BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Imagining Joseph in Egypt

New discoveries illuminate the Hyksos period

Editor’s Note: The following article contains photos of human remains.

Residential complex uncovered from Tell el-Ku‘a in northeast Egypt (c. 1650–1550 BCE). Courtesy Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

A press release from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced multiple discoveries from Tell el-Ku‘a, an archaeological site in northeastern Egypt in the Wadi Tumilat. The excavators uncovered a residential complex, storage and production facilities, pottery that contains seal impressions, ten mudbrick graves, and humans buried in unusual squatting positions. All finds dated to the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1650–1550 BCE), otherwise known as the Hyksos period in Egypt.

Scholars have long associated the Wadi Tumilat area with biblical Goshen, the fertile region described in Genesis 45:18 as “the best of the land.” This area, suited to cattle and flocks, is remembered as the place where the patriarch Joseph settled his family (Genesis 47:6).

The Tell el-Ku‘a finds paint the picture of an integrated community: people lived, worked, traded, cooked, stored goods, and buried their dead in this place. The residential complex measures roughly 100 by 200 feet, enclosed by a mudbrick wall with multiple rooms, storage areas, and ovens arranged along a regular plan.

Burial from Tell el-Ku‘a, with individual placed in a decorated burial pit in a crouched position. Courtesy Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Among the graves, some are simple rectangular pits while others have architectural facades and decorative motifs, suggesting a range of social statuses and cultures within the community. Artifacts include pottery, bronze utensils, alabaster vessels, and distinctive ceramics known as Tell el-Yahudiyeh ware, one of the most characteristic pottery types of the period. Some pottery bears seal impressions and production marks, which will help researchers trace trade networks. The archaeologists suggest the site may have functioned as a distribution or commercial center connecting Egypt to Canaan.

Scarab seals found at Tell el-Ku‘a. Courtesy Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

“Hyksos” comes from an ancient Egyptian phrase meaning roughly “rulers of foreign lands.” Egyptian sources portray them as violent invaders who overwhelmed Egypt by force. However, more recent archaeology—particularly decades of excavation at the Hyksos capital of Avaris (Tell el-Daba)—has revised that picture. The Hyksos appear to have been Semitic people from Canaan who arrived gradually over several generations in the eastern Delta as traders, craftspeople, and migrants. They ruled over northern Egypt as the 15th Dynasty for roughly a century and established themselves in precisely the region—the eastern Delta and the Wadi Tumilat corridor—the Bible associates with the Israelite sojourn in Egypt (before the Exodus).

Joseph as a Hyksos has a certain ring to it: In the Bible, he is a Semitic man—a Hebrew descended from Abraham in Canaan—who is sold into slavery in Egypt and rises, against all odds, to become the second most powerful official in the country. The Bible remembers him as administering Egypt’s grain supply, facilitating the movement of people and goods between Canaan and Egypt, and settling in Goshen (the region containing the Hyksos capital). These features fit comfortably within the setting of Hyksos rule. While foreigners could and did attain high office in other periods of Egyptian history, the Hyksos era provides a particularly plausible context.

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Additionally, Exodus 1:8 references “a new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph.” Most scholars read this as marking a dynastic break—a new regime that felt no obligation to honor the arrangements of its predecessors. The Theban pharaohs who expelled the Hyksos—Seqenenre Tao, Kamose, and Ahmose I (the founder of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt’s New Kingdom)—overthrew a Semitic ruling class and reclaimed Egypt for native Egyptian rule. The main elements of the Joseph story seem to fit naturally within a Hyksos milieu.

The transition from Hyksos rule to the New Kingdom is one of the most debated and consequential turning points in ancient Egyptian history. Evidence of settlement continuity across that divide, like the evidence coming out of Tell el-Ku‘a, helps fill out that picture, which is still very much under construction.

Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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