I thought it would be interesting and educational for us, before we move on with Genesis, to discuss who the Pharaoh of the famine might have been. Moses never calls him by name, though he must have known it. Moses was raised as an Egyptian and he received the same education in Egypt as a royal prince, so he must have been very familiar with his nation's history and its kings. Yet he never tells us the name of the king of the famine who befriended Joseph, or the name of the king from whom Moses later flees for his life, or the name of the king before whom Moses will plead for the release of the Hebrew people. I can understand why Moses didn't want to give any of Egypt's evil kings the honor of having their names written in God's holy word, but he also chose not to name the man who thought so much of Joseph that he made him his second-in-command, and I think that's because Moses doesn't want to give credit to anyone but the Lord for the kindness shown to Joseph and his family during the seven year famine of Genesis.
That's fine for Moses, but I'm a curious creature and I want to know who this king was. Today we'll talk about who is a good candidate for the Pharaoh of the famine.
We were told yesterday that Joseph's family settled in the Goshen region, in the district of Rameses. Now, that doesn't mean any of the eleven Egyptian kings named Rameses was on the throne at the time. The district of Rameses will be mentioned again in Exodus, four hundred years later, when the Hebrews have been enslaved and are making bricks in that area. We can see by this that Rameses was a common name in the land. Just because the district is called Rameses doesn't mean the king of the oppression was named Rameses or that the king who will refuse to allow the Hebrews to leave was named Rameses. By the time Moses wrote Genesis and Exodus, that district of Egypt was known as the district of Rameses, but we don't know whether it was actually called that in Joseph's day. Ancient kings of Egypt had a tendency to rebuild or add to cities already in existence and then they would rename the cities for themselves, no matter who the original builder was. So although Hollywood likes to give the name of Rameses to the kings of Genesis and Exodus, it's more a matter of convenience than a matter of history.
But the word "Rameses" has a far older origin than the kings of Egypt. It's an ancient Hyksos word that means "begotten of Ra". You'll recognize the name of the sun god Ra if you've ever paid much attention to Egyptian history, but the worship of Ra did not originate with the Egyptians. It originated with the Hyksos people who conquered and inhabited a large portion of Egypt at one time. I think it's likely that the Hyksos people built the "district of Rameses" and that this district was named not to honor a king but to honor a god. Later, when the Egyptian people adopted the worship of the sun god Ra, a number of their own kings were named to honor this god. That makes sense when we consider that the native-born pharaohs of Egypt believed (or at least convinced their people to believe) that they were gods in the flesh. What better way to force people to honor and obey you than to proclaim you are the earthly incarnation of the great sun god?
Why does it matter whether the district of Rameses was named to honor the sun god of the Hyksos? Because after doing a lot of research on the subject, I've come to think there's a good possibility that Joseph's friend Pharaoh was the final Hyksos king of Egypt. I think the historical information I found online, along with the opinion of quite a few Bible scholars, supports a theory like this. The Bible itself lends support to this theory, for the Bible will tell us that after the deaths of Joseph and his family members who originally came to Egypt from Canaan, and after the death of Joseph's friend the king, "A new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt." (Exodus 1:8) This verse could also be translated as "a king of a different order, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt". I think that by the time the Hebrews begin to be oppressed in Egypt, Egyptians are once again in control of their land and an Egyptian king is on the throne. The Hyksos rule of the land is over by then and the Egyptian king has no sympathy for a nomadic shepherding tribe like the Hebrews.
Why would a Hyksos king have been sympathetic to a nomadic shepherding tribe? Because the Hyksos people were originally a Semitic nomadic shepherding tribe who grew and became powerful enough to conquer a good deal of the region. Their very name means "shepherd kings". Once they came to power in Egypt they adopted the custom of considering themselves superior to other people, but they may not have lost their sympathy for those who still maintained the shepherding way of life. The Hyksos people and the Hebrew people had the same humble beginnings, and we can see why this might have led a Hyksos king to feel compassion for them.
During the period of time when the Hyksos people were in charge of Egypt, their capital city was near Goshen. Remember when Jacob and his family arrived in the general vicinity of Goshen and Jacob sent Judah to Joseph's house for directions to Goshen while the rest of the family waited? Judah was able to get to Joseph's house and back very quickly, which makes sense if Joseph's house was in the capital city of the Hyksos kings. All the government officials, including Pharaoh himself, would have lived in the capital. This explains why it was so easy for Joseph to take his father and five of his brothers into the king's palace to meet him in yesterday's passage. I think these men had to be called away from their homestead for only a brief period of time, perhaps for only an hour or two, because they were settled so close to the capital. If Joseph and his family had been in Egypt during the reigns of any of the native-born Egyptian pharaohs, their capital city of Thebes would have been far further away from their settlement in Goshen. It is well known to historians that the Hyksos kings ruled from Lower Egypt where Goshen would have been, not from the region of Thebes like the native-born kings who ruled before the rise of the Hyksos and who ruled after the fall of the Hyksos.
For further evidence that the Hyksos people are in or have been in Egypt during the time of Genesis, we have seen that the horse and chariot are already being used. Joseph used a horse and chariot to meet his family at their homestead. Later in Genesis we will see horses being traded for grain as the famine grows more and more severe. We tend to think of chariots as Egyptian inventions but they were invented by the Hyksos people who were the first in the region to domesticate horses. It was the Hyksos who introduced both horse and chariot to the people of Egypt, not the other way around. So we see that the famine had to occur either during or after the reign of the Hyksos in Egypt or else there would be no mention of horses and chariots in Genesis. That doesn't prove, of course, that a Hyksos king was on the throne during the famine, but it certainly doesn't disprove it. It definitely proves that these people have already been in Egypt for some time, long enough for the horse and chariot to have become quite common.
Why should we care who the Pharaoh of the famine was? Although Moses doesn't honor him by mentioning his given name in the Bible, I feel we should honor the kindness he showed to the Hebrew people when they entered the land of Egypt. And I feel it matters whether or not we know why this particular king had sympathy for the Hebrews when you consider that none of the kings after him thought them worthy of being shown human decency. What's different about him? Why does he give these foreigners "the best part of the land" as he said when bequeathing it to them in yesterday's study? I think his kindness is, in part, due to his friendship with Joseph. But I think there's more to it than that. Why does he feel free to give such bountiful pasture land to a nomadic tribe without fear of stirring up any strife with the people of the land? I think it's because he is the final Hyksos king of Egypt. I think during his reign the majority of people in power are of Hyksos origin who have something in common with a shepherding tribe from Canaan. The Hyksos were a shepherding tribe themselves once. They too came from humble beginnings and rose to become a great and powerful nation. Maybe they wanted to give these struggling Hebrew people a leg up on the ladder of success by not only ensuring they don't starve to death during the famine, but by also providing them with a place where they can grow and prosper.
Didn't it seem odd that Pharaoh would take a man fresh from the dungeon and make him his second-in-command simply because he interpreted dreams by the power of the one he calls God? If Pharaoh is a Hyksos king, it makes more sense. At that time the Hyksos people recognized only one chief deity, though not the God of Abraham, but we can see why Pharaoh might have considered Joseph's God and his god one and the same when this God provided the answer to preserving the lives of everyone in Egypt. If Pharaoh is a Hyksos king, he would not have considered a Hebrew man as being all that inferior to himself, whereas a native-born Egyptian would have considered it unthinkable to have Joseph in his house, much less to give him a position of power in the land. A Hyksos king would have felt he had things in common with a shepherd from Canaan like Joseph. He wouldn't have looked down on Joseph like a native-born Egyptian would.
If the pharaoh of the famine is the final king of the Hyksos tribe, then his name is Apepi I. To me it's very exciting to think this might be the given name of the man who impulsively but wisely took Joseph out of the dungeon and placed him on a throne almost equal to his own. It's thrilling to imagine that this is the name of the man who trusted the word of Joseph's God. I like to picture Apepi and Joseph being on a first-name basis with each other. In my mind I see Joseph getting up from a desk in this king's palace after a long afternoon of going over the records of grain sales and saying, "See you tomorrow, Apepi."
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