10 Nissan 5782 | April 11, 2022
929
Rabba Aliza Libman Baronofsky
Class of 2022
Joseph’s visionary leadership created the economic conditions that enabled his descendants’ slavery, we discover in chapter 47.
It appears that during the years of surplus, Joseph amassed great wealth on behalf of Pharaoh (Gen. 41:47-49). Pharaoh owns all of the stored grain, so Joseph sells it to the Egyptian people during the famine. The people – formerly farmers – need money to buy it. Without crops of their own to sell, their situation becomes more desperate over the course of the famine.
When the Egyptian farmers run out of money, they sell their livestock to Pharaoh in exchange for food. The following year, the Egyptians have no livestock and must sell their land to Pharaoh in exchange for food. Put another way, Pharaoh gains control of the means of production in the entire land of Egypt. (A notable exception are the Egyptian priests, who get a designated amount of food and don’t need to sell their land.) Now the ordinary Egyptians continue to work their own land in exchange for a set percentage of its crops.
Before enslaving the Jewish people, Pharaoh – at the hands of Joseph – enslaves, in a manner of speaking the Egyptian people. Do the ordinary Egyptians come to know Joseph is a Jew? Do they come to resent him taking from them their independence? Do they resent the more independent Jewish shepherds residing in neighboring Goshen? The text does not tell us. But a servile population and a centralized economic system help us understand how, when the time came, Pharaoh is able to, in a few short steps, first enslave and then begin to murder the fledgling Jewish nation.
