Myth #70:

Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery.

The Myth: And when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him. And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they hated him yet the more…. And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him. And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams. And Reuben heard it, and he delivered him out of their hands; and said, Let us not kill him. And Reuben said unto them, Shed no blood, but cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness, and lay no hand upon him; that he might rid him out of their hands, to deliver him to his father again. And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren, that they stripped Joseph out of his coat, his coat of many colours that was on him; And they took him, and cast him into a pit: and the pit was empty, there was no water in it. And they sat down to eat bread: and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and, behold, a company of Ishmeelites came from Gilead, with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt. And Judah said unto his brethren, What profit is it if we slay our brother, and conceal his blood? Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmeelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother and our flesh. And his brethren were content. Then there passed by Midianites merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmeelites for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt. (Gen. 37:4–5, 18–28)

The Reality: The story of Joseph’s conflict with his eleven brothers draws upon an Egyptian legend about twelve kings.

The story of Joseph and his brothers sets forth one of the most touching and dramatic tales in all the Bible. As with many ancient sagas it draws together a number of separate works about different characters and weaves them together into a single narrative, merging a variety of identities into individual characters. Although it hangs together as the work of primarily a single author, the story contains some traces of the later political feuds between Reuben and Judah, with one or the other competing to be the least culpable of wrongdoing in their brother’s treatment.

Like the earlier cycles about Abraham’s children and then Isaac’s children, the story continues the theme of tribal competition and jealousy among the brothers. In this account Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son, had a number of dreams foretelling that he would become head of the household, with even his parents bowing down before him.

In the early stages, Joseph comes across as a rather pompous and obnoxious young teen, with an “I’m Joseph and you’re not” sort of attitude. In one account, he insists on telling his brothers about a dream in which, “For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf ” (Gen. 37:7).

But one dream wasn’t enough. He had to rub it in with more visions of the future: “Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me” (Gen. 37:9).

No wonder his brothers “hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words” (Gen. 37:8).

Not long after Joseph told his brothers of his dreams, Jacob’s other eleven sons conspired to get rid of their obnoxious brother. Initially, they planned to kill him and toss him into a pit. But Reuben had second thoughts about actually having blood on their hands and suggested that they just leave him in the pit, presumably to starve to death. No doubt some biblical scribe saw this action by Reuben as either more humane or less culpable.

After placing him in the pit, Judah, not to be outdone by Reuben’s sudden burst of compassion, argued,“Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmeelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother and our flesh. And his brethren were content” (Gen. 37:27) .

Thus was Joseph sold into slavery and transported to Egypt, where his skills in dream interpretation eventually led him to the top spot in Pharaoh’s pecking order.

This portion of the story of Joseph shares some remarkable similarities to an Egyptian tale preserved in the writings of Herodotus in his history of Egypt. According to this Greek historian.

After the reign of Sethos [i.e. Set], the priest of Hephaestus [i.e. Ptah], the Egyptians for a time were freed from monarchical government. Unable, however, to do without a king, for long they divided Egypt into twelve regions and appointed a king for each of them. United by intermarriage, the twelve kings governed in mutual friendliness on the understanding that none of them should attempt to oust any of the others, or to increase his power at the expense of the rest. They came to the understanding, and ensured that the terms of it should be rigorously kept, because, at the time when the twelve kingdoms were first established, an oracle declared that the one who should pour a libation from the bronze cup in the temple of Hephaestus [i.e., Ptah] would become master of all Egypt.

Herodotus then went on to discuss other events in the history of Egypt, but after a while he returned to the above story.

Now as time went on, the twelve kings, who had kept their pact not to molest one another, met to offer sacrifice in the temple of Hephaestus. It was the last day of the festival, and when the moment for pouring the libation had come, the high priest, in going to fetch the golden cups which were always used for the purpose, made a mistake in the number and brought one too few, so that Psammetichus, finding himself without a cup, quite innocently and without any ulterior motive took his helmet off, held it out to receive the wine, and so made his libation. The other kings at once connected this action with the oracle, which had declared that whichever of them poured their libation from a bronze cup, should become sole monarch of Egypt. They proceeded to question him, and when they were satisfied that he had acted with no malice, they decided not to put him to death, but to strip him of the greater part of his power and banish him to the marsh-country, forbidding him to leave it or have any communication with the rest of Egypt.

After giving some details about Psammetichus’s background and of a second oracle predicting that bronze men from the sea would aid the king, Herodotus tells us that the exiled monarch met up with a group of bronze-armored sea-raiders forced ashore on Egyptian soil. Seeing this as a fulfillment of the prophesy, Herodotus says, Psammetichus made friends with the raiders and “persuaded them to enter into his service, and by their help and the help of his supporters in Egypt defeated and deposed his eleven enemies.”

Note the numerous parallels between the biblical and Egyptian stories. In both tales, a group of twelve men related by intermarriage live in a state in which no king presides; a prophecy foretells that one of the twelve would be ruler over all of them; when the other eleven learn who will become the new leader, they plan at first to kill him but then change their minds and banish the offender from their territory; after being banished, the hero enters Egypt in the company of foreigners; the hero ultimately arises to a position of power in Egypt; and in fulfillment of the original prophecy the hero rules over the eleven rivals.

One other parallel suggests itself. In the Egyptian story, a cup belonging to the hated king plays a role. Similarly, a cup belonging to Joseph plays a key role in the biblical story. After becoming Prime Minister of Egypt and seeing his brothers appear before him to buy wheat, Joseph tested his brothers by hiding his silver cup in Benjamin’s bag. While the cup symbolized Joseph’s power, the holder of the cup, Benjamin, became the forefather of Israel’s first king, ending the period of kinglessness in Israel.

Herodotus’s Psammetichus may be based on a historical figure of the same name who ruled Egypt in the seventh century B.C. The king in Israel at the time was Josiah, the great religious reformer under whom the Book of Deuteronomy may have been written and whose administration had an active interest in rewriting the earlier history of Israel. Like Joseph, Josiah was a child when he was thrust into a leadership position, taking the throne at the age of eight .

Psammetichus’s successor, Neco II, killed Josiah in battle and conquered Jerusalem and most of Canaan. He installed an Egyptian vassal, Jehoiakim, as king of Judah. Hebrew scribes at this time would have been familiar with stories about Psammetichus.

While the parallels between the biblical and Egyptian stories closely follow the same plot, a question remains as to whether Herodotus’s story about the twelve kings was history or fiction and whether it originally applied to Psammetichus or to some earlier king.

The Herodotus account begins with a claim that prior to Psammetichus, Egypt experienced a period of kinglessness and prior to this period a King Sethos reigned. This does not coincide with Egyptian history for the seventh century B.C. There was neither a period of kinglessness nor a king Sethos in this time frame. (By the seventh century B.C., Sethos, i.e., Set, had strong negative connotations as a symbol of evil.)

The last known King Sethos was Sethos II and before him Sethos I, both from the Nineteenth dynasty in the thirteenth century B.C. There was no period of kinglessness prior to their reigns, either.

Throughout Herodotus’s history of Egypt, he frequently distorted and inaccurately recorded the dynastic chronology, having earlier dynasties following later ones. In fact, Herodotus places Psammetichus’s predecessors from the Twenty-fifth dynasty immediately after the kings of the fourth dynasty, an error of almost two thousand years.

This suggests that Herodotus’s King Sethos and period of kinglessness belong more properly to the Hyksos period, when Set-worshipping aliens displaced the legitimate Theban rulers. The Egyptians considered the Hyksos period to be one without a legitimate Egyptian king.

Whether the Egyptian story of the twelve kings originated in the sixteenth century Hyksos period or the seventh century Psammetichus period, there was ample opportunity for the story to have influenced the biblical writers who finalized the biblical text.