Re-examining Righteous Joseph

This post is part of my Anarchist Bible series - see the introduction and list of posts.

I grew up hearing that there were two characters in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) who were entirely righteous characters without flaws, unlike most characters who were much more of a mixed bag or downright evil. These two heroes were Daniel and Joseph, both exiles became significant figures in foreign royal courts.

However, I’ve been wondering for years if we're getting that right about Joseph. As I continue working through scriptures in this series, it’s time to dig into those questions again.

I particularly want to focus on a later portion in Genesis 47:13-26.

As you read it, is it familiar to you? Does it fit with any picture you have in your mind of Joseph? What do you think the author thinks of Joseph’s actions here?

The story as you might know it

Most of the story of Joseph has already occurred by this point. Born into the family God has been working in and relating to throughout the book of Genesis, he's the favorite child of his father Jacob and one of the youngest, has dreams of ruling over his family, is sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, rises to power in a household, is accused and imprisoned, rises to power in the prison, and gets noticed by Pharaoh through interpretation of dreams. He interprets Pharaoh's dream to mean a famine is coming, suggests an administrator be put in place over all Egypt to collect and store food in preparation, and is himself appointed by Pharaoh to the position. In chapter 41 he has total authority in Egypt, marries into the family of the priests of Egypt, systematically taxes grain and stores it up in extreme abundance during the years of plenty, and sells that grain back to Egyptians and people of many nations when the famine arrives.

When we come to chapter 47, we see the details of Joseph’s provision of food to the people of Egypt. The famine is so severe and food so desperately needed that all Egypt (except the priests) sell their livestock, land, and very selves to Joseph and the Pharaoh in exchange for food.

Joseph's prophecy and planning does, in fact, lead to many lives being saved and can be read as an instrument of God’s action to save those lives.

Within the confines of the imagination of the state and of capitalism, that makes Joseph an uncomplicated hero. People needed the food, so of course they needed to purchase it, and Joseph managed those realities. There is no better possibility in this imagination than what Joseph did - giving them a “good deal” where they can still live on the land as tenant-farmers, and performing well for his Pharaoh-boss, and his kingdom-company as an excellent middle manager. Joseph's actions here are justified as both a good manager for state and capital and an instrument of God’s provision.

But let’s take a step deeper.

I have three questions. Why was there a famine? Was Joseph’s solution the only option? What were its consequences of this solution?

Why was there a famine?

First, is it possible that Joseph’s solution itself was the cause of the famine? Chapter 41 tells us that Joseph “amassed grain like the sand of the sea. There was so much that he stopped trying to measure it because it was beyond measuring.” There are a few intriguing possibilities here. Did this extensive taxation of grain (which is also the seed for production of more grain) harm the ability of the people to keep producing and therefore led to famine? Or, was the abundance result of overproduction in anticipation of famine which drained the land of its nutrients and led to famine? Because the need during the famine was in other lands as well, these seem like they probably don't fit the logic of the text itself, but they are interesting possibilities to consider as part of our imagining of historical events to which this later literary text may refer.

However, I also wonder, could each individual household or community have gathered and stored their own grain, keeping ownership of it, rather than Joseph using the authority of the state to do it and claiming ownership of those stockpiles for Pharaoh? There would have been no famine if these communities each had ownership of their own stockpiled grain to draw upon in the lean years. It was the centralized state's coercive theft of the grain that removed it from local ownership and created the problem where those communities had to come to Joseph begging for grain.

Was this the only solution?

Second, even if we grant the assumption that Joseph needed to use the power of the state to make sure grain was saved up, was Joseph's solution at that point the only solution? The capitalist mind says “Yes, of course. Joseph owned the supply and people had the demand, so they buy it from Joseph who owns the supply and use whatever resources they have in order to do that.”

But Joseph could have just given out the grain to those who needed it! The text does not even indicate he bought it from the people in the first place. He used his insider information, coerced resources from them through taxation when those resources had a low value, and then sold it back to them once disaster struck and they desperately needed it. Growing up, it seemed like the point of this part of the text was to present Joseph as an example of intelligent management. Formed by the lens of capitalism as a child, it is understandable I read it that way, but it's not heroism we see here, it’s exploitation!

The state enriches the rich

Meanwhile, Joseph has married into the priestly class of Egypt through his wife, and the priests are subsidized by the state, supported by taxation of the people, and because of this they do not have to sell off their resources and freedom to be sustained. This solution was right there being practiced for Joseph’s own in-laws and social class, but not extended beyond these elites.

Naomi Klein outlines how this dynamic functions in our own time in her book, The Shock Doctrine. She outlines how political leaders consistently practice “disaster capitalism” where they use disasters as opportunities to push policies that would not otherwise be accepted, and these policies favor wealthy elites at the expense of the general population. From the famines of ancient Egypt to the wars and hurricanes of the 20th and 21st century to the corporate bailouts of recent economic crises, when disaster strikes, the state acts and the rich end up richer. Elites capturing and using the tools of the state for their own gain is a tale as old as states themselves.

Joseph, middle manager of empire

Third, what were some of the consequences of Joseph’s solution? Joseph becomes the ultimate capitalist, selling off his resources to meet demand and receiving not only people's income, but their underlying capital - livestock, land, and their very bodies. The people refer to themselves as “corpses", reflecting their deep alienation from their land, labor, and bodies, and Joseph seems to have no hesitation about taking everything they have in exchange for basic food they need to survive.

Genesis reports “He moved the people to the cities from one end of Egypt to the other.” We see forced migration and urbanization, with Joseph displacing people from local agriculture and their longstanding connections to the land. This action pairs with the rest of Joseph’s actions to sever the connections between people and small, locally owned farms, to enable state ownership of essential resources, and to reinforces dependence upon Pharaoh. We see Joseph here demonstrating elements of the failures of mass central planning of authoritarian communist governments like Stalin’s USSR, and the state-backed displacements of colonizing and totalitarian governments throughout history even to today.

Joseph uses this situation to centralize power in Egypt in the royal authority of the Pharaoh. Pharaoh goes from a less powerful ruler in a less centralized Egypt to the absolute owner of and authority over all land and bodies in Egypt, able to force migrations and enslave at will. All of Egypt becomes Pharaoh’s enslaved tenant farmers or urban laborers, the engine for great imperial constructions and exponentially growing royal wealth.

The beast can't be tamed

Joseph seeks to partner with centralized power to benefit his family, bringing them to Egypt and settling them on the best land. However, centralizing power to control and use it eventually backfires, as it always does. Coercive power may be tempt with the promise it can be wielded towards good ends, but it always corrupts and destroys in the end.

Pharaoh becomes the all-powerful ruler we see in the later Book of Exodus, and Joseph’s interventions give the Egyptian monarchy the power and precedent needed to enslave Joseph’s own people, Israel, in the years to come. That is the opening background of the sequel to Genesis. The Book of Exodus begins with a later Pharaoh enslaving Israel entirely after Joseph is dead and buried, and they labor in slavery under the centralized authority of an all-powerful Pharaoh for centuries.

Joseph’s actions create Israel’s enslavement in Egypt.

God vs. Joseph

The primary action of God in the Torah (first five books of the Hebrew bible) is to undo what Joseph sets in motion here by rescuing Israel and all the slaves of Egypt and humbling this all-powerful ruler atop the hierarchy of Egypt. The primary dream of Israel pictured as the ideal throughout Torah is freedom in their own land, with each family having locally controlled land to tend, stability, and equality, with no king. This is the hope most clearly painted in the picture of the Jubilee year in Leviticus. And it is this picture which Jesus himself points back to and says that he is bringing into fulfillment in his own ministry when he proclaims “the year of the Lord’s favor” hundreds of years later.

The work of Jesus and all that God does in biblical history directly challenges and seeks to reverse the centralizing and enslaving work of Joseph here. Joseph embodies elements of both exploitative capitalism and authoritarian communism, and especially the partnership of state and capital together to benefit elites. God’s ongoing challenge to both of them, I think, fits with the values of anarchism that challenges both, as I've outlined elsewhere.

Middle manager, class traitor, daddy issues?

Finally, I want to consider briefly the character of Joseph as presented in Genesis and why he may have ended up making the decisions he did. Within the mess of his father Jacob's mixed family of sons from four different women, it seems security, approval, and stability were fragile and scarce. For multiple generations now, each successive generation was torn apart by rivalries for the approval and material wealth of the parent generation. Amid this, Joseph loses his mother Rachel at a young age, and Jacob's favoritism towards her transfers to her son Joseph. Favor from authority figures plays a central role throughout Joseph’s life. In each setting he finds himself in, he dutifully serves authority, gaining favor and power, but he is never shown actually using that power for the good of those of his own class (brothers, servants, prisoners, workers). Instead, he dedicates himself, whether explicitly in the text or implicitly in the reader seeing his rise to power, to being a successful middle manager who puts the good of his authority figure first.

Though he repeatedly comes from the margins in each scenario, he looks out for the hierarchy rather than his own class. He personally benefits and advances, but the fruit of his labor accrues to the powerful elites he serves. He embodies those who seek individual gain, are filled with ambition, and put personal advancement and company profit over class solidarity, over and over again. He’s repeatedly traumatized by those with power, but again and again he is drawn back to serve those in authority, prop up their hierarchies, and assimilate to their values (see his self-presentation as part of the Egyptian court so he was unrecognizable to family, intermarriage with the Egyptian elite, and adoption of Egyptian religious practice with his divination cup).

Joseph is a sympathetic character marginalized by empire and victimized by power, and his actions are understandable as a string of survival strategies. However, I believe his story illustrates how survival strategies of pursuing safety, security, and approval through individual achievement according to the standards of empire, successfully “attaining the Egyptian dream”, and seeking to get control of the tools of the master have deep collective consequences when they are pursued by those experiencing oppression.

In contrast, another Israelite, Moses, becomes a powerful prince of Egypt, stands in solidarity with his oppressed people, and uses his position and skills towards liberation. I think Moses is intentionally written as a mirror image and reversal of Joseph.

In the same way, rather than a foreshadowing archetype for Jesus as a righteous savior, Joseph is instead a mirror and negation of Jesus - like Adam before him, a picture of what not to do and an instigator of the evil situation which Jesus comes to reverse.

The Word in Black and Red

I do want to shout out the podcast The Word in Black and Red, as they have extensive discussion on the stories of Joseph, with people from a variety of perspectives. I've been thinking on these stories for a while, and I found some of my own ideas echoed there as I listened but also a variety of new and thoughtful perspectives I'd not encountered, some of which is reflected above, including the reference to The Shock Doctrine.

Photo by Michael Förtsch on Unsplash