By his two wives and their maids he had twelve sons. Leah was the mother of Keuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zabulon; Gad. and Asher were the children of his slave Zilpah; while Joseph and Benjamin were the only sons of Rachel—Dan and Naphtali being the offspring of her servant Bilhah. The preference which his father showed to him caused Joseph to be hated by his brothers; they sold him to a caravan of Midianites on their way to Egypt, and persuaded Jacob that a wild beast had devoured him. Jahveh was, however, with Joseph, and “made all that he did to prosper in his hand.” He was bought by Potiphar, a great Egyptian lord and captain of Pharaoh’s guard, who made him his overseer; his master’s wife, however, “cast her eyes upon Joseph,” but finding that he rejected her shameless advances, she accused him of having offered violence to her person. Being cast into prison, he astonished his companions in misfortune by his skill in reading dreams, and was summoned to Court to interpret to the king his dream of the seven lean kine who had devoured the seven fat kine, which he did by representing the latter as seven years of abundance, of which the crops should be swallowed up by seven years of famine. Joseph was thereupon raised by Pharaoh to the rank of prime minister. He stored up the surplus of the abundant harvests, and as soon as the famine broke out, distributed the corn to the hunger-stricken people in exchange for their silver and gold, and for their flocks and fields. Hence it was,that the whole of the Nile valley, with the exception of the lands belonging to the priests, gradually passed into the possession of the royal treasury. Meanwhile his brethren, who also suffered from the famine, came down into Egypt to buy corn. Joseph revealed himself to them, pardoned the wrong they had done him, and presented them to the Pharaoh. “And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Say unto thy brethren, This do ye; lade your beasts, and go, get you unto the land of Canaan: and take your father and your household, and come unto me: and I will give you the good of the land of Egypt, and ye shall eat the fat of the land.” Jacob thereupon raised his camp and came to Beersheba, where he offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac; and Jahveh commanded him to go down into Egypt, saying, “I will there make of thee a great nation: I will go down with thee into Egypt: and I will also surely bring thee up again: and Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes.” The whole family were installed by Pharaoh in the province of Goshen, as far as possible from the centres of the native population, “for every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians.”
In the midst of these stern yet touching narratives in which the Hebrews of the times of the Kings delighted to trace the history of their remote ancestors, one important fact arrests our attention: the Beni-Israel quitted Southern Syria and settled on the banks of the Nile. They had remained for a considerable time in what was known later as the mountains of Judah. Hebron had served as their rallying-point; the broad but scantily watered wadys separating the cultivated lands from the desert, were to them a patrimony, which they shared with the inhabitants of the neighbouring towns. Every year, in the spring, they led their flocks to browse on the thin herbage growing in the bottoms of the valleys, removing them to another district only when the supply of fodder was exhausted. The women span, wove, fashioned garments, baked bread, cooked the viands, and devoted themselves to the care of the younger children, whom they suckled beyond the usual period. The men lived like the Bedouin—periods of activity alternating regularly with times of idleness, and the daily routine, with its simple duties and casual work, often gave place to quarrels for the possession of some rich pasturage or some never-failing well.
A comparatively ancient tradition relates that the Hebrews arrived in Egypt during the reign of Aphôbis, a Hyksôs king, doubtless one of the Apôpi, and possibly the monarch who restored the monuments of the Theban Pharaohs, and engraved his name on the sphinxes of Amenemhâît III. and on the colossi of Mîrmâshâû.* The land which the Hebrews obtained is that which, down to the present day, is most frequently visited by nomads, who find there an uncertain hospitality.
* The year XVII. of Apôphis has been pointed out as the date
of their arrival, and this combination, probably proposed by
some learned Jew of Alexandria, was adopted by Christian
chroniclers. It is unsupported by any fact of Egyptian
history, but it rests on a series of calculations founded on
the information contained in the Bible. Starting from the
assumption that the Exodus must have taken place under
Ahmosîs, and that the children of Israel had been four
hundred and thirty years on the banks of the Nile, it was
found that the beginning of their sojourn fell under the
reign of the Apôphis mentioned by Josephus, and, to be still
more correct, in the XVIIth year of that prince.
The tribes of the isthmus of Suez are now, in fact, constantly shifting from one continent to another, and their encampments in any place are merely temporary. The lord of the soil must, if he desire to keep them within his borders, treat them with the greatest prudence and tact. Should the government displease them in any way, or appear to curtail their liberty, they pack up their tents and take flight into the desert. The district occupied by them one day is on the next vacated and left to desolation. Probably the same state of things existed in ancient times, and the border nomes on the east of the Delta were in turn inhabited or deserted by the Bedouin of the period. The towns were few in number, but a series of forts protected the frontier. These were mere village-strongholds perched on the summit of some eminence, and surrounded by a strip of cornland. Beyond the frontier extended a region of bare rock, or a wide plain saturated with the ill-regulated surplus water of the inundation. The land of Goshen was bounded by the cities of Heliopolis on the south, Bubastis on the west, and Tanis and Mendes on the north: the garrison at Avaris could easily keep watch over it and maintain order within it, while they could at the same time defend it from the incursions of the Monatiû and the Hîrû-Shâîtû.*
* Goshen comprised the provinces situated on the borders of
the cultivable cornland, and watered by the infiltration of
the Nile, which caused the growth of a vegetation sufficient
to support the flocks during a few weeks; and it may also
have included the imperfectly irrigated provinces which were
covered with pools and reedy swamps after each inundation.
The Beni-Israel throve in these surroundings so well adapted to their traditional tastes. Even if their subsequent importance as a nation has been over-estimated, they did not at least share the fate of many foreign tribes, who, when transplanted into Egypt, waned and died out, or, at the end of two or three generations, became merged in the native population.* In pursuing their calling as shepherds, almost within sight of the rich cities of the Nile valley, they never forsook the God of their fathers to bow down before the Enneads or Triads of Egypt; whether He was already known to them as Jahveh, or was worshipped under the collective name of Elohîm, they served Him with almost unbroken fidelity even in the presence of Râ and Osiris, of Phtah and Sûtkhû.
* We are told that when the Hebrews left Ramses, they were
“about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside
children. And a mixed multitude went up also with them; and
flocks and herds, even very much cattle” (Exod. xii. 37,
38).
The Hyksôs conquest had not in any way modified the feudal system of the country. The Shepherd-kings must have inherited the royal domain just as they found it at the close of the XIVth dynasty, but doubtless the whole Delta, from Avaris to Sais, and from Memphis to Buto, was their personal appanage. Their direct authority probably extended no further south than the pyramids, and their supremacy over the fiefs of the Said was at best precarious. The turbulent lords who shared among them the possession of the valley had never lost their proud or rebellious spirit, and under the foreign as under the native Pharaohs regulated their obedience to their ruler by the energy he displayed, or by their regard for the resources at his disposal. Thebes had never completely lost the ascendency which it obtained over them at the fall of the Memphite dynasty. The accession of the Xoite dynasty, and the arrival of the Shepherd-kings, in relegating Thebes unceremoniously to a second rank, had not discouraged it, or lowered its royal prestige in its own eyes or in those of others: the lords of the south instinctively rallied around it, as around their natural citadel, and their resources, combined with its own, rendered it as formidable a power as that of the masters of the Delta. If we had fuller information as to the history of this period, we should doubtless see that the various Theban princes took occasion, as in the Heracleopolitan epoch, to pick a quarrel with their sovereign lord, and did not allow themselves to be discouraged by any check.*
* The length of time during which Egypt was subject to
Asiatic rule is not fully known. Historians are agreed in
recognizing the three epochs referred to in the narrative of
Manetho as corresponding with (1) the conquest and the six
first Hyksôs kings, including the XVth Theban dynasty; (2)
the complete submission of Egypt to the XVIth foreign
dynasty; (3) the war of independence during the XVIIth
dynasty, which consisted of two parallel series of kings,
the one Shepherds (Pharaohs), the other Thebans. There has
been considerable discussion as to the duration of the
oppression. The best solution is still that given by Erman,
according to whom the XVth dynasty lasted 284, the XVIth
234, and the XVIIth 143 years, or, in all, 661 years. The
invasion must, therefore, have taken place about 2346 B.C.,
or about the time when the Elamite power was at its highest.
The advent of the XVIth dynasty would fall about 2062 B.C.,
and the commencement of the war of independence between 1730
and 1720 B.C.