Place · Egypt
Egypt
Shown only as a region, without an editorial point. It ruled Canaan in the Late Bronze Age and has a central place in Exodus tradition.
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Statements linked to this place
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Tradition or narrative
According to the Bible, Jacob's son Joseph was taken to Egypt as a slave and, thanks to his skill at interpreting dreams, rose to the second-highest post in the kingdom; during a famine in Canaan his father and eleven brothers moved there. His descendants, the 12 tribes, thrived until a new king enslaved them. Moses, raised in the household of the king's daughter, freed them with ten plagues, and they left, crossing the Red Sea, which God parted and closed over the Egyptians.
Egypt was real and had been in contact with Canaan since before writing: Egyptians went to Canaan as travelers, soldiers, traders and, when Canaan was under their rule, administrators; Canaanites went to Egypt as migrants, slaves and traders (the name Canaan itself may derive from 'trader'). Hieroglyphic writing and kingship arose there around the fourth millennium BCE.
The end of Egyptian control over Canaan in the twelfth century BCE was one of the decisive changes for Israel's emergence. The Bible does not recall that Canaan had been an Egyptian colony (it remembers ancestors as slaves in Egypt itself), but memory and history agree that Israel had to break free of Egypt to form an independent society. An Egyptian tale about the official Wenamun, who went to buy timber in Byblos and was told by the local ruler to leave, hints at the region's growing independence.