The biblical figure of Joseph presents one of the most captivating narratives in the Hebrew Bible. Genesis 37-50 recounts the intricate story of Joseph, portrayed as the favored son of Jacob, whose envious brothers sell him into slavery in Egypt. He rises to prominence, gains Pharaoh's favor, and ultimately saves Egypt during a famine. Eventually, Joseph allows his entire household to settle in the region of Goshen.
But are these action-packed stories from Genesis credible? Is there any independent historical evidence that Joseph ever existed?
Christianity is built upon certain historical events, so discussions about Scripture’s historical truthfulness are constant. Regarding Genesis, such discussions revolve around several issues, including the flood and patriarchal narratives. People want to know, “Did a global flood actually happen?
Like other patriarchal narratives, Joseph’s story seems impossible to pin down historically. What if instead of looking for the historical Joseph, we examine our sources for the broader historical period in which the biblical story could have been set?
In the rock-cut tombs of Beni Hassan, a breathtaking scene captures a moment from the distant past, a caravan of Semitic travellers - men, women, children, and animals - journeys into Egypt. Painted around 1900 BC, during the time of Joseph, these figures stand out vividly against the darker-skinned Egyptians surrounding them. One man even carries a hand-held lyre, reminiscent of the instrument David played before the Ark of the Covenant.
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Let's delve into the historical realities associated with the Joseph narrative, in conjunction with a larger project investigating the general historical trustworthiness of the Old Testament.
The Historical Context
In 2006, Kenneth Kitchen studied the historical realities associated with the Joseph narrative in conjunction with a larger project investigating the general historical trustworthiness of the Old Testament. One of the realities reflected in the Joseph narrative is the general flow of Semitic people in and out of Egypt during the Middle Kingdom. Kitchen emphasized that this movement is reflected in Genesis, with the migrations of the patriarchs and their households.
Archaeologically, evidence from Tell ed-Daba-site of the ancient city of Avaris, in the Nile River Delta region-shows a sustained increase in the Semitic population throughout the Middle Kingdom. This entire discussion is indebted to archaeology. Perhaps, then, questions about the history behind the Joseph narrative can gain clarity as we combine Bible study and archaeological research.
These two independent areas of study converge in broad and narrow ways-and we see this in the Joseph narrative. The general plot in Genesis 37-50 broadly reflects the historical relationship between Egyptians and Semitic groups during the Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period. Yet specific details in the biblical text show narrow points of convergence with Egyptian history and culture.
The motif of dreams/dream-interpretation contributes to a strong story-like narrative. The plot begins by showing Joseph as a dreamer; this leads him into trouble as, out of envy, his brothers sell him into slavery. The next two instances of dream interpretation establish his reputation as a great interpreter of dreams; first, he begins in a low place, interpreting the dreams of prisoners. Then Joseph is summoned to interpret the dreams of Pharaoh himself. Impressed with Joseph's interpretations, Pharaoh appoints him as second-in-command (Gen 41:41).
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The Hyksos were an elite class of Semitic rulers who had migrated to Egypt from the region east of the Mediterranean Sea (modern-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria). They eventually ruled as pharaohs during the Second Intermediate Period, but they were violently expelled by Pharaoh Ahmose in the middle of the 1500s BC. But before the Hyksos ruled Egypt, there were Semites functioning as slaves at all levels of Egyptian society.
In the midrash, the selling of Joseph was part of God's divine plan for him to save his tribes. A midrash asked, How many times was Joseph sold? In analyzing Genesis Chapter 37, there are five different Hebrew names used to describe five different groups of people involved in the transaction of selling Joseph, according to Rabbi Judah and Rav Huna. The first group identified, are Joseph's brothers when Judah brings up the idea of selling Joseph in verses 26 and 27. The first mention of Ishmaelites (Yishma'elîm) is in verse 25. Then the Hebrew phrase ʼnāshîm midyanîm sōĥrîm in verse 28 describes Midianite traders. A fourth group in verse 36 is named in Hebrew as m‘danîm that is properly identified as Medanites. After identifying the Hebrew names, Rabbi Judah claims that Joseph was sold four times: First his brothers sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites (Yishma'elîm), then the Ishmaelites sold him to the Midianite t...
Joseph was sold into slavery for 20 shekels (Gen. 37:28). Moreover, Joseph eventually rises from a modest position “in the house of his Egyptian master” (beveith adonaiw hammitsri; Gen. 39:2) to the overseer of his master’s house (hiphqid otho beveitho; Gen. 39:4). Most interestingly, Kitchen draws attention to the details of Joseph’s final promotion ceremony (Gen. 41:42-43).
Hallote points to the fact that from the early second millennium B.C.E. people from Canaan were infiltrating the northeastern regions of Egypt. “In the period known as the Second Intermediate Period [c. 1750-1550 B.C.E.], Canaanites who had been living in the region had expanded and taken over much of the eastern Nile Delta, essentially conquering Egypt from within.
Building on archaeological evidence from the eastern Nile Delta, Hallote affirms that the Hyksos were Canaanites. So should we see in the Hyksos the proto-Hebrews of the Bible?
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The biblical storyline does, indeed, align with the Egyptian sources for the Hyksos: people originating in Canaan come to Egypt, gain in prominence, and finally leave for Canaan, being pursued by the Egyptian army.
According to Manetho, a group called the Hyksos came from Canaan, overran Egypt, were driven out, went back to Canaan, and ultimately settled in Jerusalem. Later, the pharaoh named Amenophis, who wanted to come face to face with the gods, was told by his counselor that only if Egypt was cleansed of lepers would he be able to see the gods.
Amenophis collected all the lepers in Egypt together and settled them in a remote city, Avaris, which had previously been the Hyksos’s capital. The lepers rebelled against Amenophis and appointed a leper priest called Osarseph as their leader. Osarseph had previously served at the temple of the sun god (the biblical “On”) in Heliopolis, and he gave the lepers a new religion that was hostile to the Egyptian religion. When the lepers were attacked, Osarseph sent messengers abroad to conscript a militia. He approached the Hyksos in Jerusalem, and they arrived in thousands from Canaan to help Osarseph and the lepers, at which point Osarseph changed his name to Moses. Together, the lepers and the Jerusalemites formed a military power that took over Egypt, looted the Egyptian temples, profaned the idols, and slaughtered and ate the sacred animals. Amenophis fled Egypt and went to Ethiopia.
Years later, Amenophis left Ethiopia with a huge army and returned to Egypt. We have here a story of an ethnic group in Egypt that threatened the indigenous Egyptian religion and objected to the worship of Egyptian idols and sacred animals.
Here, too, is a scenario whereby an enemy from within joins forces with an enemy from without. Römer concludes from these literary affinities that the writer of the exodus narrative borrowed these plotlines from Manetho.
The story of the exodus from Egypt is very complex and may be taken two ways. On the one hand, it is the story of a group of miserable slaves coerced into forced building labor in Egypt. A charismatic leader called Moses emerges, and under his leadership the slaves manage to escape from Egypt: “And it was told to the king of Egypt that the people had fled” (Exod. 14:5).
On the other hand, we are told that the Israelites are driven out of Egypt because of the Egyptians’ fear of them: “because they were driven out of Egypt” (Exod. 12:39). Also, contrary to the notion that the Israelites were very downtrodden, other verses describe them as leaving Egypt with great wealth: God lends the people favor in Egyptian eyes, and the Egyptians give them gold and silver vessels (Exod. 11:2-3; 12:35-36).
There is even a verse reading, “and the people of Israel went up armed out of the land of Egypt” (Exod. 13:18); literally, they were armed soldiers, the precise inversion of a downtrodden people. According to these verses, then, the exodus included a military element: armed Israelite soldiers and foreign mercenaries who came from abroad to help them.
I think one can point precisely to the time when these events took place, based both on the biblical story and the Manetho tradition. We have to go back to the story of the Egyptian prime minister Bay-Joseph and the child pharaoh Siptah, whom Bay puts on the throne.
The widow queen Tausert, Seti II’s daughter by Merneptah’s widow, was active at that time. She ascended the throne after Seti’s death and became the sole ruler of Egypt. Her reign only lasted two or three years, (ca. 1190-1188 BCE), and then something mysterious happened, something wonderfully puzzling. This dynasty came to an end, and a new dynasty arose, the twentieth, established by Setnakhte, Ramses III’s father, who was later to fight the Philistines and other seafaring nations.
We have two Egyptian documents on the subject: one is a huge papyrus, the largest in existence today. It is about 40 meters long and is called the “Great Harris Papyrus.” One part of the puzzle is written on this papyrus, and the other part is to be found on a monument set up by Setnakhte in the city of Yeb, or Elephantine, the same city where many years later Jewish Israelite soldiers lived under Persian rule. The Harris Papyrus tells of a neglected Egypt, lacking a single ruler. Each region had a local officer or king, and they quarreled and murdered each other. There is also mention of “empty years,” which could perhaps be a reference to the famine. Then it says that someone took over the throne. The word used on the papyrus is “irsu,” which can mean “someone who made himself,” or it could be a given name. Since we are not familiar with the name “Irsu,” either in Egypt or elsewhere in the region, I favor the first option. This would mean that the text is about someone who appointed himself as a ruler, meaning he was not worthy to inherit the throne of the pharaohs and took power by improper means. It also says he was “haru,” meaning he came from Syria, Canaan, or Transjordan, all of which are called “Haru.” So a person of Syrian or Canaanite origin appoints himself as a prince, as a ruler. He levies taxes on the entire country.
The papyrus goes on to tell of a turning point when the Egyptian gods took pity on the land and restored the son born of them to power. That was Setnakhte, founder of the twentieth dynasty. He restored order throughout the country, executed the evildoers, and cleansed the great throne of Egypt. In other words, following Tausert’s death, a “Haru”-a Canaanite, Syrian, or Transjordanian-came and took over Egyptian rule. He brought with him a large group of followers who objected to the Egyptian gods and their rituals. He and his followers took over the country for a time and exploited it economically.
This document was not written at the time of the events described in it but only several decades later, toward the end of the reign of Ramses III, Setnakhte’s successor.
I mentioned another document we have, however, which was written soon after the battle for power in Egypt. This second document is a monument discovered in Yabe, on the island of Elephantine, and dated to the second year of Setnakhte’s reign. There it is written that Setnakhte cleansed Egypt of those who had led her in a mistaken direction, who had defrauded her. His enemies were seized with fear and “fled like swallows fleeing the hawk,” leaving behind the silver and gold that Setnakhte’s enemies gave to the Asians they wanted to bring in as reinforcements, as allies. This plan of bringing mercenaries paid with Egyptian silver and gold failed, and Setnakhte drove them all out of Egypt.
If I were to conflate what is written in these two Egyptian sources, the following story of the end of the nineteenth dynasty and the beginning of the twentieth emerges. Tausert died around 1188 BCE, and her death was followed by two years of internal conflict in Egypt, because she did not have any living offspring and therefore no clear heir. Then someone of Canaanite or Syrian origin took over rule in Egypt. This man despised Egyptian rituals and prohibited offerings to the Egyptian gods. He imported allies from Asia-from somewhere in Syria, Lebanon, or Canaan-whom he paid with silver and gold.
Thus, we have three groups of different kinds of sources. We have Manetho, whose story is preserved in Josephus, we have the biblical book of Exodus, and we have Egyptian documents from the twelfth century BCE. I would argue that the same basic story recurs in all three: A group within Egypt that despises Egyptian ritual brings in reinforcements from abroad, from the region of Canaan and Syria. They come to Egypt and join the local group, but the pharaoh, who remains faithful to the old Egyptian religion, manages to defeat them and drive them out of the country. There is also mention of silver and gold given to the foreigners by Egyptian citizens.
I am not the first to see the analogy between these ancient Egyptian sources and the Bible, particularly between the mention of silver and gold on the Yabe monument and the biblical story about the gold and silver vessels the Egyptians gave the Israelites on the eve of their exodus (Exod. 11:2; 12:35). But scholars who have studied this matter in the past thought that the foreigner who took over Egypt and against whom Setnakhte fought was Bay. Today we know that Bay was executed by Siptah earlier on, so I claim that this struggle for power in Egypt, occurring several years after the deaths of Bay and Siptah, cannot have anything to do with Bay-Joseph but is actually about another figure-namely, Moses.
My claim is that the exodus from Egypt occurred in a specific year: 1186 BCE, which was the second year of Pharaoh Setnakhte’s reign.
In summary, I believe the Israelites came to Egypt during the great famine, which began at the end of Ramses II’s reign, around 1225 BCE. They left at the beginning of Setnakhte’s reign, around 1186 BCE. This is a span of about 40 years.
If we recall that Moses is described as “a very great man in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 11:3), we now understand that this verse describes Moses’s historical status. The name Moses-Mases is a bona fide Egyptian name, but as is written on the Harris Papyrus, he was Haru, i.e., from Canaan or Syria. As I understand it, Moses’s parents belonged to the Jacob-el group from Edom, who came to Egypt during the famine. In my opinion, he was raised and educated, at least for a time, at the Egyptian royal court, under the protection of Tausert. When Tausert died, he saw himself as the appropriate person to take over the court and ascend the throne of the pharaohs. To do this, he conscripted his people, the Jacob-el group, who were living, enslaved, in Egypt, and then later he brought in reinforcements from abroad, that same “erev,” or mercenary army, we have discussed-a foreign legion mentioned on the monument at Elephantine and in Manetho, each in its own way.
There followed a struggle for power between opposing forces in Egypt. Moses and his men lost, were expelled from Egypt, and left for Canaan.
Archaeological Evidence
In the Bible’s Land of Goshen, where Joseph settled his family (Genesis 46:28-34), archaeologists have unearthed the sprawling remains of Avaris, a Semitic city that once thrived in the Nile Delta. Remarkably, Avaris and the nearby city of Ramesses lie in the very region the Bible identifies as Goshen.
In the ancient soil of Goshen, beneath the ruins of Avaris, archaeologists unearthed a tantalising mystery: a tomb of a Semitic man, marked by a shattered statue of a figure in a vibrant, multicoloured coat - a garment echoing the biblical tale of Joseph. Unlike typical plundered graves, this tomb was eerily empty, its bones removed, defying the habits of ancient tomb raiders. Could this be the long-lost resting place of Joseph, the Hebrew vizier whose bones, were carried away during the Exodus?
According to ancient Egyptian records, around 1550 BC, Pharaoh Ahmose I expelled the Hyksos from Avaris, casting them out in a mass exodus that mirrors the biblical departure of the Israelites. Could these Hyksos be the Hebrew slaves of the Bible? The similarities are striking: a Semitic people, settled in Goshen, powerful yet ultimately subjugated.
This brutal reality of slavery comes to life in the tomb of Rekhmire, a vizier in ancient Thebes, dating to the 15th century BC. Here, vivid paintings depict Semitic men, identified as ‘captives,’ toiling under the watchful eyes of Egyptian overseers. One scene shows a Semitic man shaping bricks, while an inscription declares, ‘The rod is in my hand, be not idle.’ The echo of this command resounds in the Bible, where the Israelites are beaten for idleness and failing to meet brick-making quotas (Exodus 5:14).
As we see in Rekhmire’s tomb, ancient Egyptians used distinct colours in their wall paintings to differentiate various groups, reflecting cultural and regional identities rather than modern racial categories. For instance, they often depicted Semitic Asiatic people with yellow skin, Egyptians with reddish-brown tones, Nubians with darker hues, and Libyans with lighter skin and tattoos. These artistic conventions were symbolic, tied to geographic origins and cultural distinctions, not a systematic racial hierarchy as some interpret today.
The Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut (1489-1469 BC) provides additional context on the exodus and disruption caused by the Hyksos. I have restored that which had been ruined. Her inscription, recorded about the Hyksos’ expulsion, reveals Egyptian disdain for these ‘Asiatics,’ a sentiment that mirrors the pharaoh’s fear in Exodus 1:10 that the Israelites might align with Egypt’s enemies.
While some scholars dismiss the connection between the Hyksos and the Israelites, the evidence resonates deeply. The Hyksos’ Semitic origins, their settlement in Goshen, the timing of their arrival, and the artefacts unearthed at Avaris align closely with the biblical account of Joseph and his family. These discoveries are therefore more than archaeological curiosities - they are a bridge between faith and history.
The painted travellers of Beni Hassan, with their multicoloured coats, evoke Joseph’s arrival in Egypt. The Semitic city of Avaris, with its Israelite-style homes, the Semtic tomb and royal seals bearing biblical names, aligns with the rise of Jacob’s family. The brick-making slaves in Rekhmire’s tomb, beaten for idleness, reflect the Israelites’ oppression.
Not all scholars connect Joseph with the reign of the Hyksos. Prior to Kitchen’s research, Charles Aling argued that the Joseph narrative should be understood against the background of an earlier dynastic period, around 1991-1783 BC. The description of Potipher as an Egyptian (Gen 39:1) makes little sense in a time when the Hyksos ruled Egypt, Aling says. Moreover, Joseph follows Egyptian customs when meeting Pharaoh, and he takes an Egyptian wife (Gen 41:14, 45). Aling also highlights other details, like climatological studies assessing water levels of the Nile River and administrative evidence that may suggest under which Pharaoh Joseph served and who his successor was. But most interestingly Ailing notes a massive burial site at Tell ed-Daba.
The convergence of history and literature
At the same time, the literary sophistication of this narrative is incontrovertible. Thus, the Joseph account can legitimately lay claim to both history and literature. It’s a masterful work fueled by both historical reality and literary elegance.
Joseph overseeing the gathering of grain during the seven years of plenty (Genesis 41:47-48). Dating to about 1275, this mosaic appears in a cupola in the atrium of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Interestingly, the artist made Joseph’s granaries to look like pyramids.
These action-packed stories from Genesis are credible. There is independent historical evidence that Joseph ever existed.
This gold-mounted, steatite scarab of the Hykosos king Khyan dates from c. 1620-1581 B.C.E.
A golden diadem featuring heads of gazelles and a stag with alternating rosettes mixes Egyptian and Levantine artistic traditions. It attests to the power and grandeur of the Hyksos kings.
Bible Story: Joseph's Rise in Egypt #shorts
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