saac and Rebekah had twin sons, Esau and Jacob. They were very different both in appearance and personality. Esau was a red-headed hairy looking guy, a man who liked to hunt, and a man who looked and acted a bit like the imaginary pre-historic man. Jacob, on the other hand, was something of a scholar and indoors person. He liked to hang around with his mother, do a bit of cooking, and scheme ways of depriving his brother of his inheritance. The firstborn son was the one who inherited the greatest share of the property and authority, and Esau had this privilege. Jacob tricked his brother out of his birthright and they became enemies for many years. Esau married many wives from different tribes and from him a great nation of people known as the Edomites developed. He never bothered to consult with his father about his wives and his intermarriage with other cultures meant that the worship of demonic idols became the inheritance of those who followed his bloodline. Because of his disregard for God, Esau and his descendents play no significant role in the story of salvation.
Jacob took his father’s advice and returned tohis relatives to find a wife. He fell in love with a girl named Rachel and agreed to work for her father Laban in exchange for her. Rachel was very beautiful, but her older sister Leah was a plain looking girl who was also unmarried. After seven years of work the time came for his marriage to Rachel. The girl was veiled throughout the ceremony, a custom still observed even in Western cultures, and it wasn’t until after the marriage had been sealed through sexual intercourse that Jacob discovered he had been tricked by his uncle. The girl he had married was Leah. Laban explained that it wasn’t their custom to marry the younger girls before the older, and agreed to give Rachel to Jacob after a week, however, he would have to work for another seven years. The trickster had been tricked; however, the real victim was Leah, for she lived her life with a man who never really loved her even though she served him well as a wife.
Through his wives Jacob had twelve sons and several daughters. God changed his name to Israel and generally, his sons became the tribes of Israel. Israel was a foolish man in many ways, not the least of them being that he loved the sons of his wife Rachel more than the others. He made his son Joseph a beautiful robe and when it became obvious to the other boys that their father loved Joseph more than them, they began to hate Joseph. Joseph was a man who loved and obeyed God. There was no written law of God at this time, and wouldn’t be for another 400 years, however, Joseph had a deep relationship with the Lord and obeyed his conscience in all things. Joseph had a special gift. God gave him dreams which foretold future events and he could interpret these dreams. He dreamt that he and his brothers were binding sheaves of grain in the field when his sheaf stood upright, and his brother’s sheaves bowed down to his. He told his brothers the dream and they hated him even more. Then he had another dream in which it appeared that all of his families were bowing down to him.
One day Joseph’s brothers decided to kill him but the older brother intervened. When the older brother was away they sold Joseph to an Egyptian slave trader. They kept his beautiful robe, covered it with goat’s blood and took it to their father. Israel wept when he saw it, believing that his son had been torn to pieces by wild animals. In the meantime, Joseph was sold to one of the King of Egypt’s officials, a man named Potiphar. Joseph honoured God in all that he did and his master recognized that he was an honorable man. Consequently, Joseph became Potiphar’s personal attendant and the man in charge of everything he owned. The Egyptian became wealthy through Joseph’s work.
Now Joseph was a well built man and his master’s wife decided she wanted to have an affair with him. She ordered Joseph to go to bed with her but he refused saying that this would be a sin against God and his master. Every day she tried to seduce him but Joseph did his best to avoid her. One day when he was alone in the house she trapped him in the room and grabbed his cloak. Joseph ran from the house and the woman, standing with his cloak in her hand, started screaming that Joseph had tried to force her into bed. Potiphar had Joseph thrown into the jail where the king’s prisoners were kept. But the Lord was with Joseph and he earned the favour of the prison warden and was given authority over time and eventually the running of the prison.
Two of the prisoners who were there with Joseph had been personal slaves of the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. Both of them had dreams and Joseph asked them why they were looking so sad. They explained that they had had dreams but there was no one to interpret them. Joseph explained that God was the one who could interpret their dreams and he asked them to tell him what they dreamed. He told the Pharaoh’s cupbearer that in three days he would be back serving the King again, and asked him to remember him to Pharaoh in order to get him out of the prison. To the King’s baker he had bad news. The baker would die in three days. These things happened exactly as Joseph had said, however, the cupbearer forgot his promise to Joseph, and he stayed another two years in the king’s prison.
One night the Pharaoh had a strange dream. He dreamt that he saw seven fat, sleek cows come up out of the Nile River and graze on the grass. Then seven ugly and thin cows came out of the Nile and ate the seven fat cows. When he woke Pharaoh was very disturbed by his dream. He fell asleep and had a second dream about grain. In this dream seven heads of healthy fat grain were devoured by seven heads of weak thin grain. The next morning Pharaoh sent for all of the wise men and magicians of Egypt and demanded that they interpret his dream. No one had any idea. While the wise men and magicians were standing there dumb-founded, the cupbearer suddenly remembered Joseph and told the Pharaoh about how this prisoner had interpreted his dream exactly. Pharaoh sent for Joseph. Pharaoh told Joseph that he had heard he could interpret dreams, but Joseph replied, “I cannot do it, but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires”.
So the King told Joseph his dreams and immediately the Lord told Joseph the answer. He explained that God was warning the Pharaoh of what was about to happen. There would be seven years of plentiful harvest when there would be a great surplus of food in Egypt. After this would come seven years of famine so severe that no one would even remember how good it was before. Joseph advised the King to appoint someone to have authority to store up food for seven years in all of the cities of Egypt so that the country wouldn’t be destroyed by the famine. Pharaoh decided that there could be no better man for this job than one in whom God had given wisdom, so Joseph became the second most powerful man in all of Egypt, wearing the Pharaoh’s signet ring as a symbol of his authority. Joseph was thirty when he became the Pharaoh’s servant and Pharaoh also gave him a wife. During the next seven years he built huge granaries throughout Egypt in every city and stored vast quantities of food, much more than the Egyptians would need in the famine which would come.
When the famine struck, Israel sent his sons to Egypt to buy food. Joseph recognized them and after a time of his testing them he eventually revealed who he was. The dreams he had previously had about them bowing down came true. He forgave his brothers and told them that he believed that God had used their evil for good. It was the Lord who ultimately sent him to Egypt, he told them, in order to save thousands from the famine. Israel, his sons, and their families left Canaan (now Israel) traveled to Egypt and were given the land of Goshen as their home, a fertile valley in Egypt. There were seventy people in all who entered the land of Egypt. For a time they prospered and multiplied, enjoying the benefits of Joseph’s legacy.
After a few generations the Egyptian Pharaohs who had known Joseph were long gone. Egypt became extremely wealthy because of the actions of Joseph. Egypt became a world power in the Middle East and its kings became conceited and arrogant. They considered themselves to be gods; they held the power of life and death over other nations. When the Jewish people became too numerous they were forced into slavery. With the wealth Egypt had accumulated its Pharaohs built cities and one of the tasks of the Jews was to make bricks for this purpose. It was around this time that many pyramids were also built. For the next several hundred years the descendents of Israel were slaves. They were perhaps the biggest workforce of the Egyptians, and they cried out to God daily to free them from this oppression. God eventually decided it was time to take them back to Canaan, to the land promised to Abraham.
Back in Canaan Satan had also been busy. He knew of God’s promise to Abraham and he was determined to stop it being fulfilled. To that end he had spent the past 400 years preparing a nasty surprise for the Jews. Canaan was now full of Nephilim, powerful and evil, part human creatures who lived and ruled in different tribes throughout the region. The Nephilim had not spread throughout the world as they did before the flood, trying to bring the entire world under their control; rather they had a single purpose, to stop the people of Israel from inheriting the land God had promised.