Thread by @JoelBaden

#Genesis 41:53-57

The famine comes

There seem to be two subtly different things going on here. One is the explicit fulfillment of Joseph’s dream interpretation: the arrival of the seven years of famine, for which he and Egypt have been preparing.

So we get notices here about the Egyptians being hungry, and about Pharaoh directing them to Joseph, all of which make sense in that framework. But interspersed with that is something else: that there’s a famine everywhere in the world, not just in Egypt.

That in itself wouldn’t be so strange - famine in one place, why not everywhere - but the way it’s presented is weird. First, it doesn’t say that *the* famine was everywhere, as we might expect, since we know about this famine pretty well already. Just “there was a famine.”

It also says that while there was famine everywhere, Egypt had food. Which is true - Joseph stored it - but that doesn’t really seem like what’s being said here. It’s more like Egypt was just better stocked (the abundance of Egypt is a common biblical theme).

And look at 41:57, where all the rest of the world comes to Egypt for food. Many translations read “came to Joseph in Egypt,” but it really says “came to Egypt, to Joseph.” That’s a little weird, syntactically. It looks like Joseph was tacked on there.

Which I think makes sense, because I think Joseph is in charge of a coming famine in one story, and in the other doesn’t yet have that responsibility (at least not to the reader’s knowledge). Jacob, when he sends his sons, doesn’t know he’s sending them to Joseph. Just to Egypt.

(Moreover, if we look ahead a tiny bit, at 42:6, we’ll see the clear introduction of Joseph’s role as distributor of food.)

Without getting into the nitty gritty specifics, I think these two narrative tracks are useful. In one, Joseph has predicted and planned for an Egyptian famine, and that’s all that is. That’s the E concept.

In the other, there’s famine everywhere, forcing people to come to Egypt, where (as it turns out) Joseph just happens to be in charge of selling grain. This is J, as is the vast majority of what follows, with Jacob’s sons going to Egypt, and payback for their sale of Joseph.