Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/543



broadly the three kinds of material which have been laid under contribution. (1) The element of tribal history or relationships, though slight and secondary, is clearly recognisable, and supplies a key which may be used with caution to explain some outstanding features of the narrative. That there was an ancient tribe named Joseph, afterwards subdivided into Ephraim and Manasseh, is an item of Hebrew tradition whose authenticity there seems no good reason to question (see p. 533); and the prestige and prowess of this tribe are doubtless reflected in the distinguished position held by Joseph as the hero of the story. Again, actual tribal relations are represented by the close kinship and strong affection between Joseph and Benjamin; and by the preference of Ephraim before Manasseh, and the elevation of both to the status of adopted sons of Jacob. The birthright and leadership of Reuben in E implies a hegemony of that tribe in very early times, just as the similar position accorded to Judah in J reflects the circumstances of a later age. These are perhaps all the features that can safely be interpreted of real tribal relations. Whether there was a migration of the tribe of Joseph to Egypt, whether this was followed by a temporary settlement of all the other tribes on the border of the Delta, etc., are questions which this history does not enable us to answer; and attempts to find a historical significance in the details of the narrative (such as the sleeved tunic of Joseph, the enmity of his brethren, his wandering from Hebron to Shechem and thence to Dothan, the deliverance of Joseph by Reuben or Judah, and so on) are an abuse of the ethnographic principle of interpretation.—For (2) alongside of this there is an element of individual biography, which may very well preserve a reminiscence of actual events. There must have been current in ancient Israel a tradition of some powerful Hebrew minister in Egypt, who was the means of saving the country from the horrors of famine, and who used his power to remodel the land-system of Egypt to the advantage of the crown. That such a tradition should be true in essentials is by no means improbable. There were 'Hebrews' in Palestine as early as the 14th cent. (p. 218), and that one of these should have been kidnapped and sold as a boy into slavery in Egypt, and afterwards have risen to the office of viceroy, is in accordance with many parallels referred to in the monuments (p. 469); while his promoting the immigration of his kinsfolk under stress of famine is an incident as likely to be real as invented. The figure of Yanḫamu, the Semitic minister of Amenhotep IV. (pp. 501 f.), presents a partial counterpart to that of Joseph, though the identification of the two personages rests on too slender data to be plausible. The insoluble difficulty is to discover the point where this personal history passes into the stream of Israelite national tradition,—or where Joseph ceases to be an individual and becomes a tribe. The common view that he was the actual progenitor of the tribe afterwards known by his name is on many grounds incredible; and the theory that he was the leader of a body of Hebrew immigrants into Egypt does violence to the most distinctive features of the representation. Steuernagel's suggestion (Einw. 67), that the story is based on feuds between the tribe Joseph and the other tribes, in the course of which individual Josephides were sold as slaves to Egypt,