Joseph’s story
The granary scheme in the Biblical story of Joseph illustrates how the elites can profit from crises and use them to drain all wealth from common people.
Joseph’s granaries
This was my initial discovery, the one that set me on the path to becoming a researcher of ancient punnery & spookery.
Joseph’s story is overall a very touching tale about dreams, escaping from captivity, and a family reconciliation theme. Most plotlines are derived from words that somehow pun with Joseph.
There may be many pun-encrypted hidden meanings, but one contradiction sticks out very obviously even in the official text: Joseph sets up granaries in Egypt to guard against famine. These granaries are then superficially presented as saving the common people. But the description rather details how he simply taxes grain away, and later resells it to the same people he taxed it from, taking away as payment all their money, livestock, lands, ultimately even buying the people themselves as debt-slaves, in return for giving them back their own grain which was taxed & hoarded before.
This story element is unusual in that the deception occurs in the literal text! If you compare this to all the other texts I’ve analyzed, then you’ll see that the nasty message is usually encrypted, while the literal text is about some harmless thing. Not so here. Apparently, debt-slavery and land-grabbing during famines was so common, that the Biblical authors & audiences thought it was okay to have the hero in a religious text do this. Generally though, we cannot expect to learn spooky secrets from the plain text. They’re usually encrypted.
Note: The Hebrew word used for debt-thralldom here is עבדים abadim, translated in varous Bible versions as “slaves”, “servants”, “bondage”. The message is clearly one of debt-slavery though: At the end of the famine, the central government owns almost all lands, and the common people have become serfs who owe a fifth of the yield they harvest to the government.
So he gathered all the food of these seven years which occurred in the land of Egypt and placed the food in the cities; he placed in every city the food from its own surrounding fields.
Now there was no food in all the land, because the famine was very severe, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished because of the famine.
Joseph gathered all the money that was found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan for the grain which they bought, and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house.
When the money was all spent in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came to Joseph and said, “Give us food, for why should we die in your presence? For our money is gone.”
Then Joseph said, “Give up your livestock, and I will give you food for your livestock, since your money is gone.”
When that year was ended, they came to him the next year and said to him, “We will not hide from my lord that our money is all spent, and the cattle are my lord’s. There is nothing left for my lord except our bodies and our lands.
“Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for food, and we and our land will be slaves to Pharaoh. So give us seed, that we may live and not die, and that the land may not be desolate.”
So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, for every Egyptian sold his field, because the famine was severe upon them. Thus the land became Pharaoh’s.
Then Joseph said to the people, “Behold, I have today bought you and your land for Pharaoh; now, here is seed for you, and you may sow the land.
So they said, “You have saved our lives! Let us find favor in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh’s slaves.”
Implications
Since all of Joseph’s story elements are puns with his name, this one is also a “storytelling” pun, which means the story probably didn’t happen as narrated. I personally view this as just a story, i.e. the first granaries probably weren’t really invented by a foreigner named Joseph when Egypt was already a major established empire. Still, that they used it as an element gives a rare insight into how crises & debt worked in ancient times. Granaries, famines, tithing, land-grabs, debt-slavery may however have worked in this or a similar fashion.
Unlike most other parables about trickery by the elites, this one is not even encrypted, but is the official story. So the central question is this: Why was this included in the Bible? To commoners, losing everything they had just to buy back grain that was tithed away from them must seem mightily unfair. To elites such as governors and creditors however, this part of Joseph’s story may appear as a useful recipe on how to profit from crises. My conclusions is therefore that it was these elites who either created or edited our Bible so that the granary scheme was included. This means that these profiteering schemes were commonplace in ancient times, known even to audiences, so that the authors had no qualms using it for Joseph’s story.
More hints to finance
This seems to be the only example where the self-enrichment of the elites via financial means is officially promoted in the Bible. In virtually all other instances, usury and debt-slavery are portrayed as negative, though sometimes as divine punishment.
But on closer inspection, there seem to be a lot of hidden financial puns. These hint at the fact that it was hidden financial elites who either created or hijacked & edited many Biblical storylines.
Particularly in Joseph’s story, the land-grab & debt-enslavement theme seems to be no coincidence. Best evidence for that is the fact that Joseph’s name also means “debt” or “credit”.
More evidence are the names of his sons Manasseh & Ephraim, which also mean “credit”.
Even the geographic setting may be a parable: Note that only Egypt & Canaan are affected, but no other countries are mentioned. Why? It could be a pun: The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitsraim, which also means “slaves”. And Canaan means, among other things, “subjects”. So to the spooks, story of Joseph visiting Egypt & Canaan may not be a story about famine in some country, but a parable on how “debt” can help overlords to loot their own “slaves” & “subjects”.
We may therefore conclude that finance was extremely important in Biblical times already, and that the Bible was compiled & edited by elites who profited from it.