Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 02:1 (Winter 1956)
Article: A Recently Published Egyptian Papyrus And Its Bearing On The Joseph Story.
Author: Kenneth A. Kitchen

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TynBul 2:1 (1956) p. 1

A Recently Published Egyptian Papyrus And Its Bearing On The Joseph Story.

K. A. Kitchen

An important Egyptian hieratic papyrus has been published recently in America. The contents of the papyrus and the specialist nature of the book make it worth while to outline here the value of this new material for Old Testament background.

This document is Papyrus Brooklyn 35. 1446, excellently published by W. C. Hayes, A Papyrus of the Late Middle Kingdom in the Brooklyn Museum 1955. It is part of the Register of Criminals of the Great Prison at Thebes, current for years 10 to 31 of the l2th Dynasty Pharaoh Amenemhat III about 1833-1812 B.C. Some sixty years later, in Dynasty XIII, the reverse of the outdated Register was utilised for a list of seventy-nine servants in a large Egyptian household, forty-five of these being Asiatics, mainly Semites—apparently sold into Egypt as Joseph was to be. The Register was in use only about a century before Joseph (ca. 1700 B.C. onward), and the list was made only 40 years or so before his time. We thus have new background material for Joseph’s enslavement and imprisonment in Egypt.

In Egypt no law-codes like those of a Lipit-Ishtar or a Hammurabi of Mesopotamia have yet been found, although we know they once existed; and the hepu niu khenret, “Laws of the Prison” are mentioned in one text at least. Only examples of ‘law applied’ in the form of actual wills, depositions, etc., and some supplementary edicts of King Haremhab (ca. 1320 B.C.) have as yet come to light. The new papyrus makes possible reference to five clauses of definitive law.

In Dynasties XII--XIII (Middle Kingdom) and XVIII (New Kingdom), the Egyptian Prison system is known only from hints in inscriptions of officials and in papyri, especially now the Brooklyn document. Hayes (pp. 37-40) has surveyed concisely and well our present knowledge in this field. Besides being a criminal ‘lock-up’, an Egyptian prison was also a labour camp for peasants on state corvées, escape from which service constituted a criminal offence. In the prisons, Egyptian criminal records (like Brooklyn Papyrus) were maintained. A “Criminal Register in the Great Prison” is mentioned in a text of the famous Dynasty XVIII Vizier Rekhmire. The “Great Prison” (khenret weret) was at Thebes; others may have been located at Memphis and Heliopolis, and every large town probably had its local prison. One was at Re-hone (modern Lahun) near the XII--XIII Dynasty capital of Itjet-tawi; perhaps, like Joseph’s prison, it received court offenders. Joseph was evidently confined in such a place at the capital where the Court was held in his day, most likely at Memphis.

Various grades of prison staff are attested. At their head was a ‘Direc...

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