Joseph the Vizier and the Great Famine in Egyptian History The story of Joseph, set against a massive long-term famine, describes how a Hebrew became Pharaoh’s vizier. Egyptian records confirm that Egypt had a Hebrew vizier during a period of famine, a man named Baya. Prof. Israel Knohl Genesis 41 tells of a lengthy famine which, according to the text, lasts seven years. The famine is so deadly that people have nothing to eat, not only in Egypt, but in the surrounding lands as well. Egypt, however, survives the famine by storing extra grain from previous good years, and all the neighboring lands come to Egypt to buy food. This famine provides the background for the story of how Jacob and his extended family end up in Egypt. They are just one group out of many that come to Egypt to buy food. But does this dramatic account of a regional famine have any basis in Egyptian history? In other words, do we have any historical record of a dramatic or widespread famine that might bring many people to move to Egypt on a quasi-permanent basis? One such event that we can identify is attested. When the Bronze Age Collapsed Towards the end of the Bronze Age, in the last decades of the 13 th century and the early decades of the 12 th century B.C.E., the Mediterranean world suffered a decades-long series of draughts and famines. 1 Many of the more vulnerable lands in the Levant and the 1 The sources for this section are taken from Itamar Singer, “A Political History of Ugarit,” chapter 15 in Handbook of Ugaritic Studies, ed. Wilfred G.E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt, Handbuch der Orientalistik 39 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 603–733 [704– 731]. For a book length discussion of the Bronze Age collapse and its reasons, see Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient