After Joseph takes care to settle his family far from the center of
Egyptian population he returns to his position as a supplier of food and also,
step by step, enslaves the entire Egyptian people to Pharaoh (except for the priests).
During the years of plenty, Joseph gathered the grain the Egyptian citizens
had grown through their own effort and, as far as we can tell, paid them
nothing for it. Now that famine has struck, he sells their produce back to
them. He doesn’t give it freely or charge a small fee to cover transportation
and administrative costs; rather, he charges a high price. As the only food
supplier in the region, Joseph can set prices as he sees fit. The price he sets
is high enough to drain the people’s savings within a year or two even though
Joseph knows the famine will continue another five years.
During the next stage, he provides bread in return for the people’s horses
and cattle, which are not merely valuable assets; they are essential means of
production. This rescue will make rehabilitation after the famine much more
difficult.
Another year passes and there are no more cattle. Lacking an alternative, the
Egyptians offer themselves and their lands as serfs to Pharaoh. The horrendous
conditions and their depressed state of mind are expressed in a single Hebrew word
meaning “our corpses.” Yes, the Egyptians proposed the enslavement plan. Yes, the
Egyptians thank Joseph for saving their lives, but people who refers to
themselves as “corpses” have lost any hope for a favorable outcome.
Writing about the laws of slavery and the sabbatical year as they appear in
Parashat Behar (Leviticus 25) Rabbi Illay Ofran, who is also a psychologist,
writes:
“Desire” and “consent,” it turns
out, are two very different things. In difficult and unfortunate circumstances,
a person may be forced to agree to many things that he really doesn’t want. A
world built on “agreements” can sometimes be a world in which people act in complete
contradiction to their will.
Joseph is building a world in which the Egyptians are forced to act not
according to their desires. And then he continues taking an additional step to
which they did not even consent: “And he removed the population town by town,
from one end of Egypt’s border to the other” (Genesis 47:21). In the Septuagint
(ancient Greek translation of the Bible) and the Samaritan Torah the verse
reads “He enslaved them as slaves” (the Hebrew spelling of key words in the two
versions are very similar). Professor Yair Zakowitch in “And You Shall Tell Your Son...” The Concept of the Exodus in the Bible, that this latter
version is the original, and proposes that the scribes who codified the accepted
Masoretic text intentionally changed the verse in order to take the spotlight
off of Joseph’s enslavement of the Egyptians. Even if Zakovitch is correct, I’m
not sure that the scribes accomplished their goal. The enslavement of the
Egyptians is quite clear in the text as we have it, and population transfer is
a drastic step. It rips the social fabric to shreds and characterizes the
darkest of regimes, the Soviets in our day and Sennacherib king of Assyria in
the Bible, as Rashbam noted (12th century). Moreover, the Torah states explicitly that the arrangements Joseph
made on behalf of Pharaoh (noting that he did not take anything for himself)
remained valid long into the future “to this very day.”
From my perspective, this is the most serious point. In emergency
situations, severe measures can be necessary. Sometimes their detrimental
features are obvious only after the crisis is passed. Joseph did save the
Egyptians but he did not reassess the situation when the famine was over.
All political-economic-social arrangements are subject to change. We know
from archaeological findings that Egyptian kings did occasionally “declare liberty”
– release prisoners and return debt slaves to their ancestral land – when ascending
to the throne or in honor of other occasions (remember Pharaoh’s birthday in Parashat
Vayeshev?) But Pharaoh did not do this after the famine.
Unlike the prevailing system in the Ancient Near East, the Torah does not
leave socioeconomic corrections to the whims of rulers but rather limits
slavery in advance, and establishes a fixed cycle of sabbatical and Jubilee
years.
Our world is more similar to that of Joseph than we would like to think.
There is not only poverty; there is slavery (also known as “human trafficking”).
In Israel 2020, 64 laborers have been killed by faulty enforcement of safety
laws (this is fewer than last year, because of the closures). Many people are
forced to work in poor conditions to which they consent, but do not desire. Some
of them are our neighbors and, if we are honest, we ought to admit that their
suffering lowers our cost of living.
The biblical solutions are unsuitable for modern economy but they contain
important principle. We are obligated to make an effort not only to reduce
poverty and close gaps but also to strive for a system that makes it possible
to break the cycle of poverty. We must not ignore the suffering or delay hard
questions until a more “convenient” time.
The global coronavirus crisis has caused many economic and social problems, in addition to exposing others that were previously concealed. When it is over, will we have strength and dedication necessary for an appropriate reassessment of the situation and to repair the socioeconomic distortions that have become evident?
Bibliography
Held,
Shai, “Saving and Enslaving,” in The Heart of Torah, vol. 1 (Special thanks to Rav Shai for the
prompt to think about Joseph [and many other things] in a more nuanced,
complicated way.) Click here for an online version.
Kashti, Or, “‘Modern Slavery:’ With Little
Enforcement, Israeli Trafficking in Foreign Workers Continues,” in Ha’aretz (English edition,
online: 18.12.2020, print: 20.12.2020)
Leibowitz, Yeshyahu, Faith, History and Values [Hebrew]
Levenson,
Jon, “Commentary on Genesis” in The Jewish Study Bible
Ofran,
Illay, Facebook post [Hebrew]
Picard,
Ariel, “Shmitta as a sticker,” in Deot August 2007 [Hebrew]
Tal,
Abraham and Moshe Florentin (eds.), The Pentateuch — The Samaritan
Version and the Masoretic Version [Hebrew]
Weinfeld,
Moshe, Justice and Righteous in Israel
and the Nations [Hebrew]
Zakovitch,
Yair, “And You Shall Tell Your Son...” The
Concept of the Exodus in the Bible
Zipor,
Moshe, The Septuagint Version of the
Book of Genesis
The Group for Combatting Work
Accidents in Israel
Traditional commentaries on Genesis 47:21: Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam, France, 1083–1174); Rabbi David Kimhi (Radak; France 1160–1235)
