God tells Abraham that his descendants will be “sojourners in a land thatis not theirs and will be servants there…for four hundred years.” (Gen. 15:13)
About a hundred years later, Joseph is sold into slavery and rises to power, resulting in saving his family from the famine. Joseph says twice that God was responsible for this and that his motives were good. (Gen. 45: 5, 45:7, 50:20)
However, other results of Joseph’s rise to power and advice to Pharoah include:
- 20% emergency taxation of the Egyptian farmers for 7 years (Gen. 41:34-36)
- exploitation of these same farmers for the next 7 years, resulting in Pharaoh owning all the money, livestock, and land (Gen. 47:13-23)
- the 20% emergency taxation becoming a standing tax (Gen. 47:24-26)
In other words, Joseph’s counsel (at God’s direction) turned a nation of peasant farmers into a nation of sharecroppers.
One of the puzzles for me in the Exodus story has been the question of why the Egyptian population would have tolerated the long-term massacre of Hebrew boys. Even given different morals and cultural biases, the killing of baby boys is a fairly universal negative.
Reading through Genesis this time, I began to consider the lifestyle of the Egyptian population goes a long way in explaining why they, as a society, would have tollerated the enslavement of the Israelites and eventual slaughtering of the babies.
Jared Diamond, in Collapse, describes the recent killings in Rwanda as having a similar basis. Basically, the impoverished population grew so large that “those whose children went to school in bare feet killed those whose children went to school in shoes.”
From a human perspective, it’s hard to justify those results compared to feeding seventy Hebrews (Gen. 46:27), yet the Bible is clear that Joseph acted at the Spirit’s guidance “for good”.
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