Click here to read Genesis 47
I like Joseph. I want to like Joseph. We all do. He is the hero of this story, and it is a really good story.
But the untold parts of Joseph’s story are, quite frankly, really disturbing. And our ability to ignore this particular chapter (lit. Gen chapter 47) in Joseph’s history is really quite amazing.
Joseph may have been wise. He may have been put in charge of the food in Egypt according to God's plan. But what he does with the power he has is controlling, manipulative, and cruel.
The people are starving. Joseph is not distributing the food of Egypt to these starving people. He is selling it to them.
He is selling food to starving people.
When they run out of money, he takes their flocks. When they run out of flocks, he takes their land, and makes them servants. They must now pay Pharaoh for the privilege of working their own land, a flat income tax of one fifth. The government owns everything, and everyone works for the government.
Remember, the food he is selling back to them was never bought from them in the first place. It was commandeered. It cost Egypt no more than storage to take the people's grain.
Now he is selling it back to them as though they did not own it to begin with.
If this were to happen today, we would compare this person to Lenin or Stalin or Chairman Mao. This is the worst of totalitarian government control.
Worst of all, in this chapter we see Joseph set up the system of Egyptian finance and labour that has the perfect environment for slavery to begin among the people if the land.
Years later, when the Israelites are enslaved and oppressed in Egypt, they could probably trace the beginnings of the trend toward it to this time.
Awful.
This is a very good example of WHY we do NOT interpret Joseph's story as being a moral example presented to us for us to emulate.
It is not the intention of the text to teach us that we should run from temptation, as Joseph did from Potiphar's wife.
If we interpret Joseph's story this way, we must apply the same interpretation to his economic policy. If we insist that scripture is teaching us about self-control in the story if Potiphar's wife because the same lesson is elsewhere in scripture we should teach it from elsewhere in scripture.
Joseph is not a model for us to emulate. This is not a morality tale.
This is not a story to teach us about Joseph's uprightness. It is about God.
Joseph shows us that God is sovereign and that his hand is on all we do. What he promises (in this story, to Abraham), will come to pass.
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