by GARY LEUPP
I confess: I don’t believe in the biblical story of Joseph. Quite aside from the fanciful notion that Joseph built the pyramids for grain storage (as alleged by Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson), I don’t believe in the Bible character himself—any more than I believe in Prometheus, Rama or the Yellow Emperor of Chinese mythology.
You perhaps recall the story. But I should not assume that, of course. (I am struck by how unfamiliar most of my students, at a highly competitive New England university, are with the Bible. This is in part because they come from all over the world, including countries where the Bible has minimal cultural impact. But even those born and raised in the U.S., and perhaps identifying as Christians or Jews, often seem lacking in a basic knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments.)
So to review the tale: according to the Book of Genesis, Joseph was a great-grandson of Abraham, who had been called by God out of the Land of Ur on the Euphrates (in what is now southern Iraq )to Hebron on the West Bank of the Jordan River where his tomb is supposedly located.
He is of course the patriarch revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike as in some way their religious ancestor, who had walked and talked with God, and to whose descendants, according to the Bible, God had promised the Holy Land forever. (Many people, including perhaps most Christians, assume that today’s Jews are Abraham’s biological descendents.)
Abraham died, the Bible tells us, at age 175, leaving the birthright to the land to his son Isaac. Isaac, who died at age 180, was succeeded by his son Jacob (also known as Israel) who had 12 sons, among them this Joseph. Jacob is supposed to have passed away at age 147.
(I mention these numbers simply to underline the implausibility of the whole account. Archeologists studying ancient Egyptian skeletons have found that the life expectancy in the region around the time these biblical figures are supposed to have lived was 33 years for men, 29 for women. Believers who convince themselves that the extraordinary life-spans attributed to early biblical figures—Adam is supposed to have died at age 930, Methuselah at 969, Noah at 950—simply show that “people lived longer way back then” are just not aware of, or not interested in, the objective study of history or prehistory. They live in a fantasy world.)
Joseph, the eleventh son, is favored by Jacob above his siblings and given the famous “coat of many colors” (Genesis 37:3). He has dreams in which his older brothers all bow down to him (and he rather foolishly relates these dreams to his brothers). Jealous, they set out to murder him. But they reconsider at the last minute and instead sell him to a caravan of Ishmaelite slavers bound for Egypt.
(These slavers according to the Bible were descendents of Ishmael, another son of Abraham, by the Egyptian slave girl Hagar, thus a half-brother of their grandfather Isaac. Many view as the “father” of the Arabs in the same way as Isaac is the ancestor of the Jews. This is pure folklore, but does convey the truth that both Jews and Arabs are Semitic peoples, along with the ancient Akkadians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Moabites, Edomites, Nabateans, etc.
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Carson’s “Personal Theory” about the Pyramids
So let us examine Carson’s comments on Joseph in Egypt, and at his understanding of the (real) function of the Egyptian pyramids.
At a 1998 Commencement speech at Andrews University, (“the flagship educational institution of the Seventh-day Adventist Church”), Dr. Carson touched on this issue. (You can find the talk on Youtube.)
“My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids in order to store grain. Now all the archeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But you know, it would have to be something awfully big [when] you stop and think about it. I don’t think it would just disappear over the course of time, to store that much grain. And when you look at the way the pyramids are made, with many chambers that are hermetically sealed, that would have to be that way for a reason and you know, various scientists have said well you know there were alien beings that came down they had special knowledge and that’s how they were…[sentence ends inconclusively]… You know doesn’t require an alien being when
God is with you.”
Seventeen years later he repeated this to CBSN this month, explaining, “you wouldn’t need hermetically sealed compartments for a sepulcher; you would need that if you were trying to store grain over a long period of time.”
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Some perspective, concerning objective reality: the great pyramids of Egypt were (as I understand it) constructed between the 27th century BCE (that of Zoser) to the 16th century BCE (that of Ahmose I). The Bible story of Joseph is set around 1600 BCE, after the heyday of pyramid construction. To broadcast a “personal theory” about the pyramids as grain silos constructed from the mythical Joseph’s time is to insult the intelligence of the audience including the likely voters. (But hasn’t that become the norm?)
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