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Selected Verse: Genesis 47:13 - King James

Verse	Translation	Text
Ge 47:13	King James	And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very sore, so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine.

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A Commentary, Critical, Practical, and Explanatory on the Old and New Testaments, by Robert Jamieson, A.R. Fausset and David Brown [1882]
there was no bread in all the land--This probably refers to the second year of the famine (Gen 45:6) when any little stores of individuals or families were exhausted and when the people had become universally dependent on the government. At first they obtained supplies for payment. Before long money failed.

A Commentary, Critical, Practical, and Explanatory on the Old and New Testaments, by Robert Jamieson, A.R. Fausset and David Brown [1882]

there was no bread in all the land--This probably refers to the second year of the famine (Gen 45:6) when any little stores of individuals or families were exhausted and when the people had become universally dependent on the government. At first they obtained supplies for payment. Before long money failed.

Commentary on the Old Testament, by Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch [1857-78]
To make the extent of the benefit conferred by Joseph upon his family, in providing them with the necessary supplies during the years of famine, all the more apparent, a description is given of the distress into which the inhabitants of Egypt and Canaan were plunged by the continuance of the famine. Gen 47:13 The land of Egypt and the land of Canaan were exhausted with hunger. - ותּלהּ: from להה = לאה, to languish, to be exhausted, only occurring again in Pro 26:18, Hithp. in a secondary sense. Gen 47:14 All the money in both countries was paid in to Joseph for the purchase of corn, and deposited by him in Pharaoh's house, i.e., the royal treasury. Gen 47:15-17 When the money was exhausted, the Egyptians all came to Joseph with the petition: "Give us bread, why should we die before thee" (i.e., so that thou shouldst see us die, when in reality thou canst support us)? Joseph then offered to accept their cattle in payment; and they brought him near their herds, in return for which he provided them that year with bread. נהל: Piel to lead, with the secondary meaning, to care for (Psa 23:2; Isa 40:11, etc.); hence the signification here, "to maintain." Gen 47:18-19 When that year had passed (תּתּם, as in Psa 102:28, to denote the termination of the year), they came again "the second year" (i.e., after the money was gone, not the second of the seven years of famine) and said: "We cannot hide it from my lord (אדוני, a title similar to your majesty), but the money is all gone, and the cattle have come to my lord; we have nothing left to offer to my lord but our bodies and our land." אם כּי is an intensified כּי following a negation ("but," as in Gen 32:29, etc.), and is to be understood elliptically; lit., "for if," sc., we would speak openly; not "that because," for the causal signification of אם is not established. תּם with אל is constructio praegnans: "completed to my lord," i.e., completely handed over to my lord. לפני נשׁאר is the same: "left before my lord," i.e., for us to lay before, or offer to my lord. "Why should we die before thine eyes, we and our land! Buy us and our land for bread, that we may be, we and our land, servants (subject) to Pharaoh; and give seed, that we may live and not die, and the land become not desolate." In the first clause נמוּת is transferred per zeugma to the land; in the last, the word תּשׁם is used to describe the destruction of the land. The form תּשׁם is the same as תּקל in Gen 16:4. Gen 47:20-21 Thus Joseph secured the possession of the whole land to Pharaoh by purchase, and "the people he removed to cities, from one end of the land of Egypt to the other." לערים, not from one city to another, but "according to (= κατά) the cities;" so that he distributed the population of the whole land according to the cities in which the corn was housed, placing them partly in the cities themselves, and partly in the immediate neighbourhood. Gen 47:22 The lands of the priests Joseph did not buy, "for the priests had an allowance from Pharaoh, and ate their allowance, which Pharaoh gave them; therefore they sold not their lands." חק a fixed allowance of food, as in Pro 30:8; Eze 16:27. This allowance was granted by Pharaoh probably only during the years of famine; in any case it was an arrangement which ceased when the possessions of the priests sufficed for their need, since, according to Diod. Sic. i. 73, the priests provided the sacrifices and the support of both themselves and their servants from the revenue of their lands; and with this Herodotus also agrees (2, 37). Gen 47:23-27 Then Joseph said to the people: "Behold I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh; there have ye (הא only found in Eze 16:43 and Dan 2:43) seed, and sow the land; and of the produce ye shall give the fifth for Pharaoh, and four parts (ידת, as in Gen 43:34) shall belong to you for seed, and for the support of yourselves, your families and children." The people agreed to this; and the writer adds (Gen 47:26), it became a law, in existence to this day (his own time), "with regard to the land of Egypt for Pharaoh with reference to the fifth," i.e., that the fifth of the produce of the land should be paid to Pharaoh. Profane writers have given at least an indirect support to the reality of this political reform of Joseph's. Herodotus, for example (2, 109), states that king Sesostris divided the land among the Egyptians, giving every one a square piece of the same size as his hereditary possession (κλῆρον), and derived his own revenue from a yearly tax upon them. Diod. Sic. (1, 73), again, says that all the land in Egypt belonged either to the priests, to the king, or to the warriors; and Strabo (xvii. p. 787), that the farmers and traders held rateable land, so that the peasants were not landowners. On the monuments, too, the kings, priests, and warriors only are represented as having landed property (cf. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs, i. 263). The biblical account says nothing about the exemption of the warriors from taxation and their possession of land, for that was a later arrangement. According to Herod. 2, 168, every warrior had received from former kings, as an honourable payment, twelve choice fields (ἄρουραι) free from taxation, but they were taken away by the Hephaesto-priest Sethos, a contemporary of Hezekiah, when he ascended the throne (Herod. 2, 141). But when Herodotus and Diodorus Sic. attribute to Sesostris the division of the land into 36 νομοί, and the letting of these for a yearly payment; these comparatively recent accounts simply transfer the arrangement, which was actually made by Joseph, to a half-mythical king, to whom the later legends ascribed all the greater deeds and more important measures of the early Pharaohs. And so far as Joseph's arrangement itself was concerned, not only had he the good of the people and the interests of the king in view, but the people themselves accepted it as a favour, inasmuch as in a land where the produce was regularly thirty-fold, the cession of a fifth could not be an oppressive burden. And it is probable that Joseph not only turned the temporary distress to account by raising the king into the position of sole possessor of the land, with the exception of that of the priests, and bringing the people into a condition of feudal dependence upon him, but had also a still more comprehensive object in view; viz., to secure the population against the danger of starvation in case the crops should fail at any future time, not only by dividing the arable land in equal proportions among the people generally, but, as has been conjectured, by laying the foundation for a system of cultivation regulated by laws and watched over by the state, and possibly also by commencing a system of artificial irrigation by means of canals, for the purpose of conveying the fertilizing water of the Nile as uniformly as possible to all parts of the land. (An explanation of this system is given by Hengstenberg in his Dissertations, from the Correspondance d'Orient par Michaud, etc.) To mention either these or any other plans of a similar kind, did not come within the scope of the book of Genesis, which restricts itself, in accordance with its purely religious intention, to a description of the way in which, during the years of famine, Joseph proved himself to both the king and people of Egypt to be the true support of the land, so that in him Israel already became a saviour of the Gentiles. The measures taken by Joseph are thus circumstantially described, partly because the relation into which the Egyptians were brought to their visible king bore a typical resemblance to the relation in which the Israelites were placed by the Mosaic constitution to Jehovah, their God-King, since they also had to give a double tenth, i.e., the fifth of the produce of their lands, and were in reality only farmers of the soil which Jehovah had given them in Canaan for a possession, so that they could not part with their hereditary possessions in perpetuity (Lev 25:23); and partly also because Joseph's conduct exhibited in type how God entrusts His servants with the good things of this earth, in order that they may use them not only for the preservation of the lives of individuals and nations, but also for the promotion of the purposes of His kingdom. For, as is stated in conclusion in Gen 47:27, not only did Joseph preserve the lives of the Egyptians, for which they expressed their acknowledgements (Gen 47:25), but under his administration the house of Israel was able, without suffering any privations, or being brought into a relation of dependence towards Pharaoh, to dwell in the land of Goshen, to establish itself there (נאחז as in Gen 34:10), and to become fruitful and multiply.

Commentary on the Old Testament, by Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch [1857-78]

To make the extent of the benefit conferred by Joseph upon his family, in providing them with the necessary supplies during the years of famine, all the more apparent, a description is given of the distress into which the inhabitants of Egypt and Canaan were plunged by the continuance of the famine.

Gen 47:13

The land of Egypt and the land of Canaan were exhausted with hunger. - ותּלהּ: from להה = לאה, to languish, to be exhausted, only occurring again in Pro 26:18, Hithp. in a secondary sense.

Gen 47:14

All the money in both countries was paid in to Joseph for the purchase of corn, and deposited by him in Pharaoh's house, i.e., the royal treasury.

Gen 47:15-17

When the money was exhausted, the Egyptians all came to Joseph with the petition: "Give us bread, why should we die before thee" (i.e., so that thou shouldst see us die, when in reality thou canst support us)? Joseph then offered to accept their cattle in payment; and they brought him near their herds, in return for which he provided them that year with bread. נהל: Piel to lead, with the secondary meaning, to care for (Psa 23:2; Isa 40:11, etc.); hence the signification here, "to maintain."

Gen 47:18-19

When that year had passed (תּתּם, as in Psa 102:28, to denote the termination of the year), they came again "the second year" (i.e., after the money was gone, not the second of the seven years of famine) and said: "We cannot hide it from my lord (אדוני, a title similar to your majesty), but the money is all gone, and the cattle have come to my lord; we have nothing left to offer to my lord but our bodies and our land." אם כּי is an intensified כּי following a negation ("but," as in Gen 32:29, etc.), and is to be understood elliptically; lit., "for if," sc., we would speak openly; not "that because," for the causal signification of אם is not established. תּם with אל is constructio praegnans: "completed to my lord," i.e., completely handed over to my lord. לפני נשׁאר is the same: "left before my lord," i.e., for us to lay before, or offer to my lord. "Why should we die before thine eyes, we and our land! Buy us and our land for bread, that we may be, we and our land, servants (subject) to Pharaoh; and give seed, that we may live and not die, and the land become not desolate." In the first clause נמוּת is transferred per zeugma to the land; in the last, the word תּשׁם is used to describe the destruction of the land. The form תּשׁם is the same as תּקל in Gen 16:4.

Gen 47:20-21

Thus Joseph secured the possession of the whole land to Pharaoh by purchase, and "the people he removed to cities, from one end of the land of Egypt to the other." לערים, not from one city to another, but "according to (= κατά) the cities;" so that he distributed the population of the whole land according to the cities in which the corn was housed, placing them partly in the cities themselves, and partly in the immediate neighbourhood.

Gen 47:22

The lands of the priests Joseph did not buy, "for the priests had an allowance from Pharaoh, and ate their allowance, which Pharaoh gave them; therefore they sold not their lands." חק a fixed allowance of food, as in Pro 30:8; Eze 16:27. This allowance was granted by Pharaoh probably only during the years of famine; in any case it was an arrangement which ceased when the possessions of the priests sufficed for their need, since, according to Diod. Sic. i. 73, the priests provided the sacrifices and the support of both themselves and their servants from the revenue of their lands; and with this Herodotus also agrees (2, 37).

Gen 47:23-27

Then Joseph said to the people: "Behold I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh; there have ye (הא only found in Eze 16:43 and Dan 2:43) seed, and sow the land; and of the produce ye shall give the fifth for Pharaoh, and four parts (ידת, as in Gen 43:34) shall belong to you for seed, and for the support of yourselves, your families and children." The people agreed to this; and the writer adds (Gen 47:26), it became a law, in existence to this day (his own time), "with regard to the land of Egypt for Pharaoh with reference to the fifth," i.e., that the fifth of the produce of the land should be paid to Pharaoh.

Profane writers have given at least an indirect support to the reality of this political reform of Joseph's. Herodotus, for example (2, 109), states that king Sesostris divided the land among the Egyptians, giving every one a square piece of the same size as his hereditary possession (κλῆρον), and derived his own revenue from a yearly tax upon them. Diod. Sic. (1, 73), again, says that all the land in Egypt belonged either to the priests, to the king, or to the warriors; and Strabo (xvii. p. 787), that the farmers and traders held rateable land, so that the peasants were not landowners. On the monuments, too, the kings, priests, and warriors only are represented as having landed property (cf. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs, i. 263). The biblical account says nothing about the exemption of the warriors from taxation and their possession of land, for that was a later arrangement. According to Herod. 2, 168, every warrior had received from former kings, as an honourable payment, twelve choice fields (ἄρουραι) free from taxation, but they were taken away by the Hephaesto-priest Sethos, a contemporary of Hezekiah, when he ascended the throne (Herod. 2, 141). But when Herodotus and Diodorus Sic. attribute to Sesostris the division of the land into 36 νομοί, and the letting of these for a yearly payment; these comparatively recent accounts simply transfer the arrangement, which was actually made by Joseph, to a half-mythical king, to whom the later legends ascribed all the greater deeds and more important measures of the early Pharaohs. And so far as Joseph's arrangement itself was concerned, not only had he the good of the people and the interests of the king in view, but the people themselves accepted it as a favour, inasmuch as in a land where the produce was regularly thirty-fold, the cession of a fifth could not be an oppressive burden. And it is probable that Joseph not only turned the temporary distress to account by raising the king into the position of sole possessor of the land, with the exception of that of the priests, and bringing the people into a condition of feudal dependence upon him, but had also a still more comprehensive object in view; viz., to secure the population against the danger of starvation in case the crops should fail at any future time, not only by dividing the arable land in equal proportions among the people generally, but, as has been conjectured, by laying the foundation for a system of cultivation regulated by laws and watched over by the state, and possibly also by commencing a system of artificial irrigation by means of canals, for the purpose of conveying the fertilizing water of the Nile as uniformly as possible to all parts of the land. (An explanation of this system is given by Hengstenberg in his Dissertations, from the Correspondance d'Orient par Michaud, etc.) To mention either these or any other plans of a similar kind, did not come within the scope of the book of Genesis, which restricts itself, in accordance with its purely religious intention, to a description of the way in which, during the years of famine, Joseph proved himself to both the king and people of Egypt to be the true support of the land, so that in him Israel already became a saviour of the Gentiles. The measures taken by Joseph are thus circumstantially described, partly because the relation into which the Egyptians were brought to their visible king bore a typical resemblance to the relation in which the Israelites were placed by the Mosaic constitution to Jehovah, their God-King, since they also had to give a double tenth, i.e., the fifth of the produce of their lands, and were in reality only farmers of the soil which Jehovah had given them in Canaan for a possession, so that they could not part with their hereditary possessions in perpetuity (Lev 25:23); and partly also because Joseph's conduct exhibited in type how God entrusts His servants with the good things of this earth, in order that they may use them not only for the preservation of the lives of individuals and nations, but also for the promotion of the purposes of His kingdom. For, as is stated in conclusion in Gen 47:27, not only did Joseph preserve the lives of the Egyptians, for which they expressed their acknowledgements (Gen 47:25), but under his administration the house of Israel was able, without suffering any privations, or being brought into a relation of dependence towards Pharaoh, to dwell in the land of Goshen, to establish itself there (נאחז as in Gen 34:10), and to become fruitful and multiply.

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⁶ For these two years hath the famine been in the land: and yet there are five years, in the which there shall neither be earing nor harvest.

¹⁰ And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein.

²⁵ And they said, Thou hast saved our lives: let us find grace in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh's servants.

²⁷ And Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the country of Goshen; and they had possessions therein, and grew, and multiplied exceedingly.

²³ The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.

²⁶ And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day, that Pharaoh should have the fifth part; except the land of the priests only, which became not Pharaoh's.

³⁴ And he took and sent messes unto them from before him: but Benjamin's mess was five times so much as any of theirs. And they drank, and were merry with him.

⁴³ And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.

⁴³ Because thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, but hast fretted me in all these things; behold, therefore I also will recompense thy way upon thine head, saith the Lord GOD: and thou shalt not commit this lewdness above all thine abominations.

²³ Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh: lo, here is seed for you, and ye shall sow the land.
²⁴ And it shall come to pass in the increase, that ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones.
²⁵ And they said, Thou hast saved our lives: let us find grace in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh's servants.
²⁶ And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day, that Pharaoh should have the fifth part; except the land of the priests only, which became not Pharaoh's.
²⁷ And Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the country of Goshen; and they had possessions therein, and grew, and multiplied exceedingly.

²⁷ Behold, therefore I have stretched out my hand over thee, and have diminished thine ordinary food, and delivered thee unto the will of them that hate thee, the daughters of the Philistines, which are ashamed of thy lewd way.

⁸ Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me:

²² Only the land of the priests bought he not; for the priests had a portion assigned them of Pharaoh, and did eat their portion which Pharaoh gave them: wherefore they sold not their lands.

²⁰ And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh's.
²¹ And as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt even to the other end thereof.

⁴ And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived: and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes.

²⁹ And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.

²⁸ The children of thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall be established before thee.

¹⁸ When that year was ended, they came unto him the second year, and said unto him, We will not hide it from my lord, how that our money is spent; my lord also hath our herds of cattle; there is not ought left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands:
¹⁹ Wherefore shall we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh: and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, that the land be not desolate.

¹¹ He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.

² He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

¹⁵ And when money failed in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came unto Joseph, and said, Give us bread: for why should we die in thy presence? for the money faileth.
¹⁶ And Joseph said, Give your cattle; and I will give you for your cattle, if money fail.
¹⁷ And they brought their cattle unto Joseph: and Joseph gave them bread in exchange for horses, and for the flocks, and for the cattle of the herds, and for the asses: and he fed them with bread for all their cattle for that year.

¹⁴ And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, for the corn which they bought: and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh's house.

¹⁸ As a mad man who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death,

¹³ And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very sore, so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine.