Who was Joseph?

Pharaoh Sosestris I of dynasty 12 (~ BC) had a vizier called Mentuhotep who "appears as the alter ego of the king. When he arrived, the great personages bowed down before him at the outer door of the royal palace" [Emille Brugsch, Egypt Under the Pharaohs].

This was an unusual honor in Egypt for someone other than Pharaoh himself, but this account is absolutely consistent with the Biblical record, which claims that Joseph was a great prime minister in Egypt, second only to Pharaoh (Genesis 41:43). Statue of Mentuhotep, the Vizier under Sesostris I

Ameni, a provincial governor of Sesostris I wrote on his tomb [in the cliffs of Beni Hassan, halfway between Cairo and Luxor]: "No one was unhappy in my days, not even in the years of the famine, for I had tilled all the fields of the Nome of Mah, upto its northern and southern frontiers. Thus I prolonged the life of its inhabitants and preserved the food which it produced." This makes perfect sense if Joseph did what the Bible claims he did: oversee the collection of the bumper harvest of the 7 years of plenty and make sure people had enough food in the famine!

There is a canal from the Nile to the Faiyyum Oasis dug in the 12th dynasty called Joseph's canal, possibly dug at Joseph’s orders in preparation for the expected famine.

Or Was He Someone Else?

National Geographic, January 1995, describes a man called Imhotep who saved his country from a famine. Statue of Imhotep holding a papyrus scroll in his lap.

Imhotep was the world's first named architect who built Egypt's first pyramid, and is often recognized as the world's first doctor, priest, scribe, sage, poet, astrologer, and vizier, chief minister - to Djoser (reign 2630–2611 BC), the second king of Egypt's third dynasty.

In 1890 Charles Wilbour discovered this boulder on the island of Sahal at the Nile, telling a story of Imhotep. "On a granite boulder above the Nile's First Cataract, the formidable rapids at Aswan, a sculptor who lived much later [thus the facts are not totally accurate] chiseled out in hieroglyphs the story of how Imhotep had even saved his country from famine.

When excavations were carried out at the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, fragments of a statue of pharaoh Djoser were found. The base was inscribed with the names of Djoser and of... "Imhotep, Chancellor of the King of Lower Egypt, Chief under the King, Administrator of the Great Palace, Hereditary Lord, High Priest of Heliopolis, Imhotep the Builder, the Sculptor, the Maker of Stone Vases..."

1. The inscription begins with the great distress of the pharaoh: "I was in distress on the Great Throne..." The Bible: "And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled" GEN 41:8 2. In the inscription, the pharaoh is troubled about a famine and asks Imhotep who the god of the Nile is, so he can approach him about the drought: "... I asked him who was the Chamberlain,...Imhotep, the son of Ptah... `What is the birthplace of the Nile? Who is the god there? Who is the god?'" Imhotep answers: "I need the guidance of Him who presides over the fowling net,..." The Bible: "And Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace." Genesis 41:16 Ptah was the Egyptian god known as the "creator" of everything else, including the other gods.

By reading the following table it would appear that Imhotep and Joseph, son of Jacob, had many attributes in common - if not identical.

Test Is this a pattern that has repeated - or were the two men one and the same person?

Test

No one knows for sure but there is definitely archaeological evidence that there was a great famine in Egypt and that because of the actions of a great man, the people were saved.