Egyptian abominations and scholarly speculations

By Shmuli Phillips and Daniel Abraham

Parashat Vayigash features scenes of both confrontation and reconciliation between Yosef and his brothers. The warm sentiments of goodwill towards the Hebrews however, are insufficient for them to find full favour in the eyes of their Egyptian hosts. Just as we read earlier how Yosef dined apart from his brothers since “the Egyptians could not eat with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to the Egyptians”, the brothers are now advised to settle separately from the Egyptians in the land of Goshen “since all shepherds are abominable to the Egyptians”.

But what was the cause of the Egyptians’ whole-hearted hostility towards the Hebrews? In an article published on theTorah.com, Rabbi Zev Farber and Prof. Jan Assmann claim to have unravelled the deep biblical mystery of Egyptian abominations.

According to Farber, the account of Egyptians refusing to dine alongside Hebrews is not predicated upon any ancient Egyptian practice, since historically “no record exists of any such taboo”. Rather it must have been adapted from a far later Persian-era Puritanical Code and anachronistically superimposed back onto the biblical text by its authors.

The methodological weakness of constructing such a speculative edifice on the flimsy foundations of an absence of evidence in ancient Egyptian records cannot be overstated. Biblical scholar, Kenneth Kitchen, was of the view that that "99 percent of all New Kingdom papyri are irrevocably lost”. Sir Alan Gardiner, a respected scholar of Ancient Egypt, went so far as to say that: 

“It must never be forgotten that we are dealing with a civilization thousands of years old and one of which only tiny remnants have survived. What is proudly advertised as Egyptian history is merely a collection of rags and tatters”.

In this instance, however, we do possess some evidence, with the Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt describing how at banquets “seating varied according to social status, with those of the highest status sitting on chairs, those slightly lower sat on stools and those lowest in rank sat on the raw floor”. It does not require a great leap of the imagination to suggest that disdained foreigners would not have been expected to dine at the table of the Egyptian Viceroy.

It should be noted that sharing of meals holds highly significant symbolic importance throughout the Torah. It demonstrated political, strategic or religious coalescence such as when pacts were formed between Yitzchak and Avimelech, Ya’akov and Lavan, Yosef’s brothers after casting him into the pit, and when Yitro joined the Jewish people in the desert (among other examples). If the Egyptians had dined together with Hebrews, this would have been an indication of shared ideological beliefs or political accord. Yet religiously and culturally, the Egyptians and Hebrews were worlds apart. A gulf attested to in a later statement of Moshe to Pharaoh significantly using the same word ‘’to’eivah’’ as the Torah employs to explain why Yosef and his brothers could not eat together:

"But Moses said [to Pharaoh], "It is improper to do that, for we will sacrifice the abomination/deity of the Egyptians to God our Lord. Will we sacrifice the abomination/deity of the Egyptians before their eyes, and they will not stone us?"

Is it readily apparent that the biblical reference to ‘’abomination’’ between Egyptians and Hebrews revolves around the religious status of the sheep which the Jews were set to sacrifice in Egypt in order to demonstrate their newfound religious and political freedom. For Egyptians, sheep enjoyed a position of great importance in their pagan pantheon – a fact that Farber and Assmann have themselves expounded upon elsewhere.

The ram-headed God Amun held pole position in the Egyptian pantheon for most of the New Kingdom, and together with Osiris, Amun-Ra is the most widely recorded of the Egyptian gods. Openly and publicly sacrificing the Paschal Lamb on Egyptian soil was an embodiment of Hebrew rejection of the pagan belief system, and an important stepping-stone on the path to monotheistic faith for which the nation was being prepared. Understood this way, sacrificing the lamb completed and complemented the Ten Plagues which went before it – which have been seen by scholars such as Professor Tom Meyer as representing a systematic dismissal of ancient Egyptian deities.

Relating the תועבת מצרים (abomination of Egypt) of the brothers’ sheep-exploiting occupation and תועבה היא למצרים (abomination to Egypt) regarding their eating arrangements to the תועבת מצרים (abomination/deity of Egypt) in the context of the Paschal Lamb offers a far more convincing and comprehensive explanation of the passage. An explanation which is thematically and linguistically consistent with other biblical passages, and which highlights why it is specifically the brothers’ occupation as shepherds – i.e. custodians of sheep – which is so offensive to the Egyptians. Further, it dispenses with the need for speculative historical somersaults and hypotheses about later biblical authorship. This in contrast to Farber’s far-fetched formulation, which supposes that Herodotus’s account, many centuries later, of ritual sensitivities related to cows can be seamlessly super-imposed on the biblical narrative of Hebrew shepherds.

First posted on Facebook 23 December 2020, here.