Genesis 47:13-26 And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very sore… The significance of the transaction is obvious; it brought men back to first principles; made them feel, in a very practical way, their absolute dependence on God, and on that one man through whom God was pleased to deal with them. But what are we to think about its morality? Was Joseph right in buying men? The following considerations, are, to my own mind, satisfactory. 1. Joseph was acting under Divine guidance in an extraordinary emergency. It was not his own wisdom that foresaw the plenty and the famine, and which devised the plan he was raised up to carry out. It was God who gave him the message to Pharaoh, and it was God more than Pharaoh who exalted him to absolute power. 2. It is unreasonable to impute mean motives or cruelty to a man whose character, before this time and after it, was so singularly noble and good. 3. The people themselves proposed this arrangement, and they accepted it with gratitude. "And they said, Thou hast saved our lives: let us find grace in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh's servants." 4. Left to themselves, where would they have been? Even supposing that every farmer from the cataracts to the seaboard had been as fully persuaded that famine was coming as men generally are that they must soon die, yet greed and the craving for present indulgence would have got the better of their prudence during the years of plenty; and long before the fourth year of continuous famine, Egypt would have become one grave. As it was, Joseph saved their lives, and saved them also from the utter moral ruin into which years of indolent pauperism would have sunk them. "As for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt, even to the other end." I understand this to mean, not that Joseph transported the population of the Delta to the vicinity of the Cataracts, and vice versa, but that he brought them in from the fields, where they could do nothing, and provided them some form of work in the towns. The fact is recorded to the honour of Joseph. When our own government has had to deal with famine, it has exhausted its ingenuity in making work for the relieved. "So far, then, is Joseph's plan of selling instead of giving the corn to the people, from being a matter of reprehension, that we ought to be astonished at a course of proceeding which anticipated the discoveries of the nineteenth century after Christ, and at the strength of mind which enabled the minister of the Egyptian crown to forego the vulgar popularity which profuse but unreasonable bounty can always secure." 5. The arrangement, as described by the sacred narrative, was a highly beneficent one. The record is very brief and subordinate, but its meaning becomes sufficiently clear on candid examination. (A. M. Symington, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very sore, so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine. |
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