A Bible Story

During the time Egypt was ruled by the Hyksos, Jacob and his twelve sons were living in the Levant, in Palestine. As the story goes Jacob loved one son, Joseph, “best of all his sons” and Jacob gave Joseph a special long tunic. His brothers were jealous of Joseph and his new tunic so one day, when they were tending their flocks, they striped Joseph of his tunic and sold Joseph as a slave to a passing caravan of traders on their way to Egypt. The bothers then tore the tunic, stained it with blood, and told their father a wild beast had devoured Joseph. Joseph’s father “mourned his son for many days”.

When the traders reached Egypt, Joseph was sold again to the Pharaoh’s chief steward. Joseph served his master well and soon was put in charge of his master’s affairs. Then one day he was falsely accused of molesting this master’s wife and thrown in to jail. In time, the chief jailer put Joseph in charge of all the prisoners including two prisoners that had been in the service of the Pharaoh. One night while in prison, the Pharaoh’s servants each had a dream. The next morning Joseph interpreted their dreams. He told them that in three days one of them would be hanged and the other would be released to again serve the Pharaoh. As it turned out, the third day was the Pharaoh’s birthday and the dreams came true. One was reinstated and the other was impaled.

Two years later the Pharaoh had two disturbing dreams. The next morning he summoned his “magicians and sages” to interpret his dreams but they could not. Then the servant that had been in jail remembered Joseph and told the Pharaoh about him. The Pharaoh summoned Joseph from the dungeon and asked him to interpret the dreams, telling him:

In my dream, I was standing on the bank of the Nile, when up from the Nile came seven cows, fat and well-formed; they grazed in the reed grass. Behind them came seven other cows, scrawny, most ill-formed and gaunt. Never have I seen such ugly specimens as these in all the land of Egypt! The gaunt, ugly cows ate up the first seven cows. But when they had consumed them, no one could tell that they had done so, because they looked as ugly as before. Then I woke up.

In another dream, I saw seven ears of grain, fat and healthy, growing on a single stalk. Behind them sprouted seven ears of grain, shriveled and thin and blasted by the east wind; and the seven thin ears swallowed up the seven healthy ears.

Genesis 41 17-24

Joseph told the Pharaoh that the dreams meant that there would be seven years of great agricultural abundance in Egypt followed by seven years of famine. He recommended that the Pharaoh appoint someone to collect and store grain during the seven good years to protect against the famine in the seven bad years. The Pharaoh was so impressed, he put Joseph “in charge of the whole land of Egypt” to do just that.

Now the importance of this story is not its happy ending for Joseph, but the words “grain...blasted by the east wind.” or in the German translation of the Hebrew word “yeraqon”, “yellowed by the east wind”. According to the authors of Famine on the Wind (G.L Carefoot and E.R Spout, 1967), the east wind refers to a weather pattern that brings cyclonic storms over the Mediterranean that bring rain and moisture to the East Coast of the Mediterranean during the winter and early spring months. This is during the time of Late Emergence and Early Drought, when the grain of Egypt would be growing and most susceptible to disease. And the disease that probably blasted or yellowed the grain was wheat rust.

Next Post: Wheat Rust?