I will always answer according to faith Alex. So yes, by the gift of faith I’m Christian. By reason I’m atheist.
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Now I’m intrigued by the Joseph story. Rodion is one of my most favorite story characters. If Joseph is in his league I should read it.
Interesting. I’d say I’m an atheist because of the way the concept of God gets elaborated. I nonetheless have faith in a fundamental mystery which animates my experience which I hold in high regard.
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Dostoevsky is my favorite writer. I read absolutely all of his works, some of them several times
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The Bible is literature. That just means that the narratives are finely crafted works of art using language. It was created by talented composers and editors who were trying to make something beautiful and transcendent.
Literature can be fictional or historical. Historical works can be more or less objective and accurate. Historical works, especially ancient ones, can mix in legends or myths or other not quite factual embellishments. I think Joseph is a historical figure. I don’t think this can be “proven” one way or the other. How much of the literary narrative in the Bible is raw fact and how much is embellished to make a great story is something we can’t know for sure. I do think that the narrators main intention was not to record objective historical facts. I think their intention was to communicate overarching truths about how God interacts with people and how he sees his people Israel.
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The BBC puts an interesting light on the historicity of the Joseph narrative. The question one has to ask oneself is what truth value one wants to attribute to anything one hears, sees or reads, and why.
Indeed.
The (obsolete) BBC kids article says ‘There is no record of who built the canal, but for thousands of years it has only been known by one name. In Arabic it’s the Bahr Yusef.’.
For a moment my yearning soared.
I’d like a source on that claim. Arabic hasn’t been spoken in those parts for thousands of years yet, it’s got another six hundred to go. Until the C7th Coptic Egyptian and Koine Greek was spoken, the Greek was replaced by Arabic for the next three centuries in a patois. It will be during this time that the name Bahr Yusef arose, post hoc.
Note the italics below indicating exaggeration and fallacy by the BBC (teaching kids isn’t their main remit) - at least they archived this 12 years ago.
The Bahr Yussef (Arabic: بحر يوسف; “the waterway of Joseph”[1]) is a canal which connects the Nile River with Fayyum in Egypt.
In ancient times it was called Tomis (Ancient Greek: Τωμις) by the Greeks which was derived from its Egyptian name Tm.t “ending canal” and was still in use after the Arab conquest, translated into Arabic as al-Manhi (Arabic: المنهى).[2] It was also known as “the Great canal” (Ancient Greek: διῶρυξ Μεγάλη) or “the canal of Moeris”.[3] The modern Arabic name refers to the prophet Yusuf, the Quranic counterpart of the Biblical Joseph.[2]
In prehistoric times, the canal was a natural offshoot of the Nile which created a lake to the west during high floods. Beginning with the 12th dynasty, the waterway was enlarged and the Fayyum was developed to enlarge Lake Moeris. The canal was built into the natural incline of the valley, creating a channel 15 km long and 5 m deep that sloped into the Fayyum depression. The canal was controlled by the Ha-Uar Dam, which was actually two dams that regulated the flow into the lake and out of the Nile. As the surrounding area changed at about 230 BC, the Bahr Yussef eventually became neglected, leaving most of Lake Moeris to dry up creating the depression that exists today and the modern province of Al Fayyum.
The Bahr Yussef still exists today, feeding water northwards into the Birket Qarun, parallel with the Nile.
The C7th Muslim Arab conquerors of Egypt knew the story of Joseph and fallaciously applied it to the Ending Canal - as it was known for the thousands of years prior. Nothing in Egyptian (which is not Arab of course) and Greek history for 2500 years mentions Joseph.
The historicity of famine isn’t significant in the light of that.
thanks for that Wikipedia link, making me dig a bit more into the subject. The ice core is an independent way of obtaining a reference date for the great famine. It will be interesting to see how this effects the timelines of the ancient Egyptian history and claims like Joseph and Imhotep refer to the same person. Are they likely to refer to the same starvation period or were there several? The article about the ice core makes an interreting read on the climate change
You’re welcome marvin. The trouble with the ice core data being correlated with the 7 years famine of Egyptian and Jewish legend is what else is in the ice core data. How many other famines? The Imhotep=Joseph trope is an old one, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail: ’ The Upper Egyptian Famine Stela, which dates from the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BCE), bears an inscription containing a legend about a famine lasting seven years during the reign of Djoser. Imhotep is credited with having been instrumental in ending it. One of his priests explained the connection between the god Khnum and the rise of the Nile to the Pharaoh, who then had a dream in which the Nile god spoke to him, promising to end the drought.'.
Did God have to do all this to ensure a milieu in which to incarnate?
???
The question was if it happened or if it is fake reality and if it changes the value you associate with other historic events. Does the presence of absence of king Arthur change the truth value of the presence or absence of Queen Elisabeth the first or second? Did it change history?
I am intrigued that you think that Imhotep is credited by you with ending the famine. I thought he was credited with helping to survive it and ensuring the economic prosperity of the dynasty - and the survival of many tribes, not only his own as a consequence of it.
What is your hammer and nail analogy about.
Not credited by me marvin. That’s wiki.
And my question is what it is: can you only have a Jesus if you have a Joseph 1900 years before? And a Moses 430 years after that?
Hammer: the Bible is as literal as possible when it comes to personalities, at least; its historiography is inerrant, supernaturally recorded and preserved to timeless standards, Joseph is therefore an historical person, he dreamt the famine; where is he and that in history? Ah ha! Look! He’s even in the Antarctic ice. Nail.
Still do not understand why he “dreamt the famine” as the famine was real. Did someone see the famine coming and fathom the consequences of it, thus initiated the building of grain stores?
Clearly the famine is not legend, as in a made up story, but reality. It should allow is to adjust historic timelines a bit like the bomb as it clearly changed the world at the time and is a good lesson about the impact of climate change, only that the next transition might not be as “peaceful”
If you look for what the bible describes as a poetic description of reality to make it accessible to the illiterate does not mean that you are a biblical fundamentalist, and to imply that of other is not helpful apart from brushing up ones ego.
Too many nails: ‘…investigations have shown that a seven-year famine was a motif common to nearly all cultures of the Near East: a Mesopotamian legend also speaks of a seven-year-famine and in the well known Gilgamesh-Epos [late second millennium BC, set over a thousand years before] the god Anu gives a prophecy about a famine for seven years. Another Egyptian tale about a long-lasting drought appears in the so-called “Book of the Temple”, translated by German Demotist Joachim Friedrich Quack. The ancient text reports about king Neferkasokar (late 2nd dynasty [2740 BCE, the time of Imhotep. Not Joseph or even Abraham.]), who faces a seven-year-famine during his reign.’.
Clearly famine is normal. Climate change is normal on a larger scale. Myths and legends about them abound.
Only a projecting egotist could be threatened by this.
I wonder about Joseph’s true legacy. We tend to look at him as a hero but given his role in enslaving Egypt I wonder if that plus the failure of his brothers and him to return to Canaan led to 400 years of slavery for Israel, as foretold by God.
Genesis 47
14 Joseph collected all the money that was to be found in Egypt and Canaan in payment for the grain they were buying, and he brought it to Pharaoh’s palace…
… “We cannot hide from our lord the fact that since our money is gone and our livestock belongs to you, there is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and our land… The land became Pharaoh’s, 21 and Joseph reduced the people to servitude,[c] from one end of Egypt to the other.
On the other hand, God can use our failures and sin to demonstrate his sovereignty, mercy, grace and love.
There could well be historic truth behind the story of Joseph and the discourse was relevant to the question on why one would want to reject the truth claim of a story opposed to the necessity of the truth claim of the story.
to feel threatened by Joseph to be or not to be goes either way. you seem to be in the to be camp.
I found it intriguing that the sea level rise submerging the Australian reefs was still in the oral hi-story telling of the aborigines.
So to help @Altair along with the interpretation of Joseph, to a materialist the importance of the story lies in the ancestory value, to a philosopher it lies in the philosophical content of the story. So it depends how one defines oneself.
Regarding the influence of a person across time boundaries you only need to read a book of someone long dead and see what happens to see how you can interact across time boundaries.
If there could well be historical truth behind the Joseph story, how could that possibly threaten me?
Of course it would have to be the kind of truth that doesn’t break the historical surface, leave any kind of a wake, so what kind of historical truth could that be? As for Abraham, Jacob (Isaac doesn’t really count does he?) and Moses. The truth would be many orders of magnitude less than the fantastical claims. None of which could possibly be historically true. p=0
so what makes you so certain that there is no historical truth in the stories of Abraham, Jacob and Moses
Once the fantastical is removed from the oral thousand year tradition, concretized, gelled by 500 BCE, including literally absurd, poetic lifespans, what’s left? A possible c2000 BCE Sumerian migration to Canaan with forays in to Egypt going hand in hand with the evolution to monotheism by 1500 BCE. I’m happy to give tradition credence in the names that survived. But none of the self-serving fantasy which has nothing to do with God in Christ.
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