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.