Why Egypt?
Why did God decide to use Egypt as the “birthing room” for his new nation, the nation of Israel? Why not send Joseph and the rest of Jacob’s family to the fertile crescent (the area later known as Babylon) instead? Why not Asia (present-day Turkey) or some other location around the Aegean Sea? Or, come to think of it, why not leave Jacob’s family in Canaan and skip the whole migration-to-another-land thing? Surely God could have found other ways to provide for his chosen people during the famine than send them to Egypt!
This was one of the central questions of our recent tour of sites in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel— one that I had never before thought to ask. I had simply accepted the twists and turns of the biblical story without seriously asking the question, “Why did God choose to arrange events in that way? Come to think of it, I don’t ask that and similar questions often enough in general.
Why did the biblical authors (and God) decide that I need to know that the Haman (in the Esther story) was an “Agagite”, that there were seven basketfulls of bread left over after one of Jesus’ miraculous feedings of the crowd and that there were twelve baskets of leftovers after another, or that Jesus was buried in a cave that Joseph of Arimathea had just purchased?
Sometimes asking such questions will lead to new insights and reflections. Sometimes asking such questions will just lead to more questions. In any case, the push, from our trip’s leader, to ask such questions of the Jacob’s-family-in-Egypt story has made me resolve to try to take the text less for granted.
As for answers to the “Why Egypt?” question, I have already raised some possible answers to it (see my May 28 post). However, there may be more to the story…
