted, and of which the Hebrew Scriptures contain so many illustrations. They all spring from the old confusion between the name and the thing, which substituted the name for the thing, and believed that if the name could be explained, the thing would be explained also. Hence the slight transformations in the form of names which allowed them to be assimilated to familiar words, or their identification with words which obviously gave an incorrect sense. Hence, too, the choice of etymologies which was offered to the reader: where the real origin of the name was unknown or uncertain, it was possible to explain it in more than one way. Isaiah (xv. 9) changes the name of the Moabite city of Dibon into Dimon in order to connect it with the Hebrew dâm, ‘blood,’ and the writer of Genesis gives two contradictory derivations of the name of Joseph (Gen. xxx. 23, 24). The latter fact is of itself a sufficient proof of the true value of these etymologies, or rather, popular plays upon words, and the sayings in which they are embodied can still be matched by the traveller in the East. Similar embodiments of popular etymologising are still repeated to explain the place-names of Egypt.[90]
The origin of some of the names of the sons of Jacob is as obscure to us as it was to the writer of Genesis. We do not know, for instance, the meaning and derivation of the name of Reuben. Equally doubtful is the real etymology of the name of Issachar.[91] The name of Simeon is already found among the places in Canaan conquered by the Egyptian Pharaoh Thothmes III. before the age of Moses, and in Judah we have a name which seems to be the same as that of a tribe in Northern Syria.[92] Levi, like Naphtali, is a gentilic noun, and must be connected with the lau’â(n), or ‘priest’ of Southern Arabia.[93] Gad was the god of good fortune, Dan ‘the judge,’ the title of certain Babylonian deities, and Dinah is the feminine corresponding to Dan.
Jacob, ever timorous, fled from Hivite vengeance after the destruction of Shechem, forsaking the property he had acquired there by purchase and the sword. He made his way southward to Beth-el, and there rested on the edge of the great mountain block of Central Palestine. Hard by was the city of Luz, soon to be eclipsed by the growing fame of the high-place on the height above it. Here, at Beth-el, an altar was erected by the patriarch to the God of the locality who had once appeared to him in a dream. It was the prototype of the altar that was hereafter to arise there when Beth-el had become a chief sanctuary of the house of Israel. Whether the altar stood on the high-place on the summit of the mountain, where the Beth-el or column of stone had been consecrated by Jacob, we do not know; there are indications in the prophets, however, that the high-place and the temple were separate from one another. Indeed, from the words of Genesis, it would seem that the altar and future temple were on the lower slope of the hill, close to the old Canaanitish town. Here, at any rate, on the road to the city, was that Allon-bachuth, that ‘Terebinth of Tears,’ which is referred to by Hosea (xii. 4), and is connected in the book of Genesis with the death of Deborah, the nurse of Rachel. In later days another Deborah dwelt under the shadow of a palm-tree on the same road (Judg. iv. 6), and modern critical ingenuity has accordingly discovered that the terebinth and the palm were one and the same tree.
Beth-el, however, was still too near the Hivites of Shechem, and Jacob continued his journey to the south. The death of Isaac called him to Hebron, where, for the last time, he met his brother Esau, who came to take part in his father’s burial. But his own residence was at Beth-lehem, ‘the Temple of the god Lakhmu,’ called Ephrath in those early days.[94] Here Rachel died, and here accordingly was raised the tombstone which marked her grave down to the day when the book of Genesis assumed its present form.[95]
It was ‘beyond the tower of Edar,’ the tower of ‘the Flock,’ that Jacob, we are told, ‘spread his tent.’ The tower of the Flock guarded the city-fortress of Jerusalem (Mic. iv. 8), and it was therefore between Jerusalem and Beth-lehem that the patriarch made his home. But his flocks were scattered northwards as far as Shechem, grazing on the mountain slopes under the charge of his sons. Jacob remained like a Bedâwi of to-day living among the settled inhabitants of the country, and yet keeping apart from them and sending his flocks far and wide wherever there was fresh grass and free pasturage.
It was while he thus lived that the disgraceful events occurred connected with the marriage of Judah and the Canaanitish Tamar, which throw an evil light on the manners and morals of the patriarch’s family. The whole episode stands in marked contrast to the ordinary character of the history, and its insertion is evidence of the impartiality of the writer. It is clear that he has put together all that reached him from the past history of his people, omitting nothing, modifying nothing. All sides of the past are brought before us, the darker as well as the lighter, and no attempt is made to spare or condone the forefathers of Israel. It has indeed been asked by an over-sensitive criticism how the recital of such abominations can be consistent with the sanctity claimed for the Mosaic writings. But the question has troubled the minds only of the critics themselves; and not more than three centuries ago the compilers of the Anglican lectionary saw no harm in ordering the chapter to be read publicly to men and maidens in church.
The episode was inserted in the midst of the story of Joseph, one of the most pathetic and touching ever told. We need not repeat its details, or describe how Joseph, the spoilt darling of his father, dreamed dreams which aroused the alarm and jealousy of his brothers, how he was sold by them into Egypt, how there he became the vizier of the Pharaoh, and how eventually Jacob and his family were brought into the land of Goshen, there to enjoy the good things of the valley of the Nile. But the story brings us back again to the great stream of ancient Oriental history; once more the history of Israel touches the history of the world, and ceases to be a series of idyllic pictures, such as the memory of shepherds and Bedâwin might alone preserve.
The story of Joseph forms a complete whole, distinguished by certain features that mark it off from the rest of the book of Genesis. It contains peculiar words, some of them of Egyptian origin,[96] and it shows a very minute acquaintance with Egyptian life in the Hyksos age. There are even words and phrases which seem to have been translated into Hebrew from some other language, and the meaning of which has not been fully understood: thus it is said that the cupbearer of Pharaoh ‘pressed the grapes’ into his master’s goblet instead of pouring the wine; and the word employed to denote an Egyptian official, and translated ‘officer’ in the Authorised Version, properly signifies ‘eunuch.’ Can the story have been translated from an Egyptian papyrus? The question is suggested by the fact that one of the most characteristic portions of it has actually been embodied in an ancient Egyptian tale. This is the so-called Tale of the Two Brothers, written by the scribe Enna for Seti II. of the nineteenth dynasty while he was crown-prince, and therefore in the age of the Exodus. Here we have the episode of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife told in Egyptian form. The fellah Bata takes the place of Joseph; his sister-in-law plays the part of Potiphar’s wife.[97]
This part of the story was therefore known among the literary classes of Egypt in the days when Moses was learned in all their wisdom. And if it has been preserved among the few fragments that have been saved from the wreck of ancient Egyptian literature, may we not conclude that had the whole of that literature come down to us, other portions of the story of Joseph would have been preserved in it as well? There is a gentleness in the character of Joseph which reminds us forcibly of Egyptian manners, and offers a sharp contrast to the rough ways and readiness to shed blood which distinguished the Hebrew Semite.
At all events, the story must have been written by one who was well acquainted with the age of the Hyksos. It is true that an attempt has recently been made, on the strength of certain proper names, to show that it is not the Egypt of the Hyksos that is described, but the Egypt of Shishak and his successors. The names of Potipherah or Potiphar and Asenath are said to have been unknown before that date. A couple of proper names, however, is an insecure foundation on which to build a theory, more especially when the argument rests upon the imperfections of our own knowledge. That no names corresponding in formation to Potipherah and Asenath should as yet have been met with earlier than the time of Shishak is no proof that they did not exist. A single example of each is sufficient to prove the contrary. And, as a matter of fact, such examples actually occur. A stela of the reign of Thothmes III. records the name of Pe-tu-Baal, ‘the Gift of Baal,’ as that of the sixth ancestor of the Egyptian whose name it records;[98] while the Tel el-Amarna tablets contain the name of Subanda, the Smendes of Greek writers, which is an exact parallel in form to Asenath.[99] Pe-tu-Baal must have lived at the close of the Hyksos period, and the Semitic deity with whose name his own is compounded indicates that it has been formed under Semitic influence. It was, in fact, as we learn from the Phœnician inscriptions, an imitation of a Canaanitish name.[100] The Hyksos had come from Asia, and had imposed their yoke upon Egypt, where they ruled for more than five hundred years. Though they held all Egypt under their sway, they had established their capital at Zoan, now called Sân, far to the north on the eastern frontier of the Delta. Here they were near their kinsfolk in Canaan, and could readily summon fresh troops from Asia in case of Egyptian revolt.
The court of the Hyksos Pharaohs, however, soon became Egyptianised. They adopted the arts and science, the manners and customs, of their more cultured subjects, and one of the few scientific works of ancient Egypt that have come down to us—the famous Mathematical Papyrus—was written for a Hyksos king. It was only in physiognomy and religion that the Hyksos conqueror continued to be distinguished from the native Egyptian.
Besides Zoan, Heliopolis, or ‘On of the North,’ was a chief centre of Hyksos power. It was the oldest and most celebrated sanctuary of Egypt, where ancient schools of learning were established, and from whence the religious system had been disseminated which made the Sun-god the supreme ruler of the universe. The Hyksos had no difficulty in identifying the Sun-god of On with their own supreme deity Sutekh, who was a form of the Canaanitish Baal. On, consequently, once the chief seat of the orthodox faith of Egypt, became the centre of foreign heresy. The Sallier Papyrus, which describes the origin of the war that resulted in the expulsion of the Hyksos, specially tells us that ‘the Impure of (On), the city of Ra, were subject to Ra-Apopi,’ the Hyksos Pharaoh, and the Egyptians changed into Ra, the Egyptian Sun-god, the name of Sutekh, which a scarab of Apopi shows was really prefixed to that Pharaoh’s name.[101] The great temple of the Sun-god of On, accordingly, before which Usertesen of the twelfth dynasty had planted the obelisks, one of which remains to this day, was transformed into a temple of the foreign god; and though its high-priest still continued to bear his ancient title, and perform the ceremonies of the past, it was Sutekh and not the native divinity whom he served. Potipherah—in Egyptian, Pa-tu-pa-Ra—was a literal translation of the Canaanitish Mattan-Baal, ‘the gift of Baal,’ and implied of itself the foreign cult.
Potiphar is an abbreviation of Potipherah, and reminds us of similar abbreviations met with in the letters of the Canaanitish correspondents of the Pharaoh in the Tel el-Amarna collection. It is an abbreviation which points to long familiarity with the name on the part of the Hebrew people. The titles, however, given to Potiphar are obscure. The second seems to signify ‘captain of the bodyguard,’ but the first—saris in Hebrew—means an ‘eunuch.’ Ebers, it is true, has pointed out that eunuchs in the East have not only held high positions of state, but have married wives as well;[102] this, however, has been in Turkey, not in ancient Egypt. Perhaps the word is the Babylonian saris, ‘an officer’; at all events, the Rab-sarîs of 2 Kings xviii. 17 is the Assyrian Rab-sarisi, or ‘chief officer.’ That Babylonian words should have made their way into Egypt in the age of the Hyksos is by no means strange. We have learned from the Tel el-Amarna tablets that Babylonian was for centuries the literary language of Western Asia, and was studied and written even on the banks of the Nile, while the monuments of Babylonia itself have shown that Babylonian culture had made its way to the frontiers of Egypt at a very remote age. The history of Joseph contains at least one word which bears testimony to its influence. When Joseph was made ‘governor over all the land of Egypt,’ the heralds who ran before his chariot to announce the fact shouted the word ‘abrêk!’ For this word no explanation can be found either in Hebrew or in Egyptian. But the language of the Babylonian inscriptions has unexpectedly come to our aid. In Chaldæa abarakku was the title of one of the highest officers of State, and abriqqu, borrowed from the earlier Sumerian abrik, signified ‘a seer.’
We have said that the history of Joseph is marvellously true in all its details to what archæology has informed us were the facts of Egyptian life. Thus the prison in which ‘the king’s prisoners’ were confined is called by the strange name of ‘the round house.’ Such, at least, would seem to be the literal meaning of the Hebrew phrase, the second element of which signifies ‘roundness.’ The word is written sohar, though there is evidence of another reading, sokhar. Sohar or sokhar, however, is really an Egyptian word. The royal prison at Thebes, where the State prisoners were kept under guard, was: called suhan, in which we have the same interchange of final r and n that is still a characteristic of Egyptian Arabic.[103] The term bêth has-sohar, ‘the house of the Sohar,’ is found nowhere else in the Old Testament: it is, in fact, one of the peculiarities which distinguish the story of Joseph, and at the same time testify to the acquaintance of its writer with the details of Egyptian life.
The titles of the royal cupbearer and the chief of the bakers have been found in the lists of Egyptian officials; the Pharaoh’s kitchen was organised on an elaborate scale;[104] and the Egyptians were famed for their skill in confectionery and in making various kinds of bread.[105] On the monuments we may see depicted the cupbearer offering the goblet of wine, and the baker carrying on his head the baskets filled with round ‘white loaves.’ The ‘birthday of the Pharaoh’ was a general festival, on which, as the decrees of Rosetta and Canopus have taught us, the sovereign proclaimed an amnesty and released such prisoners as were thought deserving of pardon.[106] The dreams that Pharaoh dreamed are in full accordance with Egyptian mythology and symbolism. The seven kine fitly represent the Nile, which from time immemorial had been likened to a milch-cow. The cow-headed goddess Hathor or Isis watched over the fertility of the country, and the fertilising water of the river was called the milk that flowed from her breasts. The number seven denotes the ‘seven great Hathors,’ the seven forms under which the goddess was adored. The dreams themselves fall in with the Egyptian belief of the age. Throughout Egyptian history they have been a power not only in religion, but in politics as well. It was in consequence of a dream that Thothmes IV. cleared away the sand from before the paws of the Sphinx, and a thousand years later Nut-Amon of Ethiopia was summoned by a dream to invade Egypt. The dreams usually needed an interpreter to explain them, such as is mentioned in a Greek inscription from the Serapeum at Memphis. Books, however, had been compiled in which the signification of dreams was reduced to a science; and as in modern Egypt, so yet more in the past, men spent their lives in pondering over the signification of the dreams of the night.[107]
Even the statement that the east wind had blasted the ears of corn (Gen. xli. 6) betrays an acquaintance with the peculiarities of the Egyptian climate. Those who have sailed up the Nile know that the wind feared alike by the peasant and the sailor is that which blows from the south-east; while the crops of spring are matured by the northern breeze, they are parched and destroyed by the evil wind from the south-east.
The golden collar placed around the neck of the royal favourite is equally characteristic of Egyptian customs, at all events in the age of the Hyksos and the eighteenth dynasty. ‘Captain’ Ahmes, whose tomb is at El-Kab, and who took a prominent part in the final struggle which drove the Hyksos strangers out of the Delta, describes the rewards bestowed upon him by the Pharaoh for his deeds of valour, and chief among the rewards are the chains of gold. Before Joseph was allowed to enter the presence of the monarch, he was not only clad in new raiment, but shorn as well. This, too, was in accordance with Egyptian custom. None could appear before Pharaoh unless they had been freshly shaven, and in the eyes of the Egyptian not the least part of the ‘impurity’ of the Asiatic Semite was his habit of growing a beard.[108]
The change of name, moreover, which marked Joseph’s elevation was again characteristic of Egypt. The monuments have told us of other cases in which an Asiatic from Canaan, or a Karian from Asia Minor, became an Egyptian official, and in so doing was required to adopt an Egyptian name.[109] That the name of Zaphnath-paaneah is of Egyptian origin has long been recognised, and that it contains the Egyptian pa-ânkh, ‘life’ or ‘the living one,’ is clear. It is only over its first elements that discussion is possible.
It is hardly necessary to notice further points which prove how intimately the writer of the history of Joseph was acquainted with Egyptian life and manners, language and soil. The Egyptians, he notes, could not eat together with the Hebrews, for that would have been ‘an abomination’ to them. It would, indeed, have defiled them ceremonially, and have caused them to participate in the impurity of those whom they termed ‘the unclean.’ So, too, we read, ‘every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians,’ not indeed, as has been imagined, because Egypt had been conquered by the ‘Shepherd’ kings, but because the flocks of the Delta were tended partly by Bedâwin, partly by half-caste Egyptians, whose unclean habits and unshorn faces were the butt of the literary world. The ‘marshmen,’ as they were contemptuously called, were looked upon as pariahs.[110]
While, however, the narrative is thus thoroughly Egyptian in character, the Egypt it brings before us is the Egypt of the age of the Hyksos. Chariots and horses have already been introduced. It has been supposed that the horse came with the Hyksos; at all events, there is no trace of it before the conquest of the country by the Asiatic stranger. The Pharaoh, moreover, holds his court in the Delta, not far from the Canaanitish border and the land of Goshen; and the waggons which carried Jacob and his family travelled easily from Beth-lehem to the Egyptian capital. Zoan consequently must still have been the residence of the Pharaoh; and Thebes, in Upper Egypt, had not as yet taken its place.
There is one fact, furthermore, which stands out prominently in the history of Joseph, and points unmistakably to the Hyksos age. We are told that it was his policy which reduced the people of Egypt to the condition of serfs. Pressed by famine, they were compelled by him to sell their lands for corn, and to receive it again as tenants of the Pharaoh, with the obligation of paying him a fifth part of the produce. The priests, or rather, the temples, were alone allowed to retain their old possessions; henceforward the land of Egypt was shared between them and the king. In the language of modern Egypt, it became either Government property or waqf.
Now, this fact corresponds with a change in the tenure of land which the monuments have informed us must have taken place under the dominion of the Hyksos dynasties. When Egypt was conquered by the Asiatics, it was divided among a number of feudal families who were landowners on a large scale, and at times the rivals of the sovereign himself. By the side of this higher aristocracy there was also a lower one, answering in some measure to the yeomen farmers of the northern counties, but equally owners of land. When, however, the Hyksos were finally driven out, a new Egypt comes into view. The feudal aristocracy has disappeared—or almost disappeared—along with the other landowners of the country, and the only proprietors of land that are left are the Pharaoh and the priests, to whom in after times the military caste was added. Only in Southern Egypt, where the struggle against the foreigner first began, do we find instances of private ownership of land, and this, too, only in the earlier years of the eighteenth dynasty. Before long the Pharaoh had absorbed into his own hands all the land that had not been given to the gods; the old nobility had disappeared, and their place been taken by an army of officials who derived all their wealth and power from the king. The Pharaoh, the priests, and the bureaucracy henceforth are the rulers of Egypt.
This momentous change must have had a cause, but we look in vain for such a cause in the Egyptian monuments. It has been suggested that the War of Independence may have brought it about by increasing the power of the king as leader in the struggle.[111] But this would not explain his absorption of the land; and even if all the older families had perished in the war, which is not very probable, the lesser landowners would have remained. Moreover, the generals of the king would in this case have claimed similar spoils to those of their leader. What their commander had seized would have been seized also by the officers under him.
However great may be our reluctance to accept the explanation offered by the story of Joseph, certain it is that it is the only adequate explanation forthcoming. And there is one strong argument in its favour. Under Ahmes, the conqueror of the Hyksos and the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, there are still instances of land being held by private individuals. But this was at El-Kab, in Upper Egypt, where the Hyksos rule had long been nominal rather than real, and where it had not been obeyed at all for three generations previously.[112] As soon as the eighteenth dynasty kings were established firmly on the throne of the Hyksos Pharaohs in the north as well as in their ancestral homes in Southern Egypt, even these instances of individual ownership in land came to an end. It was only where the Hyksos supremacy had been weak that they had lingered on. When once the Prince of Thebes had become in all respects the successor of the foreign Pharaohs who had reigned at Zoan, they cease altogether.
The account of Joseph’s procedure is true to facts in another point also. From the time of the eighteenth dynasty onwards we hear repeatedly of the public larits or granaries which were under State control.[113] The peasantry were required to contribute to them yearly in a fixed proportion, and the corn stored up in them was only sold to the people in case of need. It was out of these granaries, furthermore, that many of the Government officials were paid in kind, as well as the workmen employed by the State. The office of ‘superintendent of the granaries’ was therefore a very important one: once each year he presented to the king an ‘account of the harvests of the south and the north’; and if the account was exceptionally good, if the inundation had been abundant and the harvest better than ‘for thirty years,’ his grateful sovereign would throw chains of gold around his neck.[114] The origin of these royal granaries and of the office of their superintendent which thus characterise the ‘new empire’ of Egypt is explained by the history of Joseph.
Before the days when the conquests of the eighteenth dynasty had created an Egyptian empire in Asia, and brought foreign supplies of food to Egypt, the rise of the Nile was a matter of vital interest. The very existence of the people depended upon it. Too high a Nile meant scarcity, too low a Nile famine. It was only when the river rose to its normal level and overflowed the fields at the stated time that the heart of the agriculturist was gladdened, and he knew that the gods had given him a year of plenty.
The seven years’ famine of Joseph’s age is not the only seven years’ famine which Egypt has had to endure. El-Makrîzî, the Arabic historian of Egypt, describes one which lasted for seven years, from A.D. 1064 to 1071, and, like that of Joseph, was caused by a deficient Nile. A stela discovered by Mr. Wilbour on the island of Sehêl, in the middle of the First Cataract, and engraved in the time of the Ptolemies, similarly records a famine that was wasting the country because ‘the Nile-flood had not come for seven years.’[115] And it is possible that a memorial of the famine of Joseph has been discovered by Brugsch in one of the tombs of El-Kab. Here the dead man, a certain Baba, is made to say, ‘When a famine arose, lasting many years, I issued out corn to the city.’ Baba must have lived in the latter part of the Hyksos domination, so that the date of his inscription would agree with that of Joseph.[116]
Whether the power of Joseph and his master would still have extended as far south as El-Kab in the age of Baba, we do not know. But we do know that a famine which prevailed in Lower Egypt in consequence of a low Nile would have equally prevailed in the Thebaid. It would not, however, have prevailed in Canaan. In Canaan the ground is watered, not by the Nile, but by the rains of heaven, and in Canaan, therefore, it was only a want of rain that could have caused a scarcity of food.
Famines, indeed, did occur in Palestine from time to time, and we hear of Egyptian kings sending corn to that country to supply its needs.[117] As Egypt was the granary of Italy in the days of the Roman Empire, so too it had been the granary of Western Asia in an earlier age. A dry season in Canaan brought famine in its train; and if that dry season coincided with a deficient Nile in Egypt, there was no other land to which its inhabitants could look for food. It is quite possible that one of these famines in Canaan may have happened at the very time when the Nile refused to irrigate the fields of Egypt. When, however, we read that ‘the famine was over all the face of the earth,’ and that ‘all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn because the famine was sore in all lands,’ it is evident that the narrative has been written from an Egyptian point of view. The Egyptians might have supposed that when a low Nile produced a scarcity of food all other countries would equally suffer—such, indeed, was the case with Ethiopia—but a supposition of the kind is inconceivable in the mind of a Canaanite. An inhabitant of Palestine knew that the crops of his country were dependent on the rain, not on the waters of the Nile; it was only the Egyptian who modelled the rest of the world after that part of it which was known to him.
Here, then, we have a clear indication that the story of Joseph must have been written in Egypt, and further probability is added to the theory that it has been translated into Hebrew from an Egyptian original. But more than this. Is it likely that the Hebrew translator, if he had been acquainted with the climate of Canaan, would have left the words of the story just as we find them? Can we imagine that the language he employed about the extent of the famine would have been so definite, so comprehensive, so Egyptian in character? Like the Egyptian words embodied in the narrative, it points to a writer or translator who lived in Egypt, and not in Canaan.
Who was the Pharaoh under whom Joseph became the first minister of the State? Chronology shows that he must have been one of the kings of the last Hyksos dynasty. George the Syncellus makes him Aphophis, Apopi Ra-aa-kenen, or Apopi II. of the monuments, and the date would suit very well.[118] Apopi II. was the last powerful Hyksos sovereign. His authority was still obeyed in Upper Egypt, but it was in his reign that the War of Independence broke out. According to the story in the Sallier Papyrus, it was caused by his message to the hiq or vassal prince of Thebes, requiring him to renounce the worship of Amon of Thebes and acknowledge Sutekh, the Hyksos Baal, as his supreme god.[119] The war lasted for four generations, and ended in the expulsion of the foreigner.
But long before this took place the family of Israel was settled in the land of Goshen, on the outskirts of Northern Egypt. The geographical position of Goshen has been rediscovered by Dr. Naville. It corresponded with the modern Wadi Tumilât, through which the traveller by the railway now passes on his way from Ismailîyeh to Zagazig. It took its name from Qosem or Qos, the Pha-kussa of Greek geography, and the capital of the Arabian nome, the site of which is marked by the mounds of Saft el-Hennah.[120] The very name of the ‘Arabian nome’ indicates that its occupants belonged to Arabia rather than to Egypt. It was, in fact, a district handed over to the Bedâwin by the Pharaohs, as it still is to-day. Meneptah, the son of Ramses II., says in his great inscription at Karnak that ‘the country around Pa-Bailos (now Belbeis, near Zagazig) was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle, because of the strangers. It was abandoned since the time of the ancestors.’[121] Abandoned, that is to say, by the Egyptians themselves. But the Semitic nomad pitched his tent and fed his flocks there, partly because it was on the road to his own country and countrymen, partly because it was fitted for grazing and not for agriculture. Here, too, he was not in immediate contact with the Egyptian fellah, though the court of the Hyksos Pharaoh at Zoan was nigh at hand.
Joseph’s brethren were made overseers of the royal cattle, an official post of which we also hear in the native Egyptian texts. After a while, Jacob died, full of years, and his body was embalmed in the Egyptian fashion. The actual process of embalming occupied forty days, the whole period during which ‘the Egyptians mourned for him,’ being threescore and ten. The statement is in accordance with other testimony as to the length of time needed to embalm a mummy. Herodotos (ii. 86) states that the corpse was kept in natron during seventy days, ‘to which period they are strictly confined.’ According to Diodoros,[122] ‘oil of cedar and other things were applied to the whole body for upwards of thirty days,’ the full period during which the mourning for the dead and the preparation of his mummy lasted being seventy-two days. Between the age of Joseph and that of Diodoros it would seem that little change had taken place in this part, at any rate, of the Egyptian treatment of their dead. When, however, the Hebrew text states that the corpse was embalmed by ‘the physicians, the slaves’ of Joseph; the word ‘physicians’ must be understood in a restricted sense. Pliny,[123] it is true, avers that during the process of embalming physicians were employed to examine the body of the dead man and determine of what disease he had died. But the paraskhistæ, who made the needful incision, were regarded with the utmost abhorrence; they were the pariahs of society, who lived in a community apart. It was the embalmers who were the associates of the priests, and whose persons, in the words of Diodoros, were looked upon as ‘sacred.’ Nor is it easy to see who could have been the physicians who were the ‘slaves’ of the Hebrew vizier. The physician in Egypt was usually a free man, who followed a profession which brought with it honour and respect. The doctor belonged to the learned classes, and, like the scribe, had no mean opinion of his worth and dignity. But such physicians were employed in healing the sick, not in embalming the dead, and must have stood in a very different position from that of Joseph’s ‘slaves.’ More light is still wanted on the subject from monumental sources; in spite of the papyri which describe the ceremonies attendant on the various acts of the embalmment, we are still ignorant of its practical details.
When at last the days of mourning were past, Joseph spoke, we are told, to ‘the house of Pharaoh.’ The expression is purely Egyptian, and refers to the signification of the word ‘Pharaoh’ itself. Pharaoh, the Egyptian Per-âa, is the ‘Great House’; ‘the son of the Sun-god’ was too highly exalted to be spoken of as a man, and it was therefore to ‘the Great House’ that his subjects addressed themselves. Modern Europe is familiar with a similar phrase; when we allude to the ‘Sublime Porte’ we mean the Turkish Sultan, who once administered justice from the ‘High Gate’ of his palace.
Jacob was buried in the cave of Machpelah. A long procession of soldiers and mourners, partly in chariots, partly on foot, accompanied the mummy on its way out of Egypt. Such a procession was no unusual thing. The wealthy Egyptian desired to be buried near the tomb of Osiris at Abydos, and it was therefore not unfrequently the custom to convey his mummy in solemn procession to that sacred spot, and then to carry it back once more to its own final resting-place. The procession which accompanied the body of the patriarch must have followed the high-road which led through the Shur, or line of fortification on the eastern border of the desert, and brought the traveller with little difficulty to Southern Palestine. The reference in the narrative to the threshing-floor of Atad, on the eastern side of the Jordan, is an interpolation, which embodies merely a local etymology. The chariot-road from Egypt to Palestine naturally never ran near the Jordan; and the threshing-floor of Atad would have been far out of the way. But popular imagination had seen in the name of Abel-Mizraim, where the threshing-floor was situated, a ‘mourning of Egypt,’ and had accordingly connected it with the great mourning that was made for Jacob. As a matter of fact, however, Abel-Mizraim really signifies ‘the meadow of Egypt,’ abel, ‘a meadow,’ being a not uncommon element in the geographical names of ancient Canaan.[124]
Two sons had been born to Joseph by his Egyptian wife, whom the Israelites knew by their Hebrew names. They had been born before the death of his father, and had thus received his blessing. Joseph himself lived ‘an hundred and ten years.’ This was the limit of life the Egyptian desired for himself and his friends, and in the inscriptions the boon of a life of ‘an hundred and ten years’ is from time to time asked for from the gods. It is the term of existence a court poet promises to Seti II. ‘on earth,’ and Ptah-hotep, the author of ‘the oldest book in the world,’ who flourished in the days of the fifth dynasty, assures us that, thanks to his pursuit of wisdom he had already attained the age.[125]
Joseph was embalmed, but his mummy was not carried to Hebron for burial, like that of his father. If Apopi II. had been the Pharaoh who had transformed him from a Hebrew slave into the highest of Egyptian officials, the War of Independence must have broken out long before his death. The Hyksos dynasty was hastening to its decay. Its strength had departed from it, and the Pharaohs of Zoan, who had lost all power in Upper Egypt, would still more have lost all power in Asia. Their soldiers were needed for other purposes than that of escorting the coffin of the dead vizier across the desert of El-Arish. Moreover, Joseph was an Egyptian official, and by his marriage into the family of the high priest of Heliopolis had become as much of an Egyptian as his Hyksos master. We are told that he made the Israelites swear to carry his corpse with them should they ever return to Palestine; the triumph of the Theban princes was growing more assured, and Joseph knew well that the vengeance of the victorious party would be wreaked upon the dead as well as upon the living. The history of Egypt had already shown that the tomb and the mummy were the first to suffer.
A change of sepulchre was no unheard-of thing. King Ai of the eighteenth dynasty had two, if not three, tombs made for himself, and the mummy could be transported from one place of burial to another. All knew where it was interred; year by year offerings were made to the spirit of the dead, and in many cases the estate of the deceased was taxed to support a line of priests who should perform the stated services at the tomb. As long as the sepulchre of Joseph was in the neighbourhood of his people it would have been easy to protect his mummy from violence, and to carry the coffin out of Egypt when the needful time should come.