blogging Genesis chapters 45-47+
We
think of the children of Israel’s time in Egypt as a centuries long period of
oppression and enslavement, but it didn’t start that way. Originally, the Jews didn’t come to Egypt as
slaves. They came as honored guests of the king and prime minster.
Joseph
said to his brothers: So now it was not
you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord
of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt. . . You
shall dwell in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near to me, you and your
children, your children’s children, your flocks and your herds, and all that
you have. There I will provide for you, lest you and your household, and all
that you have, come to poverty; for there are still five years of famine.” ’
(Genesis 45: 8-11)
When Israel was a family,
they moved to Goshen, on Egypt’s eastern frontier, to survive the 5 years of
famine yet to come. In Goshen, Joseph their
brother and the prime minister of the Egyptian empire, protected and provided
for them. Joseph set up their time so
that after the economy began to turn around, 1 or 2 good years of harvest
should have been enough fo finance their return to their own land in Canaan. They should have gone home after 6 -8 years.
Now the sojourn of the children of
Israel who lived in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years (Exodus 12:40).
How does 6-8 years turn
into 430 years?
Exodus
1: 7 says that at first, the
children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, multiplied and grew
exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them.
How did the family of
the 2nd most powerful man in the country go from a rich and
prosperous clan to a community of slaves? How did the honored family of the man
who saved Egypt become slaves in the land that honored them?
The usual way:
1)
THE COMMUNITY GOT COMFORTABLE
2)
THE NATION FORGOT
The people were enslaved because THE
COMMUNITY GOT COMFORTABLE as dependents.
Genesis
46: 5 Then Pharaoh spoke to Joseph,
saying, “. . . 6 . . .
Have your father and brothers dwell in the best of the land; let them dwell in the land of Goshen.
The
Egyptian government gave them a place to stay for free.
And
if you know any competent men among them, then make them chief herdsmen over my
livestock.”
The
Egyptian government guaranteed them employment through jobs set aside just for
them.
. . . 11 And Joseph situated his father and his brothers, and gave them a possession
in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land of Rameses, as
Pharaoh had commanded. 12 Then
Joseph provided his father, his brothers, and all his father’s household with
bread, according to the number in their families.
The Egyptian government gave them allotments of food based on need and household size.
Sooooo, in the 7 year great depression of Genesis, the children of Israel got Section 8, Affirmative Action, and Food Stamps.
It
was a good plan. It was a GODLY plan.
And God sent me before you to
preserve a posterity for you in the earth, and to save your lives by a great
deliverance (Genesis 45:7)
The
Lord had positioned Joseph specifically to provide welfare to his refugee
family.
If
Joseph had not established these special programs, everybody would have starved
to death. In the book of Genesis, a system of high taxation, government price
controlled commodities, and welfare saved the nation of Egypt AND the line of
the covenant through which the Messiah would be born.
It
was a prophetically appropriate idea.
But
it was only supposed to be TEMPORARY.
They had a chance to return to Canaan when they buried Father Israel (Genesis
50:12-14). But they didn’t stay in Canaan. Joseph said: Now therefore,
do not be afraid; I will provide for you
and your little ones.” And he comforted
them and spoke kindly to them (Genesis 50: 21).
They
stayed in Goshen and got comfortable with Joseph (the Egyptian government)
providing for them.
Later,
Joseph’s will stipulated that the family return with his remains to their
ancestral home in Canaan. Instead, they
embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt (Genesis 50: 20-21).
In
Goshen, the Hebrews became more and more dependent on other people. They even got to a point where the Hebrews relied
on Egyptian midwives to birth their children.
And
for a long while it worked. The children of Israel were fruitful and
increased abundantly, multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was
filled with them.
They
got COMFORTABLE.
They
got comfortable relying on the federal government to make Southern legislatures
give them civil rights. They didn’t
nurture leaders and pass policies to ensure home rule and a strong voice in their
own state governments.
They
got COMFORTABLE. They relied on schools to provide services to their students
and they stopped making their kids read at home . . .
They
got comfortable and assumed that no one would ever cut their stamps, no one
would privatize housing and urban development, no one would close the WHOLE
steel mill.
A
free, powerful, and independent people becomes broken, afraid, and oppressed
when they get comfortable and live like
temporary assistance is permanent.
 |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap |
Because
the Hebrew community was so comfortable in Goshen, they were caught off guard
when the social winds shifted and the national sentiment turned amnesiac and
hostile.
2) The people became slaves when:
THE NATION FORGOT their true history.
But
then there arose a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph --- or Frederick Douglas or Martin Luther
King, Jr. And by “knew not” what we mean
is “didn’t care.”
They
deliberately “forgot” about Black Wall Streets in places like Wilmington, North
Carolina; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Richmond, Virginia where freed slaves and their
children built prosperous communities, several of which were such powerful
engines of economic development that they were called Black Wall Streets.
The
nation forgot that in the first few years after emancipation, 21 African Americans
served in the U.S. Congress, more than 600 more were elected to state
legislatures, and hundreds more held local political offices across the
South. Louisiana elected a Black
lieutenant governor, and a Black man named P.B.S. Pinchback was briefly governor
of Louisiana while the incumbent governor was impeached.
The
South changed in the wake of the early 19th century race riots. For example, on November 10, 1898, after the local
coalition of Black and White Republicans won control of city government In
Wilmington, North Carolina, a mob of 2,000 armed White Supremacists from the
Democratic Party attacked the only black newspaper in the state, killed dozens
of Black residents. Burned black and
bi-racial businesses and homes. They
literally ran Republican politicians out of the state, and many more Blacks
fled in fear, leaving behind the homes, businesses, and belongings that had
survived.
The
federal government refused to intervene, and Democratic party officials, all
linked to the Ku Klux Klan organized a series of race riots across the
South. The era of Jim Crow began in
force. At least 4,000 African-Americans
were lynched in that era.
After
Democratic presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson supported Civil Rights
legislation in the 60’s, segregationist White southerners switched to the
Republican party. And that’s how we got
to where we are.
African-Americans
didn’t go straight from being slaves to being broke. We were
fruitful and increased abundantly, multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty; and
the land was filled with our elected officials and our businesses and our
institutions.
America
forgot all that and more.
 |
| Add captionhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MERUO2enRME |
The
ruling parties perpetuated a narrative of alternative facts in which
Confederates were patriots, Negroes were lazy, Africa had no culture before
Europeans invaded, and Black communities had never been prosperous.
 |
| Add captionhttps://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0519/Texas-textbook-war-Slavery-or-Atlantic-triangular-trade |
The
solutions are complex and mostly unpleasant, but the principles on which those
solutions are built are fairly straightforward. The nation at large is at
fault, AND so is our own community.
We
need to:
1) Tell Pharaoh who Joseph was.
Remind
America of all the history we have conveniently forgotten.
2) Leave Goshen.
Economically,
socially, and spiritually the African-American community must move beyond the
boxes of dependence into which we have been painted by all political
parties.
If
we do neither or if we do the one and leave the other undone, 120 years from
now we’ll be marching again over today’s problems.
--Anderson T. Graves II is
a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural
leadership development.
Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in
Fairfield, Alabama. He writes a blog called A
Word to the Wise at www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com
Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
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