Tremper Longman III on the literary, theological, and historical aspects of the Joseph narrative.
Now that said, I wouldn’t be quick to divorce the Joseph story from history; and indeed, some of the leading Egyptologists today, who are also conversant in Biblical studies, people like Kenneth Kitchen and Jim Hoffmeier, have studied the Joseph narrative. And of course, they have pointed out that there is no direct proof of the Joseph narrative. Nowhere is Joseph mentioned, indeed, one of the problems in situating this story in history is that the Pharaoh’s not mentioned by name. But they do point out that the details of the text comport well with Egyptian history of the approximate time period of Joseph. To give two examples, you have, as Kitchen points out very nicely, even though it’s a detail, that in Genesis, chapter 37, verse 28, Joseph is sold as a slave for 20 shekels. And of course, Kitchen has studied slave prices through the centuries; and he shows that it’s only in this to early second millennium that slaves are sold for that amount of money. And then, both Hoffmeier and Kitchen have studied the names and showed—that is the Egyptian names in the text—and have shown that they also fit well, within an Egyptian context, but even more specifically, in the early second millennium.
