The news of these striking events was carried to Pharaoh, who being pleased at Joseph's conduct, gave directions that Jacob and his family should come forthwith into Egypt—` I will give you the good of the land of Egypt, and ye shall eat the fat of the land ; regard not your stuff, for the good of all the land is yours.' The brethren departed, being well provided for—` And to his father Joseph sent ten asses laden with the good things of Egypt, and ten she asses laden with corn and bread and meat for his father by the way.' The intelligence which they bore to their father was of such a nature that Jacob's heart fainted, for he believed them not.' When, however, he had recovered from the thus naturally told effects of his surprise, the venerable patriarch said, Enough ; Joseph my son is yet alive : I will go and see him before I (lie' (xlv. 26, 28).
Accordingly Jacob and his family, to the num ber of threescore and ten souls, go down to Egypt, and by the express efforts of Joseph, are allowed to settle in the district of Goshen, where Joseph met his father : And lie fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while.' There Joseph nourished his father and his brethren, and all his father's household, with bread, according- to their families' (xlvii. 12).
Meanwhile the predicted famine was pauperising, Egypt. The inhabitants found their money ex. hausted, and their cattle and substance all gone, being parted with in order to purchase food front the public granaries, until at length they had no thing to give in return for sustenance but them selves. Buy us '—they then imploringly said to Joseph—` and our land for bread, and we and our land will be slaves unto Pharaoh." And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, so the land became Pharaoh's. The people, too, Joseph renoved to cities from one end of the borders of the land to the other encl.' Religion, however, was too strong to submit to these political and social changes, and so the priests still retained their land, being supplied with provisions out of the common store gratuitously. The land, which was previously the people's own, was now let to them on a tenancy, at the rent of one-fifth of the produce : the land of the priests being exempted.
This is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, social revolution recorded in history. Under the pressure of famine an entire nation is reduced from freedom to dependence ; *while the population, which had been apparently limited to certain dis tricts, was distributed all over the land on different spots.
At this distant period it may not be easy to understand and explain the entire conduct observed by Joseph in this crisis of the nation's fate ; but we must protest against the application to it of measures of judgment which are derived from modern notions, and the pure and lofty morality of the Gospel. If a great change was suddenly effected in the social condition of the people, we are not hastily to conclude that the change was for the worse, especially considering that a very long and grievous famine had afflicted so fertile a land as Egypt under the previously existing social con dition. And if an opportunity was taken to in
crease the royal power over the nation, it cannot be denied that the nation was saved from impend ing destruction by the foresight, wisdom, and bene volence of the Hebrew vizier.
Joseph had now to pass through the mournful scenes which attend on the death and burial of a father. Having had Jacob embalmed, and seen the rites of mourning fully observed, the faithful and affectionate son—leave being obtained of the monarch—proceeded into the land of Canaan, in order, agreeably to a promise which the patriarch had exacted, to lay the old man's bones with those of his fathers, in tbe field of Ephron the Hittite.' Having performed with long and bitter mourning Jacob's funeral rites, Joseph returned into Egypt. The last recorded act of his life forms a most be coming close. After the death of their father, his brethren, unable, like all guilty people, to forget their criminality, and characteristically finding it difficult to think that Joseph had really forgiven them, grew afraid now they were in his power, that he would take an opportunity of inflicting some punishment on them. They accordingly go into his presence, and in imploring terms and an abject manner, entreat his forgiveness. Fear not ' —this is his noble reply—` I will nourish you anct your little ones.' Joseph lived an hundred and ten years, kind and gentle in his affections to the last ; for we are told, The children of Machir, the son of Manasseh, were brought up upon Joseph's knees ' (1. 23). And so having obtained a promise from his brethren, that when the time came, as he assured them it would come, that God should visit them, and bring them unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob,' they would carry up his bones out of Egypt, Joseph at length died, and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin ' (1. 26). This promise was religiously ful filled. His descendants, after carrying the corpse about with them in their wanderings, at length put it in its final resting-place in Shechem, in a parcel of ground that Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor, which became the inheritance of the children of Joseph (Josh. xxiv. 32).
By his Egyptian wife Asenath, daughter of the high-priest of Heliopolis, Joseph had two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim (Gen. xli. 50, seq.), whom Jacob adopted (Gen. xlviii. 5), and who accord ingly took their place among tbe heads of the twelve tribes of Israel. Among other authorities the following may be consulted :—Wolfenb. _Frag ment ; Less, Geschichte der Rel. i. 267 ; J. T. Jacobi, Slimintl. Schrift. 3 thl. ; Hess, Gesch. der Patriarch. ii. 324 ; Niemeyer, Charakt. ii. 34o ; Welthist. 322; Heeren, ii.
R. B.